Elad Lapidot (Berlin/Lille) with Göran Rosenberg (Stockholm) and Susan Neiman (Berlin)
Another Zionism, Another Judaism.
The Unrequited Love of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis
February 27, 2025, 19:00
Katholische Akademie Berlin
Image: Book Cover / Other Press
Another Zionism, Another Judaism. The Unrequited Love of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis
Elad Lapidot (Berlin/Lille) with Göran Rosenberg (Stockholm) and Susan Neiman (Berlin)
February 27, 2025, 19:00
Katholische Akademie Berlin
Born in Lviv, Ukraine, in 1869, Marcus Ehrenpreis was the secretary of Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, to become the chief rabbi of Sweden through the Nazi era. In his new book, the award-winning Swedish Jewish writer and public intellectual Göran Rosenberg (A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz) tells about Ehrenpreis’s Zionism, which was not about making Jews a nation like all others, but creating a spiritual center for the renaissance of Jewish life “amidst the nations.”
Elad Lapidot will talk with Rosenberg and with the Berlin-based philosopher and public intellectual Susan Neiman about this 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.
Organization
Elad Lapidot (Katholische Akademie Berlin)
Göran Rosenberg, born in 1948, is an acclaimed Swedish writer and journalist, son of Holocaust survivors. His personal history of Israel, Det förlorade landet, Bonniers 1996, (Das verlorene Land, Israel eine persönliche Geschichte, Jüdische Verlag, 1998, L’utopie perdue, Denoël, 2002) was shortlisted for the Swedish August Prize. His childhood memoir, A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, was awarded the 2012 August Prize and has been translated into 13 languages. The French translation, Une brève halte après Auschwitz (Seuil 2014), was awarded the Prix du meilleur livre étranger. His most recent book is Another Zionism, Another Judaism. The Unrequited Love of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis. A revised version of the 1996 book on Israel will be published by Other Press NY in 2026 as Israel, a Personal History.
Susan Neiman, who lives in Berlin, is Director of the Einstein Forum. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard, completing her Ph.D. under John Rawls and Stanley Cavell. She also studied at the Freie Universität Berlin, and was professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University. Her books, translated into many languages, include Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Evil in Modern Thought, Fremde sehen anders, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists, Why Grow Up?, Widerstand der Vernunft. Ein Manifest in postfaktischen Zeiten, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, and Left is not Woke. She has also published over one hundred essays in many newspapers, magazines and journals. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
© Ruthe-Zuntz
Elad Lapidot is professor for Culture Studies at the University of Lille, France. He specializes in philosophy, Jewish thought and Talmud and was teaching at the University of Bern, Switzerland, the Humboldt Universität Berlin and the Freie Univeristät Berlin. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation with introduction and commentary of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 1 (Resling, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logiqe de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Zeta Books, 2010).
