Another Zionism, Another Judaism: The Unrequited Love of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis

(Hardback)

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A timely, deeply personal biography of a Jewish leader whose questions for Israel have come back to haunt us with a vengeance. 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 G ran 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.

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, Gran 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 Swedens Jewish community, worked for a renaissance of Jewish life during one of the darkest periods of his peoples history. In telling the story of this admirable man, Gran Rosenberg shows that the questions Ehrenpreis grappled withabout Zionism, assimilation, anti-Semitism, and the possibility of a Jewish future in Europecould 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, Gran 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

The extraordinary life of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis opens a window to the momentous twentieth century of Jewish history. From Ukraine to the Balkans to Scandinavia, Ehrenpreis was at the forefront of political and intellectual debates. Gran Rosenberg presents a gripping account of his life and a fascinating account of the broad sweep of Jewish history, from the glowing hopes of the late nineteenth century through the horrors of the Holocaust and the passionate disputes over Zionism. Susannah Heschel, editor of Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel

A finely grained, meticulously researchedportrait of a twentieth-century communal rabbi who was ever attentive to the Judennotthe distress posed to European Jewry byvirulent racial antisemitismbut also no less to the Not des Judentumsthe distress to which Judaism as a spiritual and ethical calling was subject by the pull of ethnic nationalism as a response to the Judennot. Gran Rosenberg deftly presents Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis as exemplifying how modern Jewry may meet the existential challenge of an unyielding commitment to securing the political dignity of Jewry while unwaveringly affirming the spiritual patrimony of Judaism as a prophetic universal voice transcending the limits of national politics and territorial loyalties. Paul Mendes-Flohr, author of Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent

The search for the forgotten precedes the search for the better. Gran Rosenbergs gripping story of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreiss spiritual and political endeavor in the fateful time of the Jewish states establishment is a strong building block for such a future. Dan Diner, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Author Bio

G ran 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 F rlorade 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).