A timely, deeply personal biography of a Jewish leader whose questions
for Israel have come back to haunt us with a vengeance. Born in what
is now Lviv, Ukraine, in 1869, Marcus Ehrenpreis was the secretary of
Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, a grand
rabbi of Bulgaria during two Balkan wars, a diplomat in defense of
Europe’s minorities, a Swedish author compared to Joseph Conrad,
the chief rabbi of one of Europe’s few unscathed Jewish communities
through the Nazi era. More than a biography of a man's life and work,
this book is a literary journey by award-winning Swedish Jewish writer
and public intellectual Göran Rosenberg (A Brief Stop on the Road
from Auschwitz), in search of that European Jewish world of meaning
and hope that Ehrenpreis so clearly embodied, so vividly articulated,
and so relentlessly worked to explain, defend, and salvage from his
pulpit in Stockholm. His lifelong dream was to build a bridge between
“Israel” and “the peoples,” and he believed that he could do
so by bringing a spiritually and culturally revitalized Judaism into a
new and self-asserted contact with the non-Jewish world. His Zionism
was not about making Jews a nation like all others, in a nation-state
like all others, but creating a spiritual and cultural center for the
renaissance of Jewish life “amidst the nations.” Even as Jewish
life in Europe was all but annihilated, he feared what Jewish
nationalism might do to the spiritual heritage of Judaism. A
meticulously researched and beautifully written story of boundless
hope, unrequited love, and annihilated possibilities, Another Zionism,
Another Judaism evokes a diasporic Jewish existence that would be
harshly judged in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the creation of
the State of Israel. It also reminds us of a Zionism that strived for
something other than an ethnic-national fortress on a narrow strip
of land in the Middle East.
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The Unrequrited Love of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781635423556
Publisert
2024
Utgiver
Random House Publishing Services
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter