Download or read book Four Jews on Parnassus a Conversation written by Carl Djerassi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-25 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book features a CD of rarely performed music, including a specially commissioned rap by Erik Weiner of Walter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History." Theodor W. Adorno was the prototypical German Jewish non-Jew, Walter Benjamin vacillated between German Jew and Jewish German, Gershom Scholem was a committed Zionist, and Arnold Schönberg converted to Protestantism for professional reasons but later returned to Judaism. Carl Djerassi, himself a refugee from Hitler's Austria, dramatizes a dialogue between these four men in which they discuss fraternity, religious identity, and legacy as well as reveal aspects of their lives-notably their relations with their wives-that many have ignored, underemphasized, or misrepresented. The desire for canonization and the process by which it is obtained are the underlying themes of this dialogue, with emphasis on Paul Klee's Angelus Novus (1920), a canonized work that resonated deeply with Benjamin, Adorno, and Scholem (and for which Djerassi and Gabrielle Seethaler present a revisionist and richly illustrated interpretation). Basing his dialogue on extensive archival research and interviews, Djerassi concludes with a daring speculation on the putative contents of Benjamin's famous briefcase, which disappeared upon his suicide.
Download or read book Four Jews on Parnassus by Carl Djerassi written by Carl Djerassi and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Four Jews on Parnassus written by Carl Djerassi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four men -- Four wives -- One angel (by Paul Klee) -- Four Jews -- Benjamin's grip.
Download or read book The SciArtist written by Walter Grünzweig and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2012 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title presents criticism, commentaries, and creative responses to Carl Djerassi's literary texts, taking the author's achievements far beyond 'the Pill'
Download or read book Professor of Apocalypse written by Jerry Z. Muller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The controversial Jewish thinker whose tortured path led him into the heart of twentieth-century intellectual life Scion of a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars, Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) was an intellectual impresario whose inner restlessness led him from prewar Vienna to Zurich, Israel, and Cold War Berlin. Regarded by some as a genius, by others as a charlatan, Taubes moved among yeshivas, monasteries, and leading academic institutions on three continents. He wandered between Judaism and Christianity, left and right, piety and transgression. Along the way, he interacted with many of the leading minds of the age, from Leo Strauss and Gershom Scholem to Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, and Carl Schmitt. Professor of Apocalypse is the definitive biography of this enigmatic figure and a vibrant mosaic of twentieth-century intellectual life. Jerry Muller shows how Taubes’s personal tensions mirrored broader conflicts between religious belief and scholarship, allegiance to Jewish origins and the urge to escape them, tradition and radicalism, and religion and politics. He traces Taubes’s emergence as a prominent interpreter of the Apostle Paul, influencing generations of scholars, and how his journey led him from crisis theology to the Frankfurt School, and from a radical Hasidic sect in Jerusalem to the center of academic debates over Gnosticism, secularization, and the revolutionary potential of apocalypticism. Professor of Apocalypse offers an unforgettable account of an electrifying world of ideas, focused on a charismatic personality who thrived on controversy and conflict.
Download or read book A Jew Among Romans written by Frederic Raphael and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed biographer, screenwriter, and novelist Frederic Raphael, here is an audacious history of Josephus (37–c.100), the Jewish general turned Roman historian, whose emblematic betrayal is a touchstone for the Jew alone in the Gentile world. Joseph ben Mattathias’s transformation into Titus Flavius Josephus, historian to the Roman emperor Vespasian, is a gripping and dramatic story. His life, in the hands of Frederic Raphael, becomes a point of departure for an appraisal of Diasporan Jews seeking a place in the dominant cultures they inhabit. Raphael brings a scholar’s rigor, a historian’s perspective, and a novelist’s imagination to this project. He goes beyond the fascinating details of Josephus’s life and his singular literary achievements to examine how Josephus has been viewed by posterity, finding in him the prototype for the un-Jewish Jew, the assimilated intellectual, and the abiding apostate: the recurrent figures in the long centuries of the Diaspora. Raphael’s insightful portraits of Yehuda Halevi, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Kraus, Benjamin Disraeli, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Hannah Arendt extend and illuminate the Josephean worldview Raphael so eloquently lays out.
