Called "the most important critic of his time" by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has also emerged as one of the most compelling thinkers of our time, his work assuming a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A "natural and extraordinary talent for lette[...]

Few people thought as deeply or incisively about Germany, Jewish identity, and the Holocaust as Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. And, as this landmark volume reveals, much of that thinking was developed in dialogue, through more than two decades of correspondence. Arendt and Scholem met in 1932 in[...]

A new biography of the seminal twentieth-century historian and thinker who pioneered the study of Jewish mysticism and profoundly influenced the Zionist movement Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) was perhaps the foremost Jewish intellectual of the twentieth century. Pioneering the study of Jewish mysticis[...]

The German-born Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897-1982), the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, delved into the historical analysis of kabbalistic literature from late antiquity to the twentieth century. His writings traverse Jewish historiography, Zionism, the phenomenology of mystical religion,[...]

"Gershom Scholem is a historian who has remade the world. . . . He is coming to be seen as one of the greatest shapers of contemporary thought, possibly the boldest mind-adventurer of our generation."--Cynthia Ozick, "The New York Times Book Review""On Jews and Judaism in Crisis "presents Gershom Sc[...]

This is a richly detailed account of the only messianic movement ever to engulf the entire Jewish world. The twentieth century produced a galaxy of extraordinary Jewish historians. Gershom Scholem stands out among them for the richness and power of his historical imagination. Born in Berlin in 1897,[...]

Gershom Scholem was the master builder of historical studies of the Kabbalah. When he began to work on this neglected field, the few who studied these texts were either amateurs who were looking for occult wisdom, or old-style Kabbalists who were seeking guidance on their spiritual journeys. His wor[...]

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[...]