Martin Buber
A Life of Faith and Dissent
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The first major biography in English in over thirty years of the seminal modern Jewish thinker Martin Buber
An authority on the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965), Paul Mendes-Flohr offers the first major biography in English in thirty years of this seminal modern Jewish thinker. The book is organized around several key moments, such as his sudden abandonment by his mother when he was a child of three, a foundational trauma that, Mendes-Flohr shows, left an enduring mark on Buber’s inner life, attuning him to the fragility of human relations and the need to nurture them with what he would call a “dialogical attentiveness.”
Buber’s philosophical and theological writings, most famously I and Thou, made significant contributions to religious and Jewish thought, philosophical anthropology, biblical studies, political theory, and Zionism. In this accessible new biography, Mendes-Flohr situates Buber’s life and legacy in the intellectual and cultural life of German Jewry as well as in the broader European intellectual life of the first half of the twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mendes-Flohr (Gershom Scholem), professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School, showcases his expertise in this definitive but dense and jargon-filled biography of the Austrian-born Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber (1878 1965). Mendes-Flohr begins with Buber's abandonment by his mother when he was four years old, and links that traumatic experience with Buber's development of a "philosophy of dialogue" that called for engagement with others while recognizing the difficulty of realizing that goal. After a difficult childhood in Poland, where he was reared by grandparents who limited his contact with his peers, Buber eventually settled in Israel. He went on to become a serious thinker about the relationship between ethics and politics in Judaism, which made him a controversial figure in the Zionist movement. While Mendes-Flohr's telling of Buber's life is comprehensive, his prose is often difficult to follow ("Kinesis... denotes for Buber the power actuating the longed-for realization of unity, albeit without a specific direction") and will be a barrier for any lay reader, even those with some familiarity with Buber's thinking. While the detail will be intimidating to the nonacademic, Mendes-Flohr's biography nicely maps out Buber's legacy for researchers to ponder.
