Stranger in a Strange Land
Subtitle: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem
By: George Prochnik
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2017-03-21
Place of publication: New York, USA
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 464
ISBN-13: 9781590517765
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.

(Source: [Other Press](https://otherpress.com/product/stranger-in-a-strange-land-9781590517765/))
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Part I; title: Chapter One; title: Chapter Two; title: Chapter Three; title: Chapter Four; title: Chapter Five; title: Chapter Six; title: Chapter Seven; title: Chapter Eight; title: Chapter Nine; title: Part II; title: Chapter Ten; title: Chapter Eleven; title: Chapter Twelve; title: Chapter Thirteen; title: Chapter Fourteen; title: Chapter Fifteen; title: Chapter Sixteen; title: Chapter Seventeen; title: Chapter Eighteen; title: Acknowledgments; title: Author’s Note; title: Notes; title: Select Bibliography; title: Illustrations; title: About the Author