# Avishai Margalit **Avishai Margalit** (b. 1939, Afula) is an Israeli moral and political philosopher, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and George F. Kennan Professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study from 2006 to 2011. He supervised [[Moshe Halbertal]]'s doctoral work and later co-wrote [[Idolatry]] (Harvard, 1992) with him — the source text for [[Political Idolatry]]. His independent work centers on a cluster of concepts this knowledge base has direct use for: **decency** (a society is decent if its institutions do not humiliate people — a lower and more achievable bar than justice), **the ethics of memory** (which communities are obligated to remember what, and why), **rotten compromises** (which political bargains are impermissible regardless of the peace they buy), and **betrayal**. ## Selected works | Year | Work | Publisher | |---|---|---| | 1992 | [[Idolatry]] (with [[Moshe Halbertal]]) | Harvard University Press | | 1996 | *The Decent Society* | Harvard University Press | | 2002 | *The Ethics of Memory* | Harvard University Press | | 2004 | *Occidentalism* (with Ian Buruma) | Penguin Press | | 2010 | *On Compromise and Rotten Compromises* | Princeton University Press | | 2017 | *On Betrayal* | Harvard University Press | Honors include the Spinoza Lens Prize (2001), the EMET Prize (2007), the Israel Prize for Philosophy (2010), and the Ernst Bloch Prize (2012); he was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018. He was politically active on the Israeli left — a co-founder of the Moked party (1973), an early figure in Peace Now (1978), and a board member of B'Tselem in the 1990s. > [!note] Stub > Minimum-viable page created to support [[Political Idolatry]] and [[Moshe Halbertal]]. Expand with *The Decent Society* (humiliation as the core political harm) and *On Compromise and Rotten Compromises*, both of which have direct application to this vault's material. ## See also [[Moshe Halbertal]] · [[Idolatry]] · [[Political Idolatry]] · [[Ethics]] · [[People Hub]]