Events & Calendars "The Dialectic of Enlightenment Revisited": Talk by Steven E. Aschheim

Intellectual and cultural historian Steven E. Aschheim (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) will present a lecture on "The Dialectic of Enlightenment Revisited." In his lecture, Aschheim will critically interrogate Adorno and Horkheimer's much-admired 1944 "Dialectic of Enlightenment," addressing its contextual and ideological origins, its philosophical biases and theoretical assumptions and the nature of its emphases and omissions as the work sought to grasp the barbarism of the time. He will also highlight a rather overlooked publication detail which ideally should have given the authors pause to somewhat revise their provocative views and positions, but in practice did not.

Aschheim is the author of Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (1982), The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (1993), Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations With National Socialism and Other Crises (1996), In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans and Jews (2000), Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (2001), Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (2007) and At the Edges of Liberalism: Junctions of European, German and Jewish History (2012).