About this item
Equal parts biographical puzzle, architectural meditation, and probing detective story, Adina Hoffman's Till We Have Built Jerusalem offers a prismatic view into one of the world's most beloved and troubled cities. Panoramic yet intimate, this portrait of three architects who helped build modern Jerusalem is also a gripping exploration of the ways in which politics and aesthetics clash in a place of constant conflict. The book opens with the arrival in 1930s Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn, who, as a refugee from Hitler's Germany, has to reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next we meet Austen St. Barbe Harrison, Palestine's chief government architect from 1922 to 1937. Steeped in the traditions of Byzantine and Islamic building, he's forced to work in the often stifling and violent context of British rule.
About the Author
Essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman writes often of the Middle East, approaching it from unusual angles and shedding light on overlooked dimensions of the place, its people, and their cultures. She is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century. A biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, My Happiness was named one of the best twenty books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review and won the UK's 2010 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. She is also the author, with Peter Cole, of Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which was awarded the American Library Association's Brody Medal for the Jewish Book of the Year. In 2016, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published her Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, which the Los Angeles Times called "brave and often beautiful" and Haaretz described as "a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be." Her Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures has recently been released by Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series. Writing in the New Yorker, David Denby called it "superb," and said that Hoffman "writes with enormous flair," while Booklist, in a starred review, dubbed it "electrifying."Hoffman's essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, the TLS, Raritan, Bookforum, the Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Tin House, and on the World Service of the BBC. She is formerly a film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post. The recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the Windham Campbell prize, she lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.Author website: www.ibiseditions.com/adinahoffman
