Download Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem AudioBook Free
Taking his business lead from his subject, Gershom Scholem - the 20th-century thinker who cracked open up Jewish theology and background with a radical reading of Kabbalah - Prochnik combines biography and memoir to counter our contemporary political crisis with an original and immediate reimagining into the future of Israel. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Prochnik revisits the life span and work of Gershom Scholem, whose once visible reputation as a Freud-like interpreter of the internal world of the cosmos has been in eclipse in america. He vividly conjures Scholem's upbringing in Berlin and compellingly brings alive Scholem's transformative friendship with Walter Benjamin, the critic and philosopher. In doing so he shows how Scholem's irritation with the bourgeois ideology of Germany through the First World Battle led him to discover Judaism, Kabbalah, and finally Zionism as potent counterforces 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 also to rediscover the town as a physical place rife with the unruliness and fecundity of mother nature. Prochnik ultimately shows that a new form of ecological pluralism must now inherit the historically energizing role once enjoyed by Kabbalah and Zionism in Jewish thought.
