17 Facts About Yaakov Malkin

Yaakov Malkin was an Israeli educator, literary critic, and professor emeritus in the Faculty of Arts at Tel Aviv University.

Yaakov Malkin was active in several institutions that deal with both cultural and Humanistic Judaism.

Yaakov Malkin's father, Dov Ber Malkin, was a professor and theatre critic.

Yaakov Malkin attended the General Jewish Labour Bund school and moved to Mandatory Palestine with his family at the age of seven, where he continued his schooling in the school system of the Histadrut labor federation.

Yaakov Malkin lectured and was active in the Cyprus internment camps before the inmates were sent to Israel, and worked for the IDF arms procurement branch in France 1949.

Yaakov Malkin directed and lectured in Pomansky College for Judaism as Culture in New York in 1951, and founded and directed a Hebrew Ulpan in the Quartier Latin in Paris in 1956.

Yaakov Malkin participated in a lecture tour on Judaism in world literature in Australia, the United States, and France.

From 1952 to 1956, Yaakov Malkin taught comparative literature studies and the Bible as literature at the Seminar HaKibbutzim teachers' college in Tel Aviv.

From 1969 to 1994, Yaakov Malkin taught aesthetics, theater and film criticism at the Tel Aviv University.

Yaakov Malkin later served as editor-in-chief for Free Judaism, a magazine for Judaism as a culture, which he founded in 1995 and which came out in print editions until 2004.

Yaakov Malkin served as provost at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, based in Jerusalem and Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Yaakov Malkin's writings focus on humanistic ethics and the preservation of Jewish culture in a social context where literalist interpretations on the existence of God fade with each generation.

Yaakov Malkin, and many others, argue that to be a Jew is fundamentally a cultural identity, and not a religious one, and he often jokes that he was a descendant of many generations of devout Jews, and then goes on to list several generations of ancestors who were atheists.

Yaakov Malkin further argues that whereas religiosity has been an essential part of Jewish identity, the actual belief in a god was always a matter of friction, and whether individual Jews publicly admitted it or not, he claims most Jews have always understood god as an allegory and seen Judaism as a tradition of cultural - rather than religious - significance.

Yaakov Malkin perceives Judaism as a pluralistic culture, both in its secular and its religious forms.

Unlike atheist scholars such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, who see atheism as the lack of belief, Yaakov Malkin dedicates his writings to the humanistic beliefs shared by the non-religious community in the West generally, and among the Jewish people in particular.

On July 21,2019, at the age of 92, Yaakov Malkin died at his home in Jerusalem.