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The Unrequited Love of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis
by Göran Rosenberg
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.
"Ehrenpreis has faded into history, but Rosenberg here ably revives him as a contrarian voice who speaks to present events, for he would surely have opposed, in the author's words, 'a Judaism that could be invoked for territorial conquest, military occupation, minority oppression and ethnic cleansing.' A capably told life of a religious leader who envisioned the whole world as a safe haven for his people." —Kirkus Reviews
"Never before have Jews so desperately needed alternative visions, ways of imagining that we can flourish without dominating others. By resuscitating Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis, Göran Rosenberg shows how we might envision a different future by reclaiming a lost past. In this dark and shameful time, figures like Ehrenpreis, and authors like Rosenberg, offer a source of light." —Peter Beinart author of The Crisis of Zionism
"Marcus Ehrenpreis, a long-serving leader of Sweden's Jewish community, worked for a renaissance of Jewish life during one of the darkest periods of his people's history. In telling the story of this admirable man, Göran Rosenberg shows that the questions Ehrenpreis grappled with—about Zionism, assimilation, anti-Semitism, and the possibility of a Jewish future in Europe—could not be more relevant today." —Adam Kirsch, author of The People and the Books and The Blessing and the Curse
"In this powerful, passionate book, Göran Rosenberg rescues Marcus Ehrenpreis from obscurity and places him in the pantheon of great Jewish thinkers and leaders. This is a deeply moving study of the tensions in twentieth-century Europe between Jews and Christians, Zionism and universalism, the love of community and the love of humanity." —Derek Penslar, author of Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader
This information about Another Zionism, Another Judaism was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Göran Rosenberg was born in 1948 in Sweden. In 1970 he left academia to work as a journalist for Swedish television, radio, and print. He is the author of several books, including the highly acclaimed Det Förlorade landet (The lost land: A personal history of Zionism, messianism, and the state of Israel) and A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz (Other Press, 2015).
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