The Leo Baeck Institute London is delighted to announce that Ido Ben Harush is the winner of the 2027 LBI Year Book Essay Prize for his essay “Idolatry and Textolatry: Media Crisis from Mendelssohn to Flusser”. His essay will be published in the 2026 edition of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book.
In this article, Ben Harush examines how Moses Mendelssohn and Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) employ the Jewish concept of idolatry to formulate a theory of mediation. Both thinkers read idolatry as a structural failure of mediation in which signs, texts, or images stop pointing to meanings beyond themselves and instead become self-referential. Mendelssohn identifies this failure in print culture and presents Jewish ceremonial law as a non-idolatrous “living script,” while Flusser, in the age of technical images, proposes the dialogic computer image as a “Jewish image” and possible non-idolatrous medium. Reading them together reveals a line of continuity and rupture in modern Jewish thought in which idolatry serves as a category for thinking media crises.
Ido Ben Harush is a College Fellow in Modern Jewish Thought in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2025. His work explores the intersection of religion, political critique, and aesthetic theory in modern German Jewish thought. His research has been supported by the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. In 2027–28, he will be an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt.
We send Ido Ben Harush our warmest congratulations on this achievement.
A new Essay Prize call for 2027 will be published shortly.
