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The introduction outlines the genesis and evolution of the two-year German Philosophy Seminar, setting the stage for the current special issue. Originating in 2019 at the University of London, the seminar initially focused on Martin Buber's philosophy, since his insights into dialogue and human relationality became once again topical and relevant in light of the recent broad and rapid changes in public and interpersonal communication. The 2020 shift to an online format due to the Covid-19 pandemic presented challenges but also facilitated global participation, fostering a virtual community. The seminar's success prompted its continuation, partnering with the Global Lehrhaus to explore contemporary themes in conjunction with Buber's philosophy. Across two academic years, sessions delved into Buber's ideas in dialogue with diverse perspectives such as Marxism, feminism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, communication theory, and contemporary social philosophy. The resulting publication captures these discussions, emphasizing the enduring relevance of Buber's concepts in today's context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores tensions between Judaism and Christianity as ethical traditions and what they can learn from each other if the Jewishness of Jesus is fully recognised. It investigates Judaism as a counter-cultural tradition to Christianity and secularised European modernities, drawing on Buber's Hasidism and his understanding of dialogue, relationship and everyday ethics. The author traces ethics as a practice of truth-telling as well as relating to show how justice is more than an individual virtue; it is a matter of community and the transformation of structural relationships of power, abuse and cruelty. It is through relating equally as ethical humans that we can hope to engage with different worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the wilderness years of the Exodus, engaging desert thinking not simply as a process of worldly renunciation and inner spiritual transformation, but as a need to also practice freedom as an embodied practice in which the social and political are also transformed. The world-renouncing connotation of 'desert spirituality' has a certain Christian bias that registers a particular line in the sand that can make it harder to reflect across the boundaries of diverse religious traditions. Jewish traditions can help us to imagine differently, in more embodied ways, whilst also reminding us of the need to engage with traumatic histories and cultural memories of slavery, holocaust histories, and colonial oppression. Often these legacies are carried in gendered ways, in bodies as well as minds, and the emotional and spiritual work that needs to be done to remake lives involve creative embodied practices of freedom that are both personal and political, offering hope for living differently in a more just world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on her poetry as well as her theology, this article explores Sheila Shulman's multiple engagements with feminisms that have transformed patriarchal traditions within Judaism and opened new spaces to engage the integrity of differences. Thinking across boundaries and developing practices of 'reading whole', she showed ways of engaging traditional texts that call upon us to be honest and present to ourselves as we shape new forms of community. As a teacher she inspired many to read attentively and with love and to frame questions that mattered to the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author describes his personal experiences of Jewish liberation using the concept of tikkun olam, a Hebrew phrase that means repairing the world, which suggests redemption, or the shared responsibility to heal the world. He narrates his journey in rediscovering Jewish traditions that inspire feminism and allow socialist politics in the discourse of life. He presents the idea that the personal is political, or a learning from experience that embodies redemption, utopia and universality.

On the seventieth anniversary of the destruction of the Vilna ghetto I explore ambivalences in Holocaust memory in the Baltic states and troubling notions of a 'double genocide' while tracing train journeys of death that connected Vienna, Vilna and Tallinn and so western and eastern Europe. Exploring how memories are connected to place and investigating how family legacies of Litvak identity also travel, I show how Musar ethical traditions also journeyed as far as South Africa to influence the ethical politics of the African National Congress. Framing questions about the relationship between ethics and memory across generations I return to the painful warnings in the words of Elchanan Elkes at the destruction of the Kovno ghetto. I trace the possibilities that they help to frame a post-Shoah ethics and a vision of 'the human' that questions the rational self that informed Enlightenment thinking and that proved incapable of resisting the brutalities of Nazism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring some of the tensions in the recent international conference on 'Jews and Non-Jews in Lithuania: Coexistence, Cooperation, Violence', held at UCL in December 2012, I show how they relate to ways in which the Holocaust is to be understood and historical justice done not only to those who were murdered and suffered but also to the sufferings of Lithuanians under Soviet Occupation. Questioning the notion of a 'double holocaust' that would seek some equivalence I also interrogate assumptions informing the programme of the Prague Declaration. I explore ethical issues of what it means to do justice to the dead and how this calls for an ethical historiography that goes beyond its positivist frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay explores how expressions of heterosexual masculinity structured the ways in which Europe coped with historical trauma such as the Holocaust, leading to the suppression of pain and the rejection of affect and difference of marginalized peoples such as the Jews. Topics include the writer Franz Kafka, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and cultural marginalization.

The article reflects on sorrow, suffering and weeping and discusses the practices of mourning framed around individual loss and how the notions of mourning and melancholia can illuminate the losses of the Shoah. It points to the meaning of Auschwitz as a suffering without any promise where God requires a love that entails no promise on His part. It indicates that a love ethics that recognise the connections between spirituality and power can be created through a loving recognition of others.

Through reflecting back on the political imaginations and urgencies that informed an engagement with 1968 I share some of the promise and the difficulties in relating the personal to the political. I show the appeal of a certain kind of class politics but also the silences and suppressions that it can create through its tacit universalism, which involves, with Marx, a transcendence of differences. Through exploring the cultural memories of a political moment I argue for the importance of learning from these social inventions and experiments for ways of living differently in the present and for revisioning a notion of democratic politics. Learning to listen to ourselves in our differences, but also to others in what we share, I argue for shaping different kinds of psychosocial narratives that can bring thinking across the boundaries of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. I argue for embodying identities in ways that do not fix people into pre-given categories but allow for a fluidity that grants a sense of equal respect and equal voice as we shape multicultural psychotherapies that can learn from the cultural memories of the past as we learn to engage with different layers of experience. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we open up a dialogue across generations that shares the experiences, memories and learnings of psychotherapy and sexual politics and ways these were lived in the libertarian politics of the 1970s? Exploring attempts at living politics and the attempts to create more equal relationships and engage critically with traditions of psychoanalysis and humanistic psychotherapies so that they could engage more directly with issues of class, race, gender and sexuality, I explore how concerns around masculinities proved vital in shaping new political imaginations. I go on to raise questions that might open up a dialogue across generations and so learn from the past so that different hopes can be created for the present. This means recognizing the prevalence of complex transnational identities produced through mass migrations that have helped shape multicultural cities and so call for different frameworks to understand relationships between the ‘psyche’ and the ‘social/political’ within a globalized world. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores relationships between men, bodies, and emotional life and the ways emotions are shaped within postmodern masculinities. Exploring examples of ways men narrate their lives, the author questions prevailing notions of hegemonic masculinities that have tended to sustain rationalist traditions of modernity. Tending to treat the emotional and personal as "therapeutic"--in Connell's work framed in opposition to the "political"--makes it difficult to give adequate space to the exploration of cultures, bodies, emotions, and sexualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]