Listening some this week to this recent talk for non-academic audience by Sarah Hammerschlag, professor of religion & literature at the divinity school of note down the street. I’m listening not because I know about Levinas and broader ‘continental thought’ but because, on the whole, I don’t.

Goes together well with Sam Aronow’s history series as developed over the course of this year, roughly — the episode I mention in a longer post a few weeks ago with the rest covering Europe and the challenges of Jewish emancipation in wider Enlightenment, revolution and nationalism contexts. There’s good food for thought, here in Hammerschlag’s snapshot of Levinas in address to Paris Colloques colleagues in the ’60s, about what persists and what doesn’t, what the turn comes to, in the move from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the latter part of the twentieth in European / Western societies.