Factual Truth and the Impossible: Judaism and Utopian Thought

Lecture by Omri Boehm as Part of the Exhibition "The Opposite of Now"

Utopian thinking is often imagined – and sometimes derided – as an escape from history. In his lecture, Omri Boehm returns to the origins of utopian thinking in the Hebrew prophets: formulating the impossible in the indicative, they conceived the “opposite of now” not as a time beyond history, but a truth spoken within it. Not a deferral of action beyond time but, arguably, the only way to remain in it. What remains of this prophetic tradition today?

Omri Boehm is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. Born in Haifa in 1979, he studied in Tel Aviv and earned his Ph.D. at Yale with a dissertation on Kant’s critique of Spinoza. Omri Boehm holds Israeli and German citizenship, has conducted research in Munich and Berlin, among other places, and writes about Israeli politics for Haaretz, Die Zeit, and The New York Times. His most recent publications include Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity (New York 2025) and, co-authored with Daniel Kehlmann, The Starry Sky Above Me: A Conversation about Kant (Original: Der bestirnte Himmel über mir: Ein Gespräch über Kant, Berlin 2024).

Meeting point: W. M. Blumenthal Academy, Klaus Mangold Auditorium Fromet-und-Moses-Mendelssohn-Platz 1, 10969 Berlin (Opposite the Museum)

Booking: Booking opens soon in our ticket shop.

Next date:

• Date Thursday, 15/October/2026 19:00
• Venue Jüdisches Museum Berlin
• Address Lindenstraße 14, 10969 Berlin-Kreuzberg