Emmanuel Levinas
My greatest Jewish hero, Levinas was a Hebraist who masqueraded as a philosopher. As such, he challenged a few of the basic notions we accepted as eternal in western (Christian) philosophy from the outside, from the point of view of the eternal, outsider, from the point of view of the Jew. He articulated, for the first time in western thought, a philosophy of the other.
He deconstructed western, Christian ethics to show how it actually devalued and objectified the other person. He argues that rather than construct an ethical system of practices deriving from the self as its basis, we must build one based on the other if we are to ever begin to treat other people with dignity and respect. Only by realizing that we have no meaning in and of ourselves as individuals, but only come into being as ourselves in the face of the other, can we ever hope to prevent things like the Holocaust in the future. Moreover, if we maintain our ethics of self, he argues, we will necessarily repeat Auschwitz again and again.
A Good Levinas Website: http://home.pacbell.net/atterton/levinas/
A more exhaustive site: http://www.mythosandlogos.com/Levinas.html