As part of the Wiener Festwochen 2024, philosopher Omri Boehm will deliver the “Speech to Europe” on 7 May 2024. In the third edition of this event, the focus lies on the impact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could have on Europe.
Responses of individual European countries to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been varied. Rooted in history, these differences – as seen in the German and French responses to the conflict – have spurred tensions which are becoming increasingly explosive for Europe as a political entity. Amidst this turmoil, the European Union finds itself significantly weakened and threatened. Can a constitutional crisis be averted?
Following historian Timothy Snyder and human rights activist Oleksandra Matviichuk, Omri Boehm will deliberate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its repercussions on the European Union in his lecture entitled “Shadows of History, Spectres of the Present: The Middle East War and Europe’s Challenge”.
Omri Boehm is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. His Israeli politics and philosophy commentaries are regularly published in Haaretz, Die Zeit, and The New York Times. His critically acclaimed book Radikaler Universalismus. Jenseits von Identität Universalismus als rettende Alternative (2022) was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding in 2024. Recently, Der bestirnte Himmel über mir: Ein Gespräch über Kant (2024), was published with Ullstein.
Admission is free, no tickets or registration required.
A livestream of the event will be available here:
About the event
The Speech to Europe allows public intellectuals to provide food for thought about the future of the European Project. Yale historian and IWM Permanent Fellow Timothy Snyder delivered the first Speech to Europe in 2019, in which he argued that Europe must face its history and shed the oft-repeated myth of innocent nation-states banding together in unity. After a three-year hiatus, the Ukrainian lawyer and human rights activist Oleksandra Matviichuk delivered the second Speech to Europe in 2023 under the banner “No Peace without Freedom, no Justice without Law.“
A joint event by Wiener Festwochen | Freie Republik Wien and the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM Vienna).
