Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was ostensibly a scholar of Jewish mysticism, yet he occupies a powerful role in today’s intellectual imagination, having influential contact with an extraordinary cast of thinkers, including Hans Jonas, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno. In this first biography of Scholem, Amir Engel shows how Scholem grew from a scholar of an esoteric discipline to a thinker wrestling with problems that reach to the very foundations of the modern...

The topic of "Kafka after Kafka" is a fascinating one: the engagement of artists, philosophers, and critics in dialogical exchange with Kafka's works. The present collection of new essays highlights the engagement of lesser knownartists and commentators with Kafka, and represents those who are well known, such as Arendt, Blanchot, Nabokov, and Coetzee, from new perspectives. The eleven essays contained here represent the most recent scholarly engagements with this topic. An essay ...