Avishai Margalit - Biography

Biography

Avishai Margalit grew up in Jerusalem. He was educated in Jerusalem and did his army service in the airborne Nahal. In 1960 he started his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, majoring in philosophy and economics. He earned his B.A. in 1963 and his M.A. in philosophy in 1965, his MA thesis focusing on Karl Marx's theory of labor. During his years of study he worked as an instructor in a youth village, working with immigrant children who arrived with the mass wave of immigration in the 1950s. Thanks to a British Council scholarship he went to the Queens College in Oxford University, where he stayed from 1968 to 1970. His doctoral dissertation, "The Cognitive Status of Metaphors", written under the supervision of Professor Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, earned him his PhD summa cum laude 1970 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the same year he started teaching as an assistant professor at the philosophy department of the Hebrew University where he stayed throughout his academic career, climbing the ladder of academic promotions. In 1998-2006 he was appointed the Shulman Professor of Philosophy, and in 2006 he retired as a professor emeritus from the Hebrew University. Since 2006 Margalit has been the George Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is also a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Avishai Margalit was a visiting Scholar at Harvard University (1974-05); a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford (1979–80); a Visiting Professor at the Free University of Berlin and a Fellow at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin (1984-5); a Visiting Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford (1990); a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University (1995-6), a Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York (2001–2002) and Senior Fellow at the Global Law Program at NYU (2004-5). In addition, he held short-term visiting professorships at the Central European University in Prague and at the European University in Florence.

In 1999 Avishai Margalit delivered the Horkheimer Lectures at the University of Frankfurt, on The Ethics of Memory. In 2001-2002 he delivered the inaugural lectures at Oxford University as the first Bertelsman Professor there. In 2005 he delivered the Tanner Lectures at Stanford University.

Margalit was among the founders of the "Moked" political party in 1973 and contributed to the writing of its platform. In 1975 he participated in the founding of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, and in 1978 he belonged to the first group of leaders of Peace Now. In addition, in the 1990s Margalit served on the board of B'tzelem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

As of 1984 Avishai Margalit is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, where he published articles on social, cultural and political issues; his political profiles included Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres, as well as cultural-philosophical profiles of thinkers like Baruch Spinoza, Martin Buber and Yeshayahu Leibowitz. A collection of his NYRB articles was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, under the title Views and Reviews: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews (1998).

Avishai Margalit was married to Edna Ullman-Margalit, a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University. She died in October 2010. He has four children and lives in Jerusalem.