Lindner Lecture – Africa & Diaspora
Lewis R. Gordon
October 20, Tuesday, 7:30pm
Lewis R. Gordon is an Afro-Jewish philosopher, political thinker, educator, and musician (drums and piano), who was born on the island of Jamaica and grew up in the Bronx, New York, where he attended Evander Child’s High School, played jazz in NY night clubs, and went to Lehman College under the Lehman Scholars Program (LSP) where he graduated with honors in political science and philosophy as a member of the Chi chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. His undergraduate mentor and lifetime friend, Gary Schwartz, with whom he also studied Greek and ancient literature, was Director of the LSP. Gordon then taught social studies at Lehman High School, where he founded The Second Chance Program for In-school Truants and then studied for his doctorate at Yale University, where he met his graduate mentor, the great Maurice Natanson, a phenomenologist and existentialist who was also a child of Yiddish theater in Brooklyn, New York, and whose mentor was Alfred Schutz, the great Austrian Jewish phenomenologist of the social sciences.