Description

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Essays on Judaism in the modern world, from philosophy and history to art and politics

In these essays Deutscher speaks of the emotional heritage of the European Jew with a calm clear-sightedness. As a historian he writes without religious belief, but with a generous breadth of understanding; as a philosopher he writes of some of the great Jews of Europe: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Freud. He explores the Jewish imagination through the painter Chagall. He writes of the Jews under Stalin and of the “remnants of a race“ after Hitler, as well as of the Zionist ideal, of the establishment of the state of Israel, of the Six-Day War, and of the perils ahead.

About the Author

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Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) was born near Kraków and joined the Polish Communist Party, from which he was expelled in 1932. His books include Stalin and the Unfinished Revolution and a three-part biography of Trotsky hailed by Graham Greene as “among the greatest biographies in the English language.”

Praise For…

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“Deutscher is an exceedingly vivid writer with a sense of style.”
—Times Literary Supplement