Born in Lviv, Ukraine, in 1869, Marcus Ehrenpreis was the secretary of Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, to become the chief rabbi of Sweden through the Nazi era. In his new book, the award-winning Swedish Jewish writer and public intellectual Göran Rosenberg (»A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz«) tells about Ehrenpreis’s Zionism, which was not about making Jews a nation like all others, but creating a spiritual center for the renaissance of Jewish life »amidst the nations.«
Elad Lapidot (Katholische Akademie Berlin) will talk with Rosenberg and with the Berlin-based philosopher and public intellectual Susan Neiman (Einstein Forum, Potsdam) about this story of boundless hope, unrequited love, and annihilated possibilities. »Another Zionism, Another Judaism« evokes a diasporic Jewish existence that would be harshly judged in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel.
Göran Rosenberg, born in 1948, is an acclaimed Swedish writer and journalist, son of Holocaust survivors. His personal history of »Israel, Det förlorade landet«, Bonniers 1996, (»Das verlorene Land. Israel – eine persönliche Geschichte«, Jüdischer Verlag, 1998) was shortlisted for the Swedish August Prize. His childhood memoir, »A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz«, was awarded the 2012 August Prize and has been translated into 13 languages. The French translation, »Une brève halte après Auschwitz« (Seuil 2014), was awarded the Prix du meilleur livre étranger. His most recent book is »Another Zionism, Another Judaism. The Unrequited Love of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis.« A revised version of the 1996 book on Israel will be published by Other Press NY in 2026 as »Israel, a Personal History.«