Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and

Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem

Taking his lead from his subject, Gershom Scholemâ€”the 20th century thinker who cracked open Jewish theology and history with a radical reading of Kabbalahâ€”Prochnik combines biography and memoir to counter our contemporary political crisis with an original and urgent reimagining of the future of Israel.

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 Scholemâ€™s upbringing in Berlin, and compellingly brings to life Scholemâ€™s transformative friendship with Walter Benjamin, the critic and philosopher. In doing so, he reveals how Scholemâ€™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 Europeâ€™s suicidal nationalism.
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Prochnikâ€™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. 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.
Country USA
Manufacturer Other Press
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2017-03-21
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Other Press
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2017-03-21
Format	Kindle eBook

Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem

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