The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877-1959
The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877-1959

Author: Anthony David

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2014-09-09

Total Pages: 632

ISBN-13: 1466881046

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The rags-to-riches story of one of Europe's great entrepreneurs and a founding father of modern Jewish secular culture The name "Schocken"--now primarily associated with the prestigious publishing house--was once emblazoned over a vast commercial empire; across Europe, it stood for quality consumer goods and uplifting culture made available for working people. A sweeping, colorful saga, The Patron is the first biography of Salman Schocken, founder of a large department store chain and Jewish philanthropic titan. We follow Schocken's transformation from an impoverished migrant selling textiles door-to-door to a captain of German industry, at once media magnate, collector, talent scout, and patron. The merchandizing millionaire then harnessed his fortune to a vision: to disseminate Jewish secular culture to the Jewish masses, in much the same way as he marketed well-designed coffeepots to the working class. His task, as he saw it, was not to spread culture but to create it, through publishing houses, newspapers, and the patronage of such influential modern thinkers such as Martin Buber and Thomas Mann. But as the Nazi regime closed in on Schocken's empire, the resilient tycoon transferred his energies and passions to Palestine and New York. In The Patron historian Anthony David fills in a missing piece of twentieth-century history, the towering life of a self-made man who, with courage and tenacity, helped fashion a people's national and cultural renaissance.

Patron
Patron

Author: Anthony David

Publisher:

Published: 2008-12-01

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 9781437964028

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The name Schocken -- now primarily assoc. with the prestigious pub. house -- was once emblazoned over a vast commercial empire; across Europe, it stood for quality consumer goods and uplifting culture made available for all. Here is the fascinating story of Salman Schocken, Jewish philanthropic titan and founder of a large dep¿t. store chain. Once he became a millionaire, Schocken harnessed his fortune to a vision: to disseminate culture to the masses through pub. houses and newspapers, and to create a secular Jewish tradition by supporting modern thinkers such as Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. This is the life of a self-made man who, with courage and tenacity, helped fashion a people¿s national and cultural renaissance.

Fragile Spaces
Fragile Spaces

Author: Steven E. Aschheim

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-09-24

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 3110593084

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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.

Life, Theory, and Group Identity in Hannah Arendt's Thought
Life, Theory, and Group Identity in Hannah Arendt's Thought

Author: Karin Fry

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-09-06

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 3031108779

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Philosophy typically ignores biographical, historical, and cultural aspects of theoriss’ lives in an attempt to take a supposedly abstract and objective view of their work. This book makes some new conclusions about Arendt’s theory by emphasizing how her experience of the world as displayed in her archival materials impacted her thought. Some aspects of Arendt’s life have been examined in detail before, including the fact she was stateless as well as her affair with Heidegger. Instead, this work explores different topics including the biographical and narrative moments of Arendt's own work, the role of archiving in her thought, pivotal events that have not been archived, her understanding of her own identities, and how it affected the role of identity politics in her work. Typically, group action is underemphasized in Arendt scholarship in comparison to individual action and often identity politics questions are considered to lie within the realm of the private. Although Arendt’s theory is problematic when discussing issues concerning identity politics, she did think identity politics could be public and political and that effective political actions may occur within groups. What makes this project unique are the innovative conclusions made by moving the archival and biographical evidence to the center in order to understand her theory more accurately and within its historical and cultural context. This volume will be of interest to professional scholars in Arendt’s work, but also to those who have a more general interest in her life and theory.

Foreign Entanglements: Transnational American Jewish Studies
Foreign Entanglements: Transnational American Jewish Studies

Author: Hasia Diner

Publisher: Universitätsverlag Potsdam

Published: 2021-12-02

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 3869565209

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The field of American Jewish studies has recently trained its focus on the transnational dimensions of its subject, reflecting in more sustained ways than before about the theories and methods of this approach. Yet, much of the insight to be gained from seeing American Jewry as constitutively entangled in many ways with other Jewries has not yet been realized. Transnational American Jewish studies are still in their infancy. This issue of PaRDeS presents current research on the multiple entanglements of American with Central European, especially German-speaking Jewries in the 19th and 20th centuries. The articles reflect the wide range of topics that can benefit from a transnational understanding of the American Jewish experience as shaped by its foreign entanglements.

Dissident Rabbi
Dissident Rabbi

Author: Yaacob Dweck

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 0691183570

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In 1665, as Jews abandoned reason for the ecstasy of enthusiasm for self-proclaimed Messiah Sabbetai Zevi, Jacob Sasportas watched in horror. Dweck tells the story of the Sephardic rabbi who challenged Sabbetai Zevi's improbable claims and warned his fellow Jews that their Messiah was not the answer to their prayers..

Winged Words: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and the Life of Quotation
Winged Words: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and the Life of Quotation

Author: Benjamin E. Sax

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-07-24

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 9004680217

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This is the first book to explore the role of quotation in modern Jewish thought. Weaving back and forth from Benjamin to Rosenzweig, the book searches for the recovery of concealed and lost meaning in the community of letters, sacred scripture, the collecting of books, storytelling, and the life of liturgy. It also explores how the legacy of Goethe can be used to develop new strata of religious and Jewish thought. We learn how quotation is the binding tissue that links language and thought, modernity and tradition, religion and secularism as a way of being in the world.

Communings of the Spirit
Communings of the Spirit

Author: Mel Scult

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 0814347681

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Scholars of Judaica and rabbinical studies will value this honest look at the preeminent American Jewish thinker and rabbi of our times.

Sabbatai Ṣevi
Sabbatai Ṣevi

Author: Gershom Gerhard Scholem

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-09-20

Total Pages: 1093

ISBN-13: 1400883156

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Gershom Scholem stands out among modern thinkers for the richness and power of his historical imagination. A work widely esteemed as his magnum opus, Sabbatai Ṣevi offers a vividly detailed account of the only messianic movement ever to engulf the entire Jewish world. Sabbatai Ṣevi was an obscure kabbalist rabbi of seventeenth-century Turkey who aroused a fervent following that spread over the Jewish world after he declared himself to be the Messiah. The movement suffered a severe blow when Ṣevi was forced to convert to Islam, but a clandestine sect survived. A monumental and revisionary work of Jewish historiography, Sabbatai Ṣevi details Ṣevi's rise to prominence and stands out for its combination of philological and empirical authority and passion. This edition contains a new introduction by Yaacob Dweck that explains the scholarly importance of Scholem's work to a new generation of readers.

Lamentations of Youth
Lamentations of Youth

Author: Gershom Scholem

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780674026698

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For decades, Gershom Scholem kept these diaries locked away, returning to them only to refresh his memory of past events and eloquent observations. They remained unread by others until the meticulously edited German edition of this book appeared in 2002. Lamentations of Youth gives insight into a crucial stage in Scholem's life, beginning when he was a student in Berlin during the First World War, a time of incubation and growth for his later ideas. Much of the journal writing, however, took place in Switzerland, a magnet for radical artists, socialist intellectuals, and revolutionaries fleeing war. The diaries are where Scholem forges his anarchic orthodoxy, and where he chronicles his intense relationship with Walter Benjamin. Many entries have the crisp quality of literary aphorisms crafted in the great German tradition of Kafka and Canetti. For Scholem and Benjamin, the time they spent together in Switzerland spawned an astoundingly original view of literary criticism, interpretation, and cultural transmission. More personally, the themes of friendship, love, and heartbreak that dominate these pages later reemerge in Scholem's scholarship. No longer is the inner life of the critic seen as distinct from his textual criticism--they are deeply and esoterically intertwined.