Factual truth and the impossible. Judaism and utopian thinking

Utopian thinking is often seen as an escape from history — and sometimes ridiculed. In his presentation, Omri Böhm returns to the origins of utopian thinking in the Hebrew prophets: By formulating the impossible in an indicative way, they understood the “opposite of now” not as a time beyond history, but as a truth that is expressed within it. Not as a delay in action beyond time, but probably as the only way to remain within it. What is left of this prophetic tradition today?

Omri Böhm is a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. Born 1979 in Haifa, he studied in Tel Aviv and received his doctorate at Yale on Kant's criticism of Spinoza. Omri Böhm is an Israeli and German citizen, has researched in Munich and Berlin, among others, and writes about Israeli politics in Haaretz, Die Zeit and The New York Times. He recently published Radical Universalism. Beyond identity. Universalism as a saving alternative, Berlin 2022 and, in co-authorship with Daniel Kehlmann: The starry sky above me: A conversation about Kant, Propylaea, Berlin 2024.