Avishai Margalit is professor emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the former George F. Kennan Professor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Throughout his academic career, Margalit has also taught at several internationally renowned universities – most recently as the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford University. His publications include The Decent Society (Harvard, 1996), The Ethics of Memory (Harvard, 2002), Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with Ian Buruma; Penguin, 2004), and On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton, 2009).

Margalit is the recipient of the 2001 Spinoza Lens Prize for his “significant contribution to the normative debate on society” and the 2011 Israel Prize in Philosophy for his work as “one of the most important philosophers in the state of Israel and one of the most valued in the world today.” In September 2012, he was awarded the Ernst Bloch Prize as well as the FIPH Philosophical Book Award.