Lecture by Omri Boehm as Part of the Exhibition "The Opposite of Now"
Utopian thinking is often regarded as an escape from history – and is sometimes ridiculed. In his lecture, Omri Boehm returns to the origins of utopian thinking amongst the Hebrew prophets.
Image gallery
Jüdisches Museum Berlin
By formulating the impossible in the indicative mood, they understood the ‘opposite of now’ not as a time beyond history, but as a truth articulated within it. Not as a postponement of action beyond time, but rather as the only way to remain within it. What remains of this prophetic tradition today?
Omri Boehm is a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. Born in Haifa in 1979, he studied in Tel Aviv and obtained his PhD at Yale with a thesis on Kant’s critique of Spinoza.
Omri Boehm is an Israeli and German citizen; he has conducted research in Munich and Berlin, amongst other places, and writes about Israeli politics in *Haaretz*, *Die Zeit* and *The New York Times*.
His most recent publications include *Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity. Universalism as a Saving Alternative* (Berlin, 2022) and, co-authored with Daniel Kehlmann, *The Starry Sky Above Me: A Conversation about Kant*.
Additional information
Dates
October 2026
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