Michael Wyschogrod

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Michael Wyschogrod

Michael Wyschogrod (born September 28, 1928 in Berlin ; † December 17, 2015 ) was an American Jewish religious philosopher .

Life

His parents Paul Wyschogrod and Margaret, b. Ungar, had moved to Berlin with their older son Marcel only a few years before Michael was born from Budapest , where all economic conditions had deteriorated. Paul Wyschogrod was an internationally respected chess master, but earned only a small income by selling home-made items on markets. Michael attended Adass Yisroel's school in Berlin , which had suffered from the departure of teachers and students since 1936. With the help of a brother of their mother, the Wyschogrod family obtained entry visas to the USA in early 1939 . As the emigration to New York led via Warsaw, ten-year-old Michael got to know Jewish life in Warsaw for three weeks shortly before his destruction.

He received Talmudic education in the New York borough of Brooklyn at the Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European Orthodox Yeshivah Torah Vodaath. In 1945 and 1946 he studied the Talmud for a year . From 1946 he attended both City College and Yeshiva University in New York. At City College he came across the work of Søren Kierkegaard , which moved him to a permanent preoccupation with Christian theology. At Yeshiva University he studied Talmud and Jewish philosophy until 1953 with the leading teacher of modern American Orthodox Judaism, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik . From 1949 to his dissertation on Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger in 1953, he studied at the Philosophical Department of Columbia University. He taught philosophy at City College , Hunter College and Baruch College of the City University of New York and became director of the philosophy department at Baruch College. In 1992 he was appointed professor at the Religious Studies Program at the University of Houston , which was re-established after a 33-year hiatus , and headed the program from 1996 until his retirement in 2002.

Act

He was visiting professor at the Bar-Ilan University Tel Aviv, the Graduate Faculty of the New School, New York NY, the Dropsie University, Philadelphia PA, the University for Jewish Studies Heidelberg, the Theological Faculty Lucerne, the University of Bern, the Ecclesiastical University Wuppertal, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton NJ, Rice University Houston TX and repeatedly taught at the Christian-Jewish Summer University of the Institute for Church and Judaism, which initially took place every two years from 1987 to 2003 in his native Berlin. He was a member of the editorial board of Tradition magazine . A Journal of Orthodox Thought .

One of his comments that caused quite a stir was: "A high level of Christology sounds idolatrous to Jewish ears."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ David P. Goldman: Michael Wyschogrod, Dean of Orthodox Jewish Theologians, Dies at 87 . Tablet , December 18, 2015.