More in ‘Gershom Scholem’

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, a leading Jewish historian who mentored a generation of scholars, died Tuesday after a long illness. He was 77.
Within the field of Jewish history, Yerushalmi was first recognized in the early 1970s for his groundbreaking work on the conversos, Jews who converted to Catholicism but kept some Jewish rituals alive in secret ...

Four marquee academics—the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, Canadian public intellectual Charles Taylor, social theorist Judith Butler, and religion historian-cum-one-man-show Cornel West—gathered at Manhattan’s Cooper Union yesterday for a panel discussion on “Rethinking Secularism: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.” We caught the second half of the program, when the latter two thinkers spoke. ...

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

Reading Israeli writer Yoel Hoffmann’s newly published autobiographical novel Curriculum Vitae (New Directions) caused me to think about the Two Easts, about Zen Buddhism and Hasidism. Hoffmann’s books, five out of nine of which have been translated from Hebrew into English, represent a polyglot’s synthesis: his commingling of these two mystical traditions begins with a delight in paradox, and darkens as both Zen and Hasidism concern themselves with life’s futility and human powerlessness.

In the spring of 1940, Walter Benjamin produced the last and possibly the most influential of his essays, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The great pathos and urgency of the text comes in part from what we know about Benjamin’s circumstances when he wrote it. In 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, ...

In his contribution to Rethinking European Jewish History, a new collection of academic papers on the state of the field, Gershon David Hundert wryly notes that “periodization … is a problem that interests the guild of historians more than the general reader outside the academy, who tends to be more interested in new or newly ...

Early in 1917, as the Great War dragged into its third year and Germany suffered the food shortages of the so-called “rutabaga winter,” three young Jews struck up a friendship in Berlin. Zalman Rubashov, then twenty-seven years old, was born into a Hasidic family in Russia, but had come to Berlin before the war to ...