Lamentations of Walter Benjamin
The 62nd Annual Simon Rawidowicz Memorial Lecture
Presented by Peter E. Gordon
March 19, 2026
Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Brandeis Library
5:30 pm Reception
6:30 pm Lecture
Presenter
Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver. He is a critical theorist and an historian of modern European philosophy and social thought, specializing in Frankfurt School critical theory, phenomenology, existentialism, and Western Marxism. His other books include Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, Adorno and Existence, and Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization, among many others.
The 62nd Annual Simon Rawidowicz Memorial Lecture is sponsored by the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry with the support of the Valya and Robert Shapiro Endowment, the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, the Center for German and European Studies, and the Mandel Center for the Humanities.
For more information, email tauber@brandeis.edu or call 781-736-2125.
About Simon Rawidowicz
Simon Rawidowicz (1896-1957) was one of the most innovative Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. He was an erudite and wide-ranging student of Jewish and European philosophy, recognized by specialists for his studies of Maimonides, Nachman Krochmal, and Ludwig Feuerbach, among others. Over the course of a long and peripatetic career that took him from Lithuania to Germany to England, and finally the United States, Rawidowicz affirmed his commitment to a Jewish cultural nationalism anchored by Hebrew. His lifelong devotion to the study of Jewish philosophy and Hebrew literature was further realized at Brandeis University where he was a founding member of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.