Michael Wyschogrod

Michael Wyschogrod (September 28, 1928 – December 17, 2015) was a Jewish German-American philosopher of religion, Jewish theologian, and activist for Jewish-Christian interfaith dialog. During his academic career he taught in philosophy and religion departments of several universities in the United States, Europe and Israel.

Michael Wyschogrod was born in Berlin, Germany, on September 28, 1928, the second child of Paul Wyschogrod and Margaret Ungar. His father, a Hungarian chess master who discouraged his son from pursuing this interest, had moved his family to Berlin from Budapest after the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a decade earlier. As a child, Wyschogrod spent summers in Budapest, visiting his maternal grandparents. The family fled Nazi Germany and arrived in the United States on July 3, 1939, when Wyschogrod was ten years old.

Wyschogrod associated himself with the Modern Orthodox movement within Orthodox Judaism, and the schools he attended as a child reflect this movement's emphasis on combining high-quality Jewish and secular instruction. He attended the Orthodox Adas Yisroel school in Berlin and then, after emigrating to New York City in 1939, the Yiddish-speaking Yeshiva Torah Vodaas day school in Brooklyn, New York, from which he graduated high school in 1945. It was here that Wyschogrod studied under Rabbi Shlomo Heiman, from whom he came to appreciate "that part of the Torah that cannot be written down but transmitted only in the being of the person whose everyday conduct exemplifies it." Subsequently he studied Talmud with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik at Yeshiva University from 1946 to 1952.

He embarked upon the study of philosophy at City College of New York in 1946, where he found himself drawn into the study of Christian Theology after reading the work of Kierkegaard. He completed his B.S.S. in 1949. He then went on to graduate study in philosophy at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1953. He wrote a dissertation which was later published under the title Kierkegaard and Heidegger: the Ontology of Existence.

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