Life Achievement Award for Professor Yaakov Malkin at Jerusalem Film Festival

July 26, 2004 - Yaakov Malkin, a leading advocate for Judaism as Culture in Israel, was recently honored with a Life Achievement Award by the Twenty First International Jerusalem Film Festival for his contribution to the Israeli film industry.

The festival, the most prestigious event on the Israeli film calendar, selected Professor Malkin as one of two recipients to receive the award, along with Israeli cinematographer David Gurfinkel.

The Jerusalem Cinematheque, with the Old City walls as its scenic backdrop, hosted the festival from July 8-17, 2004.

Malkin, Professor of Aesthetics and Rhetoric at Tel Aviv University, is the founder and academic director of Meitar College for Judaism as Culture in Jerusalem and is also the co-dean of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism in Farmington Hills, MI., and its Israeli campus, called Tmura, that began educating Israeli secular rabbinical students earlier this year.

Malkin has played an integral role in Israel's film industry. Aside from his academic achievements at the Department of Film & Television at Tel Aviv University where he has taught literature and literature of theater and cinema for more than four decades, he has worked tirelessly to promote the local industry, publishing books on cinema, and establishing cinema circles and clubs. He was also the founder-director of the first community culture centers in Israel: the Rothschild Center and the Hagefen Arab-Jewish Center.

In a personal tribute to Malkin, Haaretz film critic Uri Klein, a former student of Malkin's at Tel Aviv University, hailed Malkin as his mentor, calling him "an intellectual, in the richest sense of the word ... [with an] openness and generosity and curiosity and excitement and loyalty and above all, a great love for everything beautiful and human. "

Among Professor Malkin's published works are Secular Judaism: Faith, Values and Spirituality; What Do Secular Jews Believe?; Free Judaism and Religion in Israel; Jonah Jones: A Biblical Play; Cinema as Literature and The Quality of Life and the Renaissance of Community.

Professor Malkin is a member of the editorial board of Contemplate, The International Journal of Secular Jewish Thought, which will publish as a series the English translation of his forthcoming book, God and Other Literary Characters. He is also closely associated with the Center for Cultural Judaism with his works being studied in courses on Secular Judaism.

The Center for Cultural Judaism was established in 2003 in response to emerging new insights into American Jewish demography, as cited in the American Jewish Identity Survey (AJIS 2001). Salient among those insights is the emergence of a very large population of Jews - and for many their non-Jewish spouses as well - who do not find meaning in Judaism as a religion, but rather as a culture. The Center for Cultural Judaism is dedicated to supporting programs on behalf of this large, under-served population.

Center for Cultural Judaism
www.culturaljudaism.org
Tel: 212 564 6711

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