Avishai Margalit

Avishai Margalit was born in 1939 in Afula

Avishai Margalit was born in Afula in 1939 and grew up in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood of Jerusalem. His parents came to the Land of Israel from two small towns near Warsaw. His father Moshe was a construction worker and labor official, and his mother Miriam was active in a working mothers' organization.

He attended the Hebrew University Secondary School and then served in the airborne Nahal. In 1960 he began studying philosophy and economics at the Hebrew University, and during his studies he worked with immigrant children in a youth village. After a stay at Queen's College, Oxford, from 1968 to 1970, he earned his doctorate on metaphors in 1970 under Yehoshua Bar-Hillel.

In 1970 he began teaching philosophy at the Hebrew University, where he spent his academic career and retired as professor emeritus in 2006. From 2006 to 2011 he held the George F. Kennan chair at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His books include Idolatry, written with Moshe Halbertal, and The Decent Society, which argues that a decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people.

He was a founder of the Moked party in 1973 and of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace in 1975, and among the first leaders of Peace Now in 1978. He also served on the board of B'Tselem. Since 1984 he has written for the New York Review of Books.

He was married to philosophy professor Edna Ullmann-Margalit until her death in 2010. They had 4 children.