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Parisian year inspired career in philosophy
Richard Cohen says plans to establish a Ph.D. program, an institute and a department will “put UB Judaic studies on the map.” Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
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“At its heart of hearts, it’s an academic unit, but the next layer of the onion is reaching out to the community—and not only the Jewish community, but the Buffalo community as a whole”
While it’s not uncommon for scholars to devote themselves to the work of a single great thinker, few get the chance to meet their intellectual idol in the flesh—let alone learn at his or her feet while still a student.
But for Richard Cohen, who joined UB last semester as the first director of the new UB Institute of Jewish Thought and Heritage, his career as a leading expert on the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was forged during a year spent at the Sorbonne in Paris, studying under the influential Jewish intellectual who died in 1995.
“Levinas is considered now one of the leading philosophers of Europe of the 20th century,” says Cohen, who’s also a professor in the Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), and writing a three-part series of books on Levinas. “What made his thoughts special was that he made ethics the center of his philosophy.”
While pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees in philosophy at Stony Brook University, Cohen—who first discovered Levinas as an undergraduate studying philosophy and political science at Penn State—says it suddenly struck him “like a lightning bolt” that the man at the center of his research was still “alive and well and teaching in France.”
“I just said, I’m taking a leave of absence, goodbye, and went to Paris,” he recalls. “It was an incredible experience. He [Levinas] was very hospitable, gracious, unpretentious—a person who lived his philosophy; down to earth, but also a genius.”
After returning to the United States to complete his doctoral dissertation—all the while working a day job as a safety trainer at a steel mill in Indiana—Cohen jokes that he accepted “a huge pay cut” in taking his first teaching job as an assistant professor at Penn State.
He later served as a visiting professor at universities in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Rome; five years as Aaron Aronov Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Alabama—“It was like another universe,” recalls Cohen, a native of Staten Island—and 14 years as the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. His rising reputation led to an invitation to interview at UB for a position that he says he simply couldn’t refuse.
“It’s very ambitious,” Cohen says of the project that he has been hired to spearhead. “Instead of just hiring one professor of Judaic studies, as part of President Simpson’s UB 2020 plan, he wants to go gangbusters. He’s going to create a Ph.D. program, an institute, a department—and that will put UB Judaic studies on the map.
“There are not many Judaic studies Ph.D. programs,” he adds, “so it’s a very special thing.”
Steps are being taken to establish a bachelor’s degree program in Judaic studies by spring 2010, he says, and master’s and doctoral programs are planned for the near future. UB has committed to hire four more new faculty members in the next four to five years to support the burgeoning program, he says.
Although the core mission of the program is academic, Cohen points out that a number of projects being planned also will appeal to the local community, including a lectureship series sponsored by UB alumnus and CNN host Wolf Blitzer, whose first speaker has yet to be chosen; an exhibition of Holocaust photographs in April; and a collaborative project with the Jewish Archives of Greater Buffalo in May. In fall 2009, there will be an “inaugural” event for the institute, which also will introduce the second Judaic studies professor to the campus and community.
“At its heart of hearts, it’s an academic unit,” Cohen says of the institute, “but the next layer of the onion is reaching out to the community—and not only the Jewish community, but the Buffalo community as a whole.”
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