Yaakov Malkin

An Israeli theorist of secular Judaism, essayist, and literary critic (1926–2019), Yaakov Malkin was professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, where he helped found the department of film and television as well as the cinematheques of Jerusalem and Haifa. With his daughter, Rabbi Sivan Maas, he founded the Tmura institute for humanistic and secular Judaism. He championed a cultural, pluralist conception of Judaism independent of religious belief, set out notably in Secular Judaism (Vallentine Mitchell, 2004) and What Do Secular Jews Believe? (Free Judaism, 1998).