Michael Wyschogrod

Michael Wyschogrod (September 28, 1928 – December 17, 2015Goldman, David P. (December 18, 2015).
Michael Wyschogrod, Dean of Orthodox Jewish Theologians, Dies at 87
". ''Tablet''. tabletmag.com. Retrieved 2017-02-11.) was a Jewish German-American philosopher of religion, Jewish theologian, and activist for Jewish–Christian interfaith dialogue. During his academic career he taught in philosophy and religion departments of several universities in the United States, Europe and Israel.

Early life

Michael Wyschogrod was born in Berlin, Germany, on September 28, 1928, the second child of Paul Wyschogrod and Margaret Ungar. His father, a Hungarian chess master who discouraged his son from pursuing this interest, had moved his family to Berlin from Budapest after the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a decade earlier. As a child, Wyschogrod spent summers in Budapest, visiting his maternal grandparents. The family fled Nazi Germany and arrived in the United States on July 3, 1939, when Wyschogrod was ten years old.

Education

Wyschogrod associated himself with the Modern Orthodox movement within Orthodox Judaism, and the schools he attended as a child reflect this movement's emphasis on combining high-quality Jewish and secular instruction. He attended the Orthodox Adas Yisroel school in Berlin and then, after emigrating to New York City in 1939, the Yiddish-speaking ''Yeshiva Torah Vodaas'' day school in Brooklyn, New York, from which he graduated high school in 1945. It was here that Wyschogrod studied under Rabbi Shlomo Heiman, from whom he came to appreciate "that part of the Torah that cannot be written down but transmitted only in the being of the person whose everyday conduct exemplifies it." Subsequently he studied Talmud with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik at Yeshiva University from 1946 to 1952..

He embarked upon the study of philosophy at City College of New York in 1946, where he found himself drawn into the study of Christian Theology after reading the work of Kierkegaard. He completed his B.S.S. in 1949. He then went on to graduate study in philosophy at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1953. He wrote a dissertation which was later published under the title ''Kierkegaard and Heidegger: the Ontology of Existence.''

Teaching career

Wyschogrod taught philosophy at several CUNY colleges and served as the head of the Philosophy Department at Baruch College of the City University of New York. In 1992 he was appointed Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Houston. He was a guest professor at many universities in Israel, Europe, and the United States such as Bar Ilan University in Israel, University of Bern in Switzerland and Yeshiva University in New York, among others.

Thought

Wyschogrod's best known book, ''The Body of Faith'', deals with God’s preferential love for the Jewish people and asserts that the election of Israel is corporeal in nature. The biblical notion of God’s indwelling in the Jewish people, he says, indicates that God is physically present among them. However, Wyschogrod says, God’s love for Israel does not preclude love for all humankind. Rather, election ties the Jewish people "to all men in brotherhood, as Joseph, favored by his human father, ultimately found himself tied to his brothers."

In much of his work, Wyschogrod concerned himself with the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and he was active in Jewish-Christian theological dialogue. His book ''Abraham's Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations'' makes an appeal for a new non- supersessionist Christian view of Judaism. If Judaism and Christianity are to have a stable and harmonious co-existence in the future, then Christianity must dispense with or, at the very least, not openly insist on a status for Judaism in which Judaism is considered an incomplete or antiquated religion.

At the same time, Wyschogrod urges Jews not to pursue a fallacious dismissal of the divinity of Christ that operates on a priori grounds. In other words, while Jews should reject the divinity of Christ, they should not do so by attempting to argue that God's Incarnation in man is somehow inconsistent with the teaching of the Hebrew Bible Protestant theologian Karl Barth, whose work Wyschogrod considered relevant to Jewish theologians.

Writings

Wyschogrod's best-known work is ''The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel'' (1989; 2nd edition: ''The Body of Faith: God and the People Israel''). His ''Abraham's Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations'' (2004) is a collection of some of his most seminal essays on Jewish-Christian relations from throughout his career.

Personal life

Wyschogrod was married to the philosopher Edith Wyschogrod.Michael Wyschogrod, Dean of Orthodox Jewish Theologians, Dies at 87
. ''Tablet Magazine''. December 18, 2015. Retrieved 2022-11-27.

Works

Books

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As editor

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Notes

References

* Soulen, R. Kendall. "A Biographical Sketch of Michael Wyschogrod", in .
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External links

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The Michael Wyschogrod Scholarship Fund

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wyschogrod, Michael
1928 births
2015 deaths
American male non-fiction writers
American Modern Orthodox Jews
American people of German-Jewish descent
Philosophers of Judaism
Jewish philosophers
American Jewish theologians
Jewish American non-fiction writers
City College of New York faculty
City College of New York alumni
Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Christian and Jewish interfaith dialogue
German emigrants to the United States
21st-century American Jews