About this item
What is it like to travel to Berlin today, particularly as a Jew, and bring with you the baggage of history? And what happens when an American Jew, raised by a secular family, falls in love with Berlin not in spite of his being a Jew but because of it? The answer is Berlin for Jews. Part history and part travel companion, Leonard Barkan's personal love letter to the city shows how its long Jewish heritage, despite the atrocities of the Nazi era, has left an inspiring imprint on the vibrant metropolis of today. Barkan, voraciously curious and witty, offers a self-deprecating guide to the history of Jewish life in Berlin, revealing how, beginning in the early nineteenth century, Jews became prominent in the arts, the sciences, and the city's public life.
About the Author
Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature along with appointments in the Departments of Art and Archaeology, English, and Classics. He has been a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and N.Y.U. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (Yale, 1986) and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (Yale, 1999) , which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association,Architectural Digest, and Phi Beta Kappa. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been an actor and a director; he is also a regular contributor to publications in both the U.S. and Italy on the subject of food and wine.He is the author of Satyr Square (Farrar, Straus, 2006; pbk Northwestern, 2008) , which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. In recent years, he has published Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, 2010) , which treats the artist's creative and inner life by considering his constant habit of writing words on his drawings, and Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures(Princeton, 2012) , an essay about the intersecting worlds of artists and writers from Plato and Praxiteles to Shakespeare and Rembrandt. During 2014-15 he was the Rudolf Arnheim Gastprofessur at the Institut für Kunst und Bildgeschichte at the Humboldt University, and he spent a month as a Visiting Professor at Harvard's I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. During the sabbatical year, he completed Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2016. Having delivered the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome in 2011 on the subject of food culture and high culture from antiquity to the Renaissance, he is now completing a book-length version of that subject to be entitled Reading for the Food: Art, Literature, and the Hungry Eye.
