Martin Buber, Faith, and Jewish Identity
Rebecca Keys
Watch a 1-hour program featuring Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr, author of Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent, and Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue as they explore the life and legacy of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.
This program is part of the Jewish Lives Book Club and aired on the Jewish Broadcasting Service.
By Paul Mendes-Flohr
Published March 26, 2019
440 pages
“Exquisite” —Amir Eshel
The first major biography in English in over thirty years of the seminal modern Jewish thinker Martin Buber
An authority on the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965), Paul Mendes-Flohr offers the first major biography in English in thirty years of this seminal modern Jewish thinker. Organized around several key moments—such as his sudden abandonment by his mother when he was a child of three—Mendes-Flohr shows how this foundational trauma left an enduring mark on Buber’s inner life, attuning him to the fragility of human relations and the need to nurture them with what he would call a “dialogical attentiveness.”
Buber’s philosophical and theological writings, most famously I and Thou, made significant contributions to religious and Jewish thought, philosophical anthropology, biblical studies, political theory, and Zionism. In this accessible new biography, Mendes-Flohr situates Buber’s life and legacy in the intellectual and cultural life of German Jewry as well as in the broader European intellectual life of the first half of the twentieth century.