Omri Boehm during his acceptance speech at the opening event of the Leipzig Book Fair.
Photo: dpa/Hendrik Schmidt
The fact that activists disrupted an event at which a champion of peace and equal coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians was to be honored was anachronistic. The German-Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm showed greatness and articulated understanding for the protests during the ceremony to open the Spring Book Fair on Wednesday evening in the Leipzig Gewandhaus. What is currently happening in Gaza is “shameful,” said the award winner, who was born in Haifa in 1979. And: There can be no German-Jewish friendship “if in these dark times there is no room for the difficult truths that must be said in the name of Jewish-Palestinian friendship.” She’s having a very difficult time at the moment, but she’s still alive, assured Boehm, who said he was influenced by his educated middle-class German grandmother and his Iranian grandfather.
He received the 20,000 euro book prize on European understanding for his polemic “Radical Universalism. Beyond Identity”, in which the Tel Aviv University graduate, who received his doctorate on Kant from Yale University, calls for unconditional humanism, crossing borders and cultures, in the spirit of the Königsberg philosopher, and the recognition of the equality of all people. The philosophy professor who teaches in New York had already sent a signal of respect with the book “Israel – a Utopia” (2020). In it he called for a Jewish-Palestinian binational state. In Leipzig he emphasized again: “As long as people don’t get equal rights, there will be no peace.”
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