Stranger In A Strange Land: Searching For Gershom Scholem And
Jerusalem

Product Description

Gershom Scholem, the great humanist thinker & founder of modern Kabbalah, is all but forgotten today. But here, in a biography as daring & inquisitive as its subject, George Prochnik goes in search of Scholem, restoring the reputation of a vital intellectual & finding in his work a vision with the power to reinvigorate contemporary religious & political thought. Tracing Scholem`s life from his upbringing in Berlin, where he experienced a close & transformative friendship with Walter Benjamin, Prochnik reveals how Scholem`s frustration with the bourgeois ideology of Germany during WWI led him to discover mystic Judaism, Kabbalah, &, finally, Zionism. But having emigrated to what was to become Israel, Scholem again found himself a `stranger in a strange land`, ill at ease with a prevailing conservative form of Zionism. Prochnik follows Scholem to the modern Holy Land
- only to find that he too is disillusioned by the state politics he encounters. But through his profound study of Scholem & his own experience of Jerusalem, Prochnik not only questions the ideological & religious constructs of Jerusalem, but finds an ethical way forward, showing how a new form of pluralism might energize Jewish thought.