More in ‘Walter Benjamin’

Four marquee academics—the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, Canadian public intellectual Charles Taylor, social theorist Judith Butler, and religion historian-cum-one-man-show Cornel West—gathered at Manhattan’s Cooper Union yesterday for a panel discussion on “Rethinking Secularism: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.” We caught the second half of the program, when the latter two thinkers spoke. ...

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the Frankfurt School in recent American thought. Philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer—to name just the best-known members of the group—helped to develop a subtle and powerful way of thinking about the problems of modern society. Critical Theory, as it is usually capitalized, adapted the revolutionary impulse of Marxism to 20th-century conditions, in which mass culture and totalitarianism seemed to shut off any real possibility of social transformation. Especially appealing to academics is the way Critical Theory makes the analysis of culture feel like a revolutionary act in and of itself. Reading Adorno on modern music, or Benjamin on literature, it is momentarily possible to believe that criticism is a weapon of liberation, rather than simply a hermetic exercise for intellectuals.

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

In the spring of 1940, Walter Benjamin produced the last and possibly the most influential of his essays, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The great pathos and urgency of the text comes in part from what we know about Benjamin’s circumstances when he wrote it. In 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, ...

Early in 1917, as the Great War dragged into its third year and Germany suffered the food shortages of the so-called “rutabaga winter,” three young Jews struck up a friendship in Berlin. Zalman Rubashov, then twenty-seven years old, was born into a Hasidic family in Russia, but had come to Berlin before the war to ...

It took only 20 minutes before a couple in the third row of Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater meekly stood and snuck out of Shadowtime, Brian Ferneyhough and Charles Bernstein’s “thought opera” about Walter Benjamin. They were not the last to flee. While I’m hardly a Benjamin expert, I doubt he would have made it to ...