Judaism figures into Emmanuel Levinas’s thinking — and his life — in a number of ways. Clarifying what Judaism contributes to his thought and what his thought might contribute to our understanding of Judaism depend substantially on how one reads Levinas. We will discuss this contribution. We will then look at a few areas in which Levinas’s involvement with Judaism may be interesting and perhaps even appealing.

Michael L. Morgan is the Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies (emeritus) at Indiana University, where he has taught since 1975. In the fall of 2015, for three years, he became the Senator Jerahmiel S. and Carole S. Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is an Honorary Professor of the Australian Catholic University and has taught at Northwestern, Yale, Stanford, Toronto, and Princeton. He is the author and editor/co-editor of nineteen books, including Beyond Auschwitz (Oxford, 2001), Discovering Levinas (Cambridge, 2007), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (2007), the Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas (2011), Fackenheim’s Jewish Philosophy (University of Toronto Press, 2013), Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism: Historical, Philosophical, and Literary Perspectives (2014), and most recently Levinas’s Ethical Politics (Indiana, 2016). He is currently working on a book on modern Jewish philosophy and two books on Emmanuel Levinas, one for the Routledge Philosophers series and the other The Oxford Handbook on Emmanuel Levinas for Oxford University Press.