Challenging the assumption that modernist writer Gertrude Stein seldom integrated her Jewish identity and heritage into her work, this book uncovers Stein’s constant and varied writing about Jewish topics throughout her career. Amy Feinstein argues that Judaism was central to Stein’s ideas about modernity, showing how Stein connects the modernist era to the Jewish experience.Combing through Stein’s scholastic writings, drafting notebooks, and literary works, Feinstein anal...

"What have I in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself!"--Franz KafkaKafka's quip--paradoxical, self-questioning, ironic--highlights vividly some of the key issues of identity and self-representation for Jewish writers in the 20th century. No group of writers better represents the problems of Jewish identity than Jewish poets writing in the American modernist tradition--specifically secular Jews: those disdainful or suspicious of organized re...

“A skilled exploration” of why 6 notable 20th-century philosophers—from Martin Heidegger to Michel Foucault—succumbed to “a narcissistic embrace of totalitarian politics” (The Washington Post).European history of the past century is full of examples of philosophers, writers, and scholars who supported or excused the worst tyrannies of the age. How was this possible? How could intellectuals whose work depends on freedom defend those who would deny it? Here,...

From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's historyOn June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argu...

A bold exploration of the life and work of one of the world’s most influential – and controversial – thinkers, which brings Arendt’s ideas into urgent dialogue with our troubled present.‘A rare gem’ SHAMI CHAKRABARTI'An absorbing new biography... Admirable' ECONOMIST'Invigorating and insightful' FINANCIAL TIMES‘Exhilarating, brilliant and utterly original’ PHILIPPE SANDS...

The acclaimed biographer presents "a perceptive life of the controversial political philosopher" and author of Eichmann in Jerusalem ( Kirkus Reviews).Hannah Arendt was a polarizing cultural theorist—extolled by her peers as a visionary and berated by her critics as a poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler's Germany in 1933. Arendt is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that surround...

If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture.In American Nietzsch...

A devastating refutation of the book that claimed all Germans supported the execution of the Jews during the Holocaust."Finkelstein's and Birn's important contributions are more than dissections: they tell us something about where we are." —Raul HilbergNo recent work of history has generated as much interest as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Purporting to solve the mystery of the Nazi holocaust, Goldhagen m...

This highly original book is the first to explore the political and philosophical consequences of Hannah Arendt's concept of 'the banality of evil,' a term she used to describe Adolph Eichmann, architect of the Nazi 'final solution.' According to Bernard J. Bergen, the questions that preoccupied Arendt were the meaning and significance of the Nazi genocide to our modern times. As Bergen describes Arendt's struggle to understand 'the banality of evil,' he shows how Arendt redefined the mean...

Two titans of twentieth-century thought: their lives, loves, ideas, and politics.Shaking up the content and method by which generations of students had studied Western philosophy, Martin Heidegger sought to ennoble man’s existence in relation to death. Yet in a time of crisis, he sought personal advancement, becoming the most prominent German intellectual to join the Nazis.Hannah Arendt, his brilliant, beautiful student and young lover, sought to enable a d...

A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury AmericaIn a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers th...

Released to the public for the first time in in 1887, Esperanto had its specific origins in the fertile brain of a single individual, Zamenhof, and in the particular circum stan ces into which he was born and came of age. It is the story of these origins that Aleksander Korzhenkov's biography sets out to tell. -- That biography was originally published in Esperanto; the present version, in Ian Richmond's excellent translation, is an abridged version of the original text, prepared for Engli...