Fragile Spaces : Forays into Jewish Memory, European History and Complex Identities / Steven E. Aschheim.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Aschheim, Steven E., author.

Contributor:

Knowledge Unlatched, Funder.

Series:

Perspectives on Jewish texts and contexts (Series) ; 2199-6962 Volume 8.

Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts ; 8

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jews--Identity.

Jews.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 279 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; Boston : De Gruyter, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Biography/History:

Steven E. Aschheim, Hebrew University, Israel.

Summary:

This book consists of a range of essays covering the complex crises, tensions and dilemmas but also the positive potential in the meeting of Jews with Western culture. In numerous contexts and through the work of fascinating individuals and thinkers, the work examines some of the consequences of political, cultural and personal rupture, as well as the manifold ways in which various Jewish intellectuals, politicians (and occasionally spies!) sought to respond to these ruptures and carve out new, sometimes profound, sometimes fanciful, options of thought and action. It also delves critically into the attacks on liberal and Enlightenment humanism. In almost all the essays the fragility of things is palpably present and the book touches on some of the ironies, problematics and functions of responses to that condition. The work mirrors the author's ongoing fascination with the always fraught, fragile and creatively fecund confrontation of Jews (and others) with European modernity, its history, politics, culture and self-definition. In a time of increasing anxiety and feelings of fragility, this work may be helpful in understanding how people at an earlier (and sometimes contemporary) period sought to come to terms with a similar predicament.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Preface and Acknowledgments

Contents

1. Introduction

Part I History, Memory and Genocide

2. The Dialectic of Enlightenment Revisited

3. Why the Germans? Why the Jews? The Perennial Holocaust Question

4. Lessons of the Holocaust: A Critical Examination

5. Empathy, Autobiography and the Tasks and Tensions of the Historian

Part II Culture and Complex Identities

6. The Weimar Kaleidoscope - And, Incidentally, Frankfurt's Not Minor Place In It

7. The Avant-Garde and the Jews

8. Vienna: Harbinger of Creativity and Catastrophe

Part III Politics

9. Between the Particular and the Universal: Rescuing the Particular from the Particularists and the Universal from the Universalists

10. Zionism and Europe

11. Gershom Scholem and the Left

Part IV Scholarly Dilemmas and Personal Confrontations

12. Between New York and Jerusalem: Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt

13. An Unwritten Letter from Victor Klemperer to Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem

14. Moshe Idel and the Critique of German Jewry

15. On Grading Jewishness: Pierre Birnbaum's Geography of Hope

16. The Memory Man: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Fallen Jew

17. Of Memory, History - and Eggplants: The Odyssey of Saul Friedländer

18. The Modern Jewish Medici: Salman Schocken between Merchandise and Culture

19. Hans Jonas and his Troubled Century

20. Islamic Jihad, Zionism, and Espionage in the Great War

Copyright Acknowledgements

Index

About the Author

Notes:

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Okt 2018)

ISBN:

9783110593082

3110593084

9783110596939

3110596938

OCLC:

1059279993

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access