Elad Lapidot/Levinas and Decolonial Israel

About this episode

Professor Elad Lapidot discusses the intersection of post-Holocaust Jewish thought and decolonial thought through Emmanuel Levinas's work.

Professor Elad Lapidot reflects on the relations between post-Holocaust Jewish thought and decolonial thought through the work of French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Recently thinkers criticized Levinas for his Eurocentrism. In his recent book, State of Others. Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Indiana UP, 2025), he argues that Levinas anticipated this critique and from the 1960s on sought to develop the foundations for decolonial Jewish thought – and for decolonial Zionism. To demonstrate this claim, his talk will analyze Levinas’s entire intellectual project as articulated around a fundamental turn between the period prior to 1968 and the post-68 period. The turn relates to Levinas’s understanding of the relationship between Judaism and Western civilization – and to his position with respect to the State of Israel and to the Palestinian question. Elad Lapidot is Professor for Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: State of Others. Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025), Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press…

People in this episode

Guest: Elad Lapidot

Topics covered

• Jewish thought
• decolonial thought
• Emmanuel Levinas
• Zionism
• post-Holocaust
• Palestinian question

Keywords

• Levinas
• decolonial Israel
• Jewish thought
• Zionism
• post-68
• Eurocentrism
• Palestinian question

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Lille, Indiana University Press, SUNY Press

Books & works: State of Others. Levinas and Decolonial Israel, Politics of Not Speaking, Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism, Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 1

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