Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.92 (625 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B06XRZWZQR |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 544 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-11-05 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
In-depth study and analysis of the "stranger" in a "strange ecclectic In-depth study and analysis of the "stranger" in a "strange land".plus the author's own story of conversion and understanding. Not a light read, but it is well worth the price. Prochnik wraps the reader up in a warm, spiritual tallis as he drives the story home.. Identity A very lively picture of Gershom SholemQuestions of identity in Judaism todayThe connection to a Zionism without a soulVery deep. martin Isaacson said Five Stars. wonder historical document.
In Stranger in a Strange Land, Prochnik revisits the life and work of Gershom Scholem, whose once prominent reputation as a Freud-like interpreter of the inner world of the cosmos has been in eclipse in the United States. Taking his lead from his subject, Gershom Scholem - the 20th-century thinker who cracked open Jewish theology and history with a radical reading of Kabbalah - Prochnik combines biography and memoir to counter our contemporary political crisis with an original and urgent reimagining of the future of Israel. Prochnik's own years in the Holy Land in the 1990s brings him to question the stereotypical intellectual and theological constructs of Jerusalem and to rediscover the city as a physical place rife with the unruliness and fecundity of nature. In doing so he reveals how Scholem's frustration with the bourgeois ideology of Germany during the First World War led him to discover Judaism, Kabbalah, and finally Zionism as potent counterforces to Europe's suicidal nationalism. Prochnik ultimately suggests that a new form of ecological pluralism must now inherit the historically energizing role once played by Kabbalah and Zionism in Jewish thought.. He vividly conjures Scholem's upbringing in Berlin and compellingly brings to life Scholem's transformative friendship with Walter Benjamin, the critic and philosopher