Download or read book The Scholems written by Jay Howard Geller and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evocative and riveting stories of four brothers—Gershom the Zionist, Werner the Communist, Reinhold the nationalist, and Erich the liberal—weave together in The Scholems, a biography of an eminent middle-class Jewish Berlin family and a social history of the Jews in Germany in the decades leading up to World War II. Across four generations, Jay Howard Geller illuminates the transformation of traditional Jews into modern German citizens, the challenges they faced, and the ways that they shaped the German-Jewish century, beginning with Prussia's emancipation of the Jews in 1812 and ending with exclusion and disenfranchisement under the Nazis. Focusing on the renowned philosopher and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem and his family, their story beautifully draws out the rise and fall of bourgeois life in the unique subculture that was Jewish Berlin. Geller portrays the family within a much larger context of economic advancement, the adoption of German culture and debates on Jewish identity, struggles for integration into society, and varying political choices during the German Empire, World War I, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi era. What Geller discovers, and unveils for the reader, is a fascinating portal through which to view the experience of the Jewish middle class in Germany.
Download or read book Behind the Angel of History written by Annie Bourneuf and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-09-24 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This short book offers a dazzling new interpretation of Paul Klee's most famous work: his Angelus Novus (1920), which was purchased by Walter Benjamin and became the model for his Angel of History, a figure saturated with Jewish mysticism that he introduces in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In 2014 the celebrated American artist R. H. Quaytman made a surprising discovery about Klee's work when she examined it at the Jewish Museum in Israel. She realized that Klee had carefully pasted the Angelus down over another image, a face, leaving just a finger's breadth of it showing. Through forensic science and lots of sleuthing it was determined that face belonged to Martin Luther. Behind the Angel of History tells the story of how Quaytman solved the mystery of who lurks behind Klee's angel. It then plunges into questions about why a face long hidden beneath another picture might matter. The book travels through a tangle of loaded conversations among images-from Klee's Angelus to Benjamin's own drawing of a crucified angel, from Klee's Angelus to Quaytman's own layered panels meditating on its secret"--
Download or read book Emily Jacir Susan Buck Morss written by Susan Buck-Morss and published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. This book was released on 2023-12-16 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This notebook combines photographs by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir with a text by political philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, who teaches at the City University of New York, written in response to the images and to conversations with the artist. Jacir's photographs depict the former Benedictine monastery of Breitenau, near Kassel . A prison camp in the Nazi era, it became a girl's reformatory after World War II. These images as well as other photographs taken in Kassel are accompanied by selections from the artist's diary entries, which investigate questions around the histories of the represented sites. Recalling Walter Benjamin's reading of Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, Buck-Morss' textual response unravels how truth and collective memory are established and how the inextricable relation between knowledge and power leads to the selection of what is archived and remembered. Language: English
Download or read book Keeping the Mystery Alive written by Ariana Huberman and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. It introduces the work of Latin American authors and artists who have been inspired by Jewish Mysticism from the 1960s to the present focusing on representations of dybbuks (transmigratory souls), the presence of Eros as part of the experience of mystical prayer, reformulations of Zoharic fables, and the search for Tikkun Olam (cosmic repair), among other key topics of Jewish Mysticism. The purpose of this book is to open up these aspects of their work to a broad audience who may or may not be familiar with Jewish Mysticism.
Download or read book On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone written by Danchev Alex Danchev and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can works of the imagination help us to understand good and evil in the modern world? In this new collection of essays, Alex Danchev treats the artist as a crucial moral witness of our troubled times, and puts art to work in the service of political and ethical inquiry. He takes inspiration from Seamus Heaney's dictum: 'the imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it'. This is a book of blasphemers, world menders, troublemakers, torturers and turbulent priests of every persuasion.
Download or read book Four Jews on Parnassus written by Diane Wood Middlebrook and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chemistry In Theatre Insufficiency Phallacy Or Both written by Carl Djerassi and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2012-03-21 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the questions “What can science do for the theatre?” and “What can the theatre do for science?” which raise challenges for both theatre professionals and scientists. Unusually, this book deals with plays first and foremost as reading material — as texts to be read alone or in dramatic readings — rather than emphasizing performances on the stage. Concrete examples are given to demonstrate the potential pedagogic value of using the dialogic style and plot structure of plays in science, with a special focus on chemistry.Very few books have dealt with the subject of science-in-theatre and virtually none with chemistry-in-theatre. Texts of the author's two recent plays, Insufficiency and Phallacy, are included in their entirety to offer concrete examples of plays dealing with actual (rather than invented) chemistry. Insufficiency represents an example from the field of beer and champagne bubbles, where the topics of academic tenure and fashion in chemistry are analyzed, whereas in Phallacy, a case history of the similarities and differences between science and art is presented for debate./a
Download or read book Art and Sovereignty in Global Politics written by Douglas Howland and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume aims to question, challenge, supplement, and revise current understandings of the relationship between aesthetic and political operations. The authors transcend disciplinary boundaries and nurture a wide-ranging sensibility about art and sovereignty, two highly complex and interwoven dimensions of human experience that have rarely been explored by scholars in one conceptual space. Several chapters consider the intertwining of modern philosophical currents and modernist artistic forms, in particular those revealing formal abstraction, stylistic experimentation, self-conscious expression, and resistance to traditional definitions of “Art.” Other chapters deal with currents that emerged as facets of art became increasingly commercialized, merging with industrial design and popular entertainment industries. Some contributors address Post-Modernist art and theory, highlighting power relations and providing sceptical, critical commentary on repercussions of colonialism and notions of universal truths rooted in Western ideals. By interfering with established dichotomies and unsettling stable debates related to art and sovereignty, all contributors frame new perspectives on the co-constitution of artworks and practices of sovereignty.
Download or read book Cantor s Dilemma written by Carl Djerassi and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2012-11-21 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Professor Isidore Cantor reveals his latest breakthrough in cancer research, his promising research fellow, Dr. Jeremiah Stafford, has only to conduct the experiment and win Cantor the Nobel prize. But how far will Stafford go to guarantee the results? Carl Djerassi draws from his career as a world-famous scientist to describe the fierce competition driving scientific superstars in this gripping novel.
Download or read book Austria and America 20th Century Cross Cultural Encounters written by Joshua Parker and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2017 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through literature, film, diplomatic relations, and academic exchanges, this volume examines key historical points in Austrian-American relations of the past century, pondering the roots of how and why "austrianness" was adapted to American culture, and how America's cultural lens focused on the two countries' exchanges. From Freud's early reception, to FDR's policy toward Austrian refugees in the Pacific, and from film adaptations to film-writing, literature and Freudianism during the McCarthy era, it reviews encounters between Austria and the United States, between Austrians and Americans, between each's images of the other, and the lives of those caught in between. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 15) [Subject: Politics, American Studies, Austrian Studies, Sociology]
Download or read book Foreplay written by Carl Djerassi and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno were intellectual giants of the first half of the twentieth century. The drama Foreplay explores their deeply human and psychologically intriguing private lives, focusing on professional and personal jealousies, the mutual dislike of Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, the association between Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille, and the border between erotica and pornography. Djerassi’s extensive biographical research brings to light many fascinating details revealed in the dialogues among the characters, including Adorno’s obsession with his dreams, Benjamin’s admiration for Franz Kafka, and the intimate correspondence between Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin. The introduction of a fictitious character, Fräulein X, intensifies the complex interplay among the four lead protagonists and allows for a comparison of Adorno’s philandering and the similar behavior of Martin Heidegger, whose affair with Hannah Arendt is well known. Foreplay brims with intrigue and the friction created when strong personalities clash.
