CV

Yuval Kremnitzer is a research fellow at the Rosenzweig Minerva Center and a Dean’s distinction fellow at the School of Philosophy, linguistics and Science Studies at Tel Aviv University. He studied Philosophy, Comparative literature and Jewish Studies in Tel Aviv, New York and Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University for his Dissertation “How to believe in Nothing: Moses Mendelssohn’s Subjectivity and the Empty Core of Tradition” in 2017.  Kremnitzer has presented his work in the United States, Germany, Slovenia and Israel. He currently teaches at the Philosophy Department in Tel Aviv University.

Research Project

Kremnitzer’s primary research interest is the ethical crisis of modern life, the problem of ‘Nihilism’.

He is currently preparing a manuscript based on his dissertation, tracing the echoes and direct influences of Mendelssohn’s intellectual legacy on the German-Jewish Tradition, and its fraught relationship with German Idealism. At the core of this project lies Mendelssohn’s great philosophical contribution: the isolation of a non-enforceable power, the power of the unwritten law.

The book project has two main parts: 1. A reevaluation of the consequential ‘pantheism affair’, in light of Mendelssohn’s mostly unacknowledged contribution, much of it developed in his “Jewish writings”, namely, his Jerusalem. Mendelssohn is viewed, in this light, as presenting a valuable and very much still relevant philosophical contribution to the topics debated in the ‘pantheism affair’ and its aftermath, such as the nature of subjectivity, immanence vs transcendence, the legacies of Kant and Spinoza, and the problem of ‘nihilism’.  2. The book project traces a constellation of topics centered around the notion of the unwritten law, such as the media of tradition, sovereignty, and Jewish notions of history as they occupy the thoughts of German Jewish intellectuals after Mendelssohn, such as Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin.