Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme - Hardcover

Biemann, Asher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804768811 ISBN 13: 9780804768818

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Dreaming of Michelangelo is the first book-length study to explore the intellectual and cultural affinities between modern Judaism, Italy, and the life and work of Michelangelo Buonarroti.

About this title

Review:

"Dreaming of Michelangelo obliges the reader to rethink the important questions of the relationship between Deutschtum and Judentum, Judaism and Hellenism, Jewish criticism of idolatry, Jewith ethics, and religion."--Irene Kajon "University of Rome "

"Beautifully written and richly textured with readings of original sources, this meditation depicts the encounter of the Jewish imagination with Italy and Michelangelo--unrequited lover, sculptor of living form, painter of humanity's original image, and desired other of Jewish cultural Eros . . . Biemann's analysis of the German-Jewish affinity for Italy and Michelangelo through the dynamic of cultural eroticism deepens our understanding of Jewish selfhood during these crucial years and reveals to us how German-Jewish love and dreaming are not mere forms of escapism or fantasy but rather the means for self-creation and even self-empowerment."--Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich

"Biemann breaks ground on the new interest in Jewish aesthetics in the context of German Jewish culture and German aesthetic thought . . . Dreaming of Michelangelo recommends itself as a go-to book in the field of modern Jewish Studies as it relates to art, German Jewish culture, and Jewish philosophical aesthetics."--Zachary Braiterman "Images: Journal of Jewish Art & Visual Culture "

"Asher Biemann's Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme engages the intellectual history of the modern Jewish experience in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Europe . . . [T]hrough a study of the German-Jewish experience of Italy, Dreaming of Michelangelo provides a powerful and compelling example of how an engagement with aesthetics can and should be the work of twenty-first-century Jewish thought."--Benjamin E. Sax "Partial Answers "

"[The Jewish/Modern Michelangelo] provides the subject of this thoughtful, dense, and extended essay. Its main focus, modern Jewish thinkers and writers, is viewed through a very specific, possibly surprising lens: Michelangelo and Renaissance Italy . . . This stimulating and pensive book is not merely a tenure document or converted dissertation but rather a different kind of scholarly engagement with both elements of its equation, Michelangelo as well as Moses."--Larry Silver

"Biemann takes the reader into the vibrant intellectual worlds of the generations of Jews in the German-speaking orbit for whom the encounter with Michelangelo, with Italy, and with classical art proved constitutive of their experience of modernity and sometimes Jewishness as well."--Jonathan Hess "University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "

"Dreaming of Michelangelo is a masterpiece of original scholarship . . . Enhanced with extensive notes and a comprehensive index, Dreaming of Michelangelo is a very highly recommended addition to academic library Judaic Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists."--James A. Cox "The Midwest Book Review "

"Asher Biemann presents a very creative and productive lens for re-examining the entry into modernity by Western European Jews."--Richard Block "University of Washington "

About the Author:

Asher D. Biemann is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Stanford has also published his Inventing New Beginnings (2009).

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0804768811
• ISBN 13: 9780804768818
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200