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Against the gloomy forecast of "The Vanishing Diaspora", the end of
the second millennium saw the global emergence of a dazzling array
of Jewish cultural initiatives, institutional modalities, and
individual practices. These "Jewish Revival" and "Jewish Renewal"
projects are led by Jewish NGOs and philanthropic organizations,
the Orthodox Teshuva (return to the fold) movement and its
well-known emissary Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, and alternative
cultural initiatives that promote what can be termed "lifestyle
Judaism." This range between institutionalized revival movements
and ephemeral event-driven projects circumscribes a diverse space
of creative agency, which calls for a bottom-up empirical analysis
of cultural creativity and the re-invention of Jewish tradition
worldwide. Indeed, the trope of a "Jewish Renaissance" has become
both a descriptive category of an increasingly popular and
scholarly discourse across the globe, and a prescriptive model for
social action. This volume explores the global transformations of
contemporary Jewishness, which give renewed meaning to identity,
tradition, and politics in our post secular world.
"Dreaming of Michelangelo" is the first book-length study to
explore the intellectual and cultural affinities between modern
Judaism and the life and work of Michelangelo Buonarroti. It argues
that Jewish intellectuals found themselves in the image of
Michelangelo as an unrequited lover whose work expressed loneliness
and a longing for humanity's response. The modern Jewish
imagination thus became consciously idolatrous. Writers brought to
lifeOColiterallyOCoMichelangelo's sculptures, seeing in them their
own worldly and emotional struggles. The Moses statue in particular
became an archetype of Jewish liberation politics as well as a
central focus of Jewish aesthetics. And such affinities extended
beyond sculpture: Jewish visitors to the Sistine Chapel
reinterpreted the ceiling as a manifesto of prophetic socialism,
devoid of its Christian elements. According to Biemann, the
phenomenon of Jewish self-recognition in Michelangelo's work
offered an alternative to the failed promises of the German
enlightenment. Through this unexpected discovery, he rethinks
German Jewish history and its connections to Italy, the
Mediterranean, and the art of the Renaissance.
Against the gloomy forecast of "The Vanishing Diaspora", the end of
the second millennium saw the global emergence of a dazzling array
of Jewish cultural initiatives, institutional modalities, and
individual practices. These "Jewish Revival" and "Jewish Renewal"
projects are led by Jewish NGOs and philanthropic organizations,
the Orthodox Teshuva (return to the fold) movement and its
well-known emissary Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, and alternative
cultural initiatives that promote what can be termed "lifestyle
Judaism." This range between institutionalized revival movements
and ephemeral event-driven projects circumscribes a diverse space
of creative agency, which calls for a bottom-up empirical analysis
of cultural creativity and the re-invention of Jewish tradition
worldwide. Indeed, the trope of a "Jewish Renaissance" has become
both a descriptive category of an increasingly popular and
scholarly discourse across the globe, and a prescriptive model for
social action. This volume explores the global transformations of
contemporary Jewishness, which give renewed meaning to identity,
tradition, and politics in our post secular world.
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