Yaakov Malkin

Yaakov Malkin (3 August 1926 – 21 July 2019) was an Israeli educator,

Malkin was born into a secular Jewish family in Warsaw on 3 August 1926. His father, Dov Ber Malkin, was a professor and theatre critic. He attended the General Jewish Labour Bund school and moved to Mandatory Palestine with his family at the age of seven, where he continued his schooling in the school system of the Histadrut labor federation.^[3]

Career

Starting in 1944, while still a student, Malkin published literary, cinema, and theater critiques, and served as the editor of On the Wall, the magazine of the

From 1969 to 1994, Malkin taught aesthetics, theater and film criticism at the Tel Aviv University. In 1971 he established, together with the Dean of the Faculty for New Arts, Professor Moshe Lazar, the Department for Cinema and Television at the Tel Aviv University. He also served as the university's representative in the founding team of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, and as editor of the "Cinematheque Pages" – film criticism essays handed out to viewers before the screening of each movie, together with Uri Klein.

From 1958 to 1971, Malkin founded and directed the first community centers in

Malkin later served as editor-in-chief for Free Judaism, a magazine for Judaism as a culture, which he founded in 1995 and which came out in print editions until 2004. Malkin also served as provost at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, based in Jerusalem and Farmington Hills, Michigan (Birmingham Temple). The Institute trains students who hold an undergraduate degree to be community leaders for secular communities and those with a master's degree or a PhD to be secular rabbis in a four-year track of studies and work.

Writings

Malkin's writings focus on humanistic ethics and the preservation of Jewish culture in a social context where literalist interpretations on the existence of God fade with each generation. Malkin, and many others, argue that to be a Jew is fundamentally a cultural identity, and not a religious one, and he often jokes that he was a descendant of many generations of devout Jews, and then goes on to list several generations of ancestors who were atheists. He further argues that whereas religiosity has been an essential part of Jewish identity, the actual belief in a god was always a matter of friction, and whether individual Jews publicly admitted it or not, he claims most Jews have always understood god as an allegory and seen Judaism as a tradition of cultural - rather than religious - significance. Given this reality, Malkin argues that an honest reflection of one's own Jewish beliefs will demonstrate to oneself that they are already a humanistic or secular Jew.

Malkin perceives

Unlike atheist scholars such as

In 1950, Malkin married Israeli artist Felice Pazner. They had two children: Irad Malkin, a history professor who won the 2014 Israel Prize, and Sivan Malkin Maas, a rabbi.

Death

On July 21, 2019, at the age of 92, Malkin died at his home in Jerusalem.^[4][5]

References

External links

• Official Site
• Free Judaism's English Articles
• Tmura: The International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism
• The International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism
• The Center for Cultural Judaism