Stranger in a Strange Land
Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prochnik (The Impossible Exile) effectively and movingly combines a nuanced biography of Gershom Scholem, who singlehandedly created an academic discipline out of an obscure theological tradition , with a warts-and-all autobiography that recounts Prochnik s search for meaning in his own life. The contrast between the physical and the spiritual is manifest from the opening section, as Prochnik engages even readers with no knowledge of his subject by recounting how he visited Scholem s old house in Jerusalem to find it abandoned and derelict. He interweaves Scholem s life story, starting with his boyhood in Berlin, with his own, alternating sections that illustrate how both he and his subject dealt with the contrast of the reality of the State of Israel with its idealistic aspirations. Scholem was prominent in the pre-state Brit Shalom movement, which advocated a binational Arab-Jewish state in Palestine; Prochnik, who lived in Israel with his wife in the 1990s, confronted the dehumanizing aspects of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the profound trauma of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He also makes Scholem s study of Jewish mystical texts, and of the 17th-century false messiah Sabbatai Sevi, interesting and accessible. This is a powerful must-read for anyone interested in how people of faith struggle to live in the real world.
