Category:Religious belief and doctrine

Region	Western Philosophers
Era	20th-century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Image name	benjamin-sm.jpg
Name	Walter Benjamin
Birth date	July 15, 1892
Birth place	Berlin, German Empire
Death date	September 27, 1940
Death place	Portbou, Catalonia, Spain
School tradition	Western Marxism, Frankfurt School
Main interests	Literary theory, Aesthetics, Technology, Epistemology, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of history
Influences	AdornoBachofenBaudelaireBrechtKierkegaardLukácsMarxNietzscheProustSchmittScholem
Influenced	AdornoAgambenArendtBaudrillardDerridaMerquiorScholemSontagTaussig

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (, 15 July 1892 – 27 September 1940) was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. His work, combining elements of historical materialism, German idealism and Jewish mysticism, has made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. As a literary critic, among his major works are essays on J.W. Goethe's novel Elective Affinities; the work of Franz Kafka; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation, alienation). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism.

Influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Walter Benjamin coined the term “auratic perception”, denoting the aesthetic faculty by means of which civilization may recover an appreciation of myth. Benjamin's work is often cited in academic and literary studies, especially the essays "The Task of the Translator" (1923) and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936).

Life

Walter Benjamin and his younger brother, Georg (1895–1942), and younger sister, Dora (1901–46), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Jews in the Berlin of the German Empire (1871–1918). The patriarch, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who relocated from France to Germany, where he worked as an antiques trader in Berlin; he later married Pauline Schönflies. In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled to the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. Personally, Walter Benjamin was a boy of fragile health, so, in 1905, the family sent him to boarding school in the Thuringian countryside, for two years; in 1907, returned to Berlin, his schooling resumed at the Kaiser Friedrich School.

In 1912, at the age of twenty, he enrolled at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, but, at summer semester's end, returned to Berlin, then matriculated into the Humboldt University of Berlin, to continue studying philosophy. Elected president of the Freie Studentenschaft (Free Students Association), Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change. When not re-elected as student association president, he returned to Freiburg University, and studied, with particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert; in that time he travelled to France and Italy.

In 1914, as Germany and France fought each other in the First World War (1914–18), the intellectual Walter Benjamin began faithfully translating the works of the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67). The next year, 1915, he moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Gershom Scholem; the latter became a friend. In that year, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843).

In 1917 he transferred to the University of Bern; there, he met Ernst Bloch, and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner) (1890–1964), whom he later married, and they had a son, Stefan Rafael (1918–72). In 1919 Benjamin earned his doctoral degree cum laude with the dissertation essay Begriff der Kunstkritik in der Deutschen Romantik (The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism). Later, unable to support himself and family, the Benjamins returned to Berlin, and resided with his parents; in 1921, he published the essay Kritik der Gewalt (The Critique of Violence).

In 1923, when the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) was founded, and later became home to the Frankfurt School, he published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens. In that time he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács, whose The Theory of the Novel (1920) much influenced him. Meanwhile, the inflation in the Weimar Republic, consequent to the First World War, made it difficult for the businessman Emil Benjamin to continue supporting his intellectual son's family, Walter, Dora, and Stefan. At year's end of 1923, his best friend, Gershom Scholem, emigrated to Palestine, a country ruled under the British Mandate of Palestine; despite repeated invitations, he failed to persuade Walter Benjamin (and family) to leave the Continent for the Middle East.

In 1924, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, in the Neue Deutsche Beiträge magazine, published Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe’s Elective Affinities), by Walter Benjamin, about Goethe’s third novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). Later that year, Benjamin and Ernst Bloch resided in the Italian island of Capri; Benjamin wrote Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel (The Origin of German Tragic Drama), as an habilitation dissertation meant to qualify him as a university instructor in Germany. He also read, at Bloch’s suggestion, History and Class Consciousness (1923), by Georg Lukács. In the event, he also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis, then residing in Moscow; she became his lover and was a lasting intellectual influence upon him.

A year later, in 1925, the Goethe University Frankfurt, at Franfurt am main, rejected The Origin of German Tragic Drama as Benjamin’s qualification for the habilitation teaching credential; he was not to be an academic instructor. Working with Franz Hessel (1880–1941), he translated the first volumes of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), by Marcel Proust. The next year, 1926, he began writing for the German newspapers Frankfurter Zeitung (The Frankfurt Times) and Die Literarische Welt (The Literary World), that paid enough for him to reside in Paris for some months. In December 1926 (the year his father, Emil Benjamin, died), Walter Benjamin went to Moscow to meet Asja Lācis, and found her ill, in a sanatorium.

In 1927, he began Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project), his incompleted magnum opus, a study of 19th-century Parisian life. The same year, he saw Gershom Scholem in Berlin, for the last time, and considered emigrating from Continental Europe (Germany) to Palestine. In 1928, he and Dora separated, then divorced two years later, in 1930; he published Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street), and a revision of his habilitation dissertation Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama). In 1929 Berlin, Asja Lācis, then assistant to Bertolt Brecht, socially presented the intellectuals to each other. In that time, he also briefly embarked upon an academic career, as an instructor at the University of Heidelberg.

In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler’s assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany, Walter Benjamin left Germany for the Spanish island of Ibiza, there residing some months; he then moved to Nice, where he considered killing himself. Perceiving the socio-political and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) as the de facto Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews, he moved to Paris, but, before doing so, he sought shelter in Svendborg, at Bertold Brecht's house, and at Sanremo, where his ex-wife Dora lived.

As he ran out of money, Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkheimer, and received funds from the Institute for Social Research, then relocated from Germany to the US, at Columbia University, in New York City, New York. In Paris, he met other German artists and intellectuals refuged there from Germany; he befriended Hannah Arendt, novelist Hermann Hesse, and composer Kurt Weill. In 1936, L'Œuvre d'Art à l'Époque de sa Reproductibilité Technique (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) was first published, in French, by Max Horkheimer in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung journal of the Institute for Social Research.

In 1937 Benjamin worked on Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted the Arcades Project manuscript), and joined the College of Sociology. In 1938 he paid a last visit to Bertolt Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. Meanwhile, the Nazi Régime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, the French government arrested and for three months incarcerated Walter Benjamin in a prison camp near Nevers, in central Burgundy.

Returning to Paris in January 1940, he wrote Über den Begriff der Geschichte (Theses on the Philosophy of History). As the Wehrmacht defeated the French defence, on 13 June, Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to the town of Lourdes, just a day before the Germans entered Paris (14 June 1940), with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the US, that Max Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo, Benjamin planned to travel to the US from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach by traversing Gen. Franco’s fascist Spain, then ostensibly a neutral country.

The historical record indicates he safely crossed the French-Spanish border and arrived at the coastal town of Portbou, in Catalonia. Yet, the Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and ordered the Spanish police to return such persons to France, including the Jewish refugee group Benjamin had joined. Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Walter Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets on the night of 27 September 1940, yet the official Portbou register records 26 September 1940 as the official date of death.

Works

The most important of Walter Benjamin’s works are:

Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique of Violence, 1921).

Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe’s Elective Affinities, 1922).

Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928).

Einbahnstraße (One Way Street, 1928).

Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936).

Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900, 1950).

Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History / Theses on the Philosophy of History), 1939).

Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, 1938).

's 1920 painting Angelus Novus, which Benjamin compared to "the angel of history"]] Walter Benjamin corresponded much with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer, even from their New York City residence. The competing influences — Brecht’s Marxism, Adorno’s critical theory, Gerschom Scholem’s Jewish mysticism — were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover, the critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin’s writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplar synthesis is "On the Concept of History" (Theses on the Philosophy of History).

The ninth thesis in the essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” presents:

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

The Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928), is the theoretic and empirical analysis of German politics and culture during the Counter-Reformation (1545–1648), via the critical study of the 18th-century theatrical Trauerspiel (Bürgerliches Trauerspiel, Bourgeois Tragedy) genre, that Walter Benjamin in 1925 presented to the University of Frankfurt as the (post-doctoral) dissertation meant to earn him the Habilitation (qualification) to become a university instructor in Germany.

In the changing political climate of German society in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin expected that the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928) would culturally relate to the German belief in political and historical progress, by demonstrating the intellectual futility of raw historicism, and, like-wise, demonstrating that in the Trauerspiel the resuscitation of historical object and fact is infeasible. In the event, the abstruse (theoretically complex and referentially obscure) dissertation proved inaccessible to its academic judges when submitted for earning the Habilitation for Benjamin to be officially granted venia legendi (permission for lecturing).

Professor Schultz of University of Frankfurt found The Origin of German Tragic Drama inappropriate for his Germanistik department (of German Language and Literature), and passed it to the department of æsthetics (philosophy of art), the readers of which department likewise dismissed Benjamin's dissertation. In the event, in 1925, the University (among them Max Horkheimer) recommended to Walter Benjamin that he withdraw Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as a Habilitation dissertation, and avoid formal rejection and concomitant public embarrassment; he heeded the advice, and three years later, in 1928, he published The Origin of German Tragic Drama as a book.

The Arcades Project

The Passagenwerk (Arcades Project, 1927–40), was Walter Benjamin’s final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century, especially about the Passages couverts de Paris the covered passages that extended the culture of flânerie (idling and people-watching) when inclement weather made flânerie infeasible in the boulevards and streets proper.

Writing style

Susan Sontag said that in Walter Benjamin’s writing, sentences did not originate ordinarily, do not progress into one another, and delineate no obvious line of reasoning, as if each sentence “had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes”, a “freeze-frame baroque” style of writing and cogitation. “His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct”. The difficulty of Benjamin's writing style is essential to his philosophical project. Fascinated by notions of reference and constellation, his goal in later works was to use intertexts to reveal aspects of the past that cannot, and should not, be understood within greater, monolithic constructs of historical understanding.

Walter Benjamin’s writings identify him as a modernist for whom the philosophic merges with the literary: logical philosophic reasoning cannot account for all experience, especially not for self-representation via art. He presented his stylistic concerns in The Task of the Translator, wherein he posits that a literary translation, by definition, produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original text. Moreover, in the deformed text, otherwise hidden aspects of the original, source-language text are elucidated, while previously obvious aspects become unreadable. Such translational mortification of the source text is productive; when placed in a specific constellation of works and ideas, newly revealed affinities, between historical objects, appear and are productive of philosophical truth.

Death

Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the Spanish-French border while attempting to escape from the Nazis. The party he was with were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France, which would have hampered Benjamin's plans to get to the United States. While staying in the Hotel de Francia, he apparently took some morphine pills and died on the night of 27/28 September 1940.

Yet the circumstances of his death remain obscure. It has been recently suggested by journalist Stephen Schwartz that Benjamin was murdered by Joseph Stalin's secret police.

The fact that he was buried in the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic cemetery would indicate that his death was not announced as a suicide. The other persons in his party were allowed passage the next day, and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. A manuscript of Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" was passed to Theodor Adorno by Hannah Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, and was subsequently published by the Institute for Social Research (temporarily relocated to New York) in 1942.

A completed manuscript, which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase, disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. Some critics speculate that it was his Arcades Project in a final form; this is very unlikely as the author's plans for the work had changed in the wake of Adorno's criticisms in 1938, and it seems clear that the work was flowing over its containing limits in his last years. As the last finished piece of work from Benjamin, the Theses on the Philosophy of History (noted above) is often cited; Adorno claimed this had been written in the spring of 1940, weeks before the Germans invaded France.

While this is not completely certain, it is clearly one of his last works, and the final paragraph, about the Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a harrowing final point to Benjamin's work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight between humanity and nihilism. He brings up the interdiction, in some varieties of Judaism, to try to determine the year when the Messiah would come into the world, and points out that this did not make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."

Legacy

Since the publication of Schriften (Writings, 1955), fifteen years after his death, the work of Walter Benjamin, especially the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), is of seminal importance to academics in the humanities disciplines.

See also

Gertrud Kolmar

Angelus Novus

References

Further reading

Primary literature

The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-00802-2

''Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-02222-X

Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet In The Era Of High Capitalism. ISBN 0-902308-94-7

The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-15427-4

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940. ISBN 0-226-04237-5

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. ISBN 0-674-17415-1

Illuminations. ISBN 0-8052-0241-2

Moscow Diary, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-58744-8

One Way Street and Other Writings. ISBN 0-86091-836-X

Reflections. ISBN 0-8052-0802-X

On Hashish, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-02221-1

The Origin of German Tragic Drama. ISBN 0-86091-837-8

Understanding Brecht. ISBN 0-902308-99-8

Selected Writings in four volumes Harvard University Press:

* Volume 1, 1913-1926, ISBN 0-674-94585-9

* Volume 2, 1927-1934, ISBN 0-674-94586-7

* Volume 3, 1935-1938, ISBN 0-674-00896-0

* Volume 4, 1938-1940, ISBN 0-674-01076-0

The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-02287-4,

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-02445-1

Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs. Edited by Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla. ISBN 978-1-84467-196-0

Secondary literature

Adorno, Theodor. (1967). Prisms (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought). London: Neville Spearman Ltd. [reprinted by MIT Press, Cambridge, 1981. 10-ISBN 0-262-01064-X; 13-ISBN 978-0-262-01064-1 (cloth) -- 10-ISBN 0-262-51025-1; 13-ISBN 978-0-262-51025-7 (paper)]

Victor Malsey, Uwe Raseh, Peter Rautmann, Nicolas Schalz, Rosi Huhn, Passages. D'après Walter Benjamin / Passagen. Nach Walter Benjamin. Mainz: Herman Schmidt, 1992. ISBN 3-87439-251-1

Benjamin, Andrew and Peter Osborne, eds. (1993). Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience. London: Routledge. 10-ISBN 0-415-08368-0; 13-ISBN 978-0-415-08368-3 (cloth) -- ISBN 0-415-08369-9; 13-ISBN 978-0-415-08369-0 (paper) [reprinted by Clinamen Press, Manchester, 2000. 10-ISBN 1-903083-08-7; 13-ISBN 978-1-903083-08-6 (paper)]

Buck-Morss, Susan. (1991). The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 10-ISBN 0-262-02268-0; 13-ISBN 978-0-262-02268-2 (cloth) -- 10-ISBN 0-262-52164-4; 13-ISBN 978-0-262-52164-2 (paper)

Betancourt, Alex. (2008). Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud: Between Theory and Politics. Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8364-3854-4

Derrida, Jacques. (2001). "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority'," in Acts of Religion, Gil Anidjar, ed. London: Routledge. 10-ISBN 0-415-92400-6; 13-ISBN 978-0-415-92400-9 (cloth) -- 10-ISBN 0-415-92401-4; 13-ISBN 978-0-415-92401-6

de Man, Paul. (1986). "'Conclusions': Walter Benjamin's 'Task of the Translator'," in The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 73-105. 10-ISBN 0-8166-1294-3

Ferris, David S., ed. (1996). Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 10-ISBN 0-8047-2569-1; 13-ISBN 978-0-8047-2569-9 (cloth) -- 10-ISBN 0-8047-2570-5; 13-ISBN 978-0-8047-2570-5 (paper)

__________. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10-ISBN 0-521-79329-7 (cloth) 10-ISBN 0-521-79724-1 (paper)

Jacobs, Carol. (1999). In the Language of Walter Benjamin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. 10-ISBN 0-8018-6031-8; 13-ISBN 978-0-8018-6031-7 (cloth) -- 10-ISBN 0-8018-6669-3; 13-ISBN 978-0-8018-6669-2 (paper)

Jennings, Michael. (1987). Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 10-ISBN 0-8014-2006-7; 13-ISBN 978-0-8014-2006-1 (cloth)

Jacobson, Eric. (2003). Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0231126571, S. 352ff.

Kermode, Frank. "Every Kind of Intelligence; Benjamin," New York Times. 30 July 1978.

Kirst-Gundersen, Karoline. Walter Benjamin's Theory of Narrative. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989

Leslie, Esther. (2000). Walter Benjamin, Overpowering Conformism. London: Pluto Press. 10-ISBN 0-7453-1573-9; 13-ISBN 978-0-7453-1573-7 (cloth) -- 10-ISBN 0-7453-1568-2; 13-ISBN 978-0-7453-1568-3 (paper)

Lindner, Burkhardt, ed. (2006). Benjamin-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung Stuttgart: Metzler. 10-ISBN 3-476-01985-3; 13-ISBN 978-3-476-01985-1 (paper)

Menke, Bettine. (2010). Das Trauerspiel-Buch. Der Souverän – das Trauerspiel – Konstellationen – Ruinen. Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag. 10-ISBN 978-3-89942-634-2.

Missac, Pierre (1996). Walter Benjamin's Passages. Cambridge: MIT Press. 19-ISBN 0-262-13305-9; 13-ISBN 978-0-262-13305-0 (cloth) -- 10-ISBN 0-262-63175-X; 13-ISBN 978-0-262-63175-4(paper)

Perret, Catherine "Walter Benjamin sans destin", Ed. La Différence, Paris, 1992, rééd. revue et augmentée d'une préface, Bruxelles, éd. La Lettre volée, 2007.

Perrier, Florent, ed., Palmier, Jean-Michel (Author), Marc Jimenez (Preface). (2006) Walter Benjamin. Le chiffonnier, l'Ange et le Petit Bossu. Paris: Klincksieck. 10-ISBN 2-252-03591-9; 13-ISBN 978-2-252-03591-7

Pignotti, Sandro (2009): Walter Benjamin - Judentum und Literatur. Tradition, Ursprung, Lehre mit einer kurzen Geschichte des Zionismus. Rombach, Freiburg ISBN 978-3-7930-9547-7

Plate, S. Brent (2004) Walter Benjamin, Religion and Aesthetics. London: Routledge. 13-ISBN 978-0-415-96992-5

Roberts, Julian (1982). Walter Benjamin. London: Macmillan.

Rudel, Tilla (2006) : Walter Benjamin L’Ange assassiné, éd. Menges - Place Des Victoires, 2006

Scheurmann, Ingrid, ed., Scheurmann, Konrad ed., Unseld, Siegfried (Author), Menninghaus, Winfried (Author), Timothy Nevill (Translator) (1993). For Walter Benjamin - Documentation, Essays and a Sketch including: New Documents on Walter Benjamin's Death. Bonn: AsKI e.V. 10-ISBN 3-930370-00-X

Scheurmann, Ingrid / Scheurmann, Konrad (1995). Dani Karavan - Hommage an Walter Benjamin. Der Gedenkort 'Passagen' in Portbou. Homage to Walter Benjamin. 'Passages' Place of Remembrance at Portbou. Mainz: Zabern. 10-ISBN 3-8053-1865-0

Scheurmann, Konrad (1994) Passages Dani Karavan: An Environment in Remembrance of Walter Benjamin Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Bonn: AsKI e.V. 10-ISBN 3-930370-01-8

Schiavoni, Giulio. (2001). Walter Benjamin: Il figlio della felicità. Un percorso biografico e concettuale. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore. ISBN 88-06-15729-9

Scholem, Gershom. (2003). Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: New York Review Books. 10-ISBN 1-59017-032-6

Steinberg, Michael P., ed. (1996). Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 10-ISBN 0-8014-3135-2; 13-ISBN 978-0-8014-3135-7 (cloth) -- 10-ISBN 0-8014-8257-7; 13-ISBN 978-0-8014-8257-1 (paper)

Weber, Samuel. (2008). Benjamin's -abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 10-ISBN 0-674-02837-6 (cloth) -- 10-ISBN 0-674-04606-4 (paper)

Witte, Bernd. (1996). Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Verso. 10-ISBN 1-85984-967-9; 13-ISBN 978-1-85984-967-5

Wizisla, Erdmut. 2009. Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht — The Story of a Friendship. Translated by Christine Shuttleworth. London / New Haven: Libris / Yale University Press. ISBN 1-870352-78-5. ISBN 978-1-870352-78-9 [Contains a complete translation of the newly discovered Minutes of the meetings around the putative journal Krise und Kritik (1931)].

Wolin, Richard, Telos 43, An Aesthetic of Redemption: Benjamin's Path to Trauerspiel. New York: Telos Press Ltd., Spring 1980. (Telos Press).

Wolin, Richard, Telos 53, The Benjamin-Congress: Frankfurt (July 13, 1982). New York: Telos Press Ltd., Fall 1982. (Telos Press).

External links

The Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft. In English and German. (Defunct)

Walter Benjamin at Marxists.org

Fragments of the Passagenwerk: The Arcades Project, Giles Peaker

Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline Translated by Scott J. Thompson, copyright March 25, 1997

From 'Rausch' to Rebellion An introductory essay by Scott J. Thompson

Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle In French

Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate

"Walter Benjamin for Historians", American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 5. December 2001.

Who Killed Walter Benjamin?, a documentary film about the circumstances of Benjamin's death by David Mauas

The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin, Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard, Volume 006, Issue 37, 11 June 2001

Through the Trapdoor: review of The Narrow Foothold by Carina Birman describes Benjamin's final days

The Arcades Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext, Heather Marcelle Crickenberger

The Dialectics of Allegoresis: Historical Materialism