Yaakov Malkin (3 August 1926 – 21 July 2019) was an Israeli educator,[1] literary critic, and professor emeritus in the Faculty of Arts at Tel Aviv University.
[3] Starting in 1944, while still a student, Malkin published literary, cinema, and theater critiques, and served as the editor of On the Wall, the magazine of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement (1944–1946).
Malkin lectured (in Yiddish) and was active in the Cyprus internment camps before the inmates were sent to Israel, and worked for the IDF arms procurement branch in France 1949.
In 1971 he established, together with the Dean of the Faculty for New Arts, Professor Moshe Lazar, the Department for Cinema and Television at the Tel Aviv University.
Malkin also served as provost at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, based in Jerusalem and Farmington Hills, Michigan (Birmingham Temple).
Malkin's writings focus on humanistic ethics and the preservation of Jewish culture in a social context where literalist interpretations on the existence of God fade with each generation.
These beliefs lead to a rebuttal of "godly religions" that obligate the believer to keep the rules of their leaders, especially those that stand in contrast to the values of humanism and universal justice.
These anti-humanistic beliefs lead, among other things, to the acceptance of secular ideological religions such as Communism and Nazism wherein believers are also obligated to obey leaders, regardless of the cost.
Humanistic nonreligious beliefs include agnostics such as Socrates, deists such as Epicurus, pantheists such as Spinoza and Albert Einstein, and atheists such as John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, which are all free of commitment to a religious or ideological religion.