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The Levinas Ethical Legacy Foundation and the Center for Jewish History in collaboration with the Association pour la Célébration du Centenaire d’Emmanuel Levinas (France) and the Centre Raïssa et Emmanuel Levinas in Israel and universities around the world are planning a series of events to mark the centennial and help disseminate the work of Levinas in the US.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was born in Kaunas (Lithuania) in 1906. As a young philosopher, Levinas introduced modern phenomenology to France and was heralded for his commentary on Husserl and Heidegger. Within time, however, Levinas would become principally renown for developing one of the most original philosophies of the 20th Century - a philosophy that places ethical responsibility at the forefront.

The impact of Levinas’ works extends today far beyond academia. Infinite responsibility for the Other, the core of Levinasian ethics, has direct implications for modern society in its struggle against poverty, for justice and for the respect of the rights of others. Levinas’ spiritual and ethical positions have influenced multitudes of scholars in many disciplines, as well as leading activists around the world. Dissidents fighting for democracy and human rights in lands as distant as the former Eastern block countries and Latin America, including intellectuals and statesmen such as Rubens Ricupero in Brazil, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Zygmunt Bauman in Poland and Jorge Semprun in Spain have acknowledged their debt to Levinas’ thought and recognized the inspiration they have drawn from his works.

Witness to the major events of the 20th century, the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel, Levinas played a decisive role in the renaissance of Jewish life in Europe. Beginning in the immediate post war period, Levinas’ work in education, which he pursued for more than half a century at the Alliance Israelite Universelle along with his public teachings, affected generations of young Jews and left a lasting mark on the Jewish community of France as a whole.

Placing Jewish ethics above all dogmatism, and hence above all sterile debates between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’, he drew wider global attention to classic rabbinic texts and restored these writings to their rightful place among the greatest achievements of human thought.