Announcing the Walter Benjamin Fellowship and Incubator at 36 LEARNING MATTERS.
Five to ten outstanding Benjamin Fellows, post-BA and no older than 30 years of age, will be introduced to the critical theory tradition of our 19th century European Jewish ancestors, with special emphasis on the “Marburg Tradition.”
As a Fellow, you will advise the program director on how to adapt the curriculum-concept in future more expansive versions in order to serve young adults as they make their way in Jewish life and in the larger moral-political universe. If interested, you will automatically be eligible for the expanded program once it’s born.
The Benjamin incubator will place special emphasis on the study of those figures who have sought to combine critical theory with Torah Study. As a modern phenomenon associated with “criticism” as a positive good, the Marburg school is the most obvious point of origin, e.g. Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, and other lesser known writers.
The measure of our success
The measure of our success will be to what extent this course of study provide grounds for critique of the Jewish world always being-born in the next generation of young people. This was Cohen’s measure, and it was transmitted to his students and admirers (e.g. Rosenzweig, Scholem, Benjamin, Gustav Landauer); nevertheless, with the devastation of two world wars and the decimation of European Jewry, including an intellectual class for whom it would have been a natural inheritance, the Marburg school, as Cohen’s entourage was known, is threatened today with obsolescence and near-extinction. As living Torah, it flickers only among an academic elite professionally compensated to keep it alive.
The Benjamin fellows and 36 LEARNING MATTERS will exist to change this reality.
A word about the name of this incubator
While Cohen and Rosenzweig are arguably the only two canonical figures who were truly committed both to Critical Theory and to a full-blooded engagement with Jewish sources, the name of Benjamin is nevertheless apt. It signifies a life unfinished, an abortive engagement with Torah and critical theory tragically ended before it had really fully begun. It is this fate — a truncated experience of Torah, and incomplete engagement with the life of Critique — that this program aspires to help us avoid in the name of living our values and extending our precious legacy. With your help maybe we can make a difference. For details on the short and tragic life of Walter Benjamin, see here.
Time and Place
The Benjamin Fellowship program will take place at a time and place still yet to be determined.
The real value of this experience — for all of us — can only be measured in how it ultimately impacts the Jewish world, a world that currently risks pushing away the very critical-thinkers and radical-doers who are most needed. To quote the words of Kahlil Gibran about generational transmission of values and responsibilities,
“You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit,
not even in your dreams.”