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“Ehrenpreis has faded into history, but Rosenberg here ably revives him as a contrarian voice who speaks to present events…A capably told life of a religious leader who envisioned the whole world as a safe haven for his people.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Never before have Jews so desperately needed alternative visions, ways of imagining that we can flourish without dominating others. By resuscitating Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis, Göran Rosenberg shows how we might envision a different future by reclaiming a lost past. In this dark and shameful time, figures like Ehrenpreis, and authors like Rosenberg, offer a source of light.” —Peter Beinart author of The Crisis of Zionism
“Marcus Ehrenpreis, a long-serving leader of Sweden’s Jewish community, worked for a renaissance of Jewish life during one of the darkest periods of his people’s history. In telling the story of this admirable man, Göran Rosenberg shows that the questions Ehrenpreis grappled with—about Zionism, assimilation, anti-Semitism, and the possibility of a Jewish future in Europe—could not be more relevant today.” —Adam Kirsch, author of The People and the Books and The Blessing and the Curse
“In this powerful, passionate book, Göran Rosenberg rescues Marcus Ehrenpreis from obscurity and places him in the pantheon of great Jewish thinkers and leaders. This is a deeply moving study of the tensions in twentieth-century Europe between Jews and Christians, Zionism and universalism, the love of community and the love of humanity.” —Derek Penslar, author of Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader
“The extraordinary life of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis opens a window to the momentous twentieth century of Jewish history. From Ukraine to the Balkans to Scandinavia, Ehrenpreis was at the forefront of political and intellectual debates. Göran Rosenberg presents a gripping account of his life and a fascinating account of the broad sweep of Jewish history, from the glowing hopes of the late nineteenth century through the horrors of the Holocaust and the passionate disputes over Zionism.” —Susannah Heschel, editor of Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel
“A finely grained, meticulously researched portrait of a twentieth-century communal rabbi who was ever attentive to the Judennot—the ‘distress’ posed to European Jewry by virulent racial antisemitism—but also no less to the Not des Judentums—the ‘distress’ to which Judaism as a spiritual and ethical calling was subject by the pull of ethnic nationalism as a response to the Judennot. Göran Rosenberg deftly presents Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis as exemplifying how modern Jewry may meet the existential challenge of an unyielding commitment to securing the political dignity of Jewry while unwaveringly affirming the spiritual patrimony of Judaism as a prophetic universal voice transcending the limits of national politics and territorial loyalties.” —Paul Mendes-Flohr, author of Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent
“The search for the forgotten precedes the search for the better. Göran Rosenberg’s gripping story of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis’s spiritual and political endeavor in the fateful time of the Jewish state’s establishment is a strong building block for such a future.” —Dan Diner, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem