The Stirrings of a Stubborn and Difficult Freedom: Assimilation, Education, and Levinas’s Crisis of Humanism

Abstract

In several places, Levinas identifies the problem that concerns him as a “crisis of humanism.”  This problem finds its seeds in modernity but comes to fruition in the inhumanities of the 20th century. Like his philosophical predecessors, Levinas offers an educational model as a solution to a problem he has identified.   But this model--Jewish education—is uniquely different from those offered by those who came before him. This essay examines Levinas‘s interest in Jewish education as a solution to this crisis in humanism and considers what the implications of this solution are for his project as a whole.