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Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationshipÑwhich was to remain crucial for both menÑis both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin's suicide in 1940.
At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life.
Anonymous
Posted May 17, 2004
Gershom Scholem the founding father of the academic study of Jewish mysticism writes of his friendship with Walter Benjamin one of the greatest critics of literature of the twentieth century. The Zionist Scholem who made his way to Jerusalem writes movingly of his friend, who tragically did not make it out of Nazi Europe. A must read for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.
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Posted October 24, 2008
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Overview
Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationshipÑwhich was to remain crucial for both menÑis both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and ...