Stranger in a Strange Land : : Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem
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Call Number: 921 Scholem, Gershom
On Shelf At: Downtown Library
Location & Checkout Length | Call Number | Checkout Length | Item Status |
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Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout |
921 Scholem, Gershom | 4-week checkout | On Shelf |
"Prochnik creates a nonfiction Bildungsroman of one of the twentieth century's most important humanist thinkers, while also telling an intimate story of his own youth, marriage and spiritual quest in Jerusalem. 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. He vividly conjures Scholem's upbringing in Berlin, and compellingly brings to life Scholem's transformative friendship with Walter Benjamin, the critic and philosopher. 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 counter-forces to Europe's suicidal nationalism. Prochnik's self-imposed exile 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. 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"-- Provided by publisher.
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PUBLISHED
New York : Other Press, 2016.
Year Published: 2016
Description: 522 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Language: English
Format: Book
ISBN/STANDARD NUMBER
9781590517765
1590517768
SUBJECTS
Scholem, Gershom, -- 1897-1982.
Jewish scholars -- Germany -- Biography.
Jewish scholars -- Israel -- Biography.
Biographies.