Taking his lead from his subject, Gershom Scholem - the 20th-century
thinker who cracked open Jewish theology and history with a radical
reading of Kabbalah - Prochnik combines biography and memoir to counter
our contemporary political crisis with an original and urgent
reimagining of the future of Israel.
In Stranger in a Strange Land, Prochnik revisits the life and work of
Gershom Scholem, whose once prominent reputation as a Freud-like
interpreter of the inner world of the cosmos has been in eclipse in the
United States. He vividly conjures Scholem's upbringing in Berlin and
compellingly brings to life Scholem's transformative friendship with
Walter Benjamin, the critic and philosopher. In doing so he reveals how
Scholem's frustration with the bourgeois ideology of Germany during the
First World War led him to discover Judaism, Kabbalah, and finally
Zionism as potent counterforces to Europe's suicidal nationalism.
Prochnik's own years in the Holy Land in the 1990s brings him to
question the stereotypical intellectual and theological constructs of
Jerusalem and to rediscover the city as a physical place rife with the
unruliness and fecundity of nature. Prochnik ultimately suggests that a
new form of ecological pluralism must now inherit the historically
energizing role once played by Kabbalah and Zionism in Jewish thought.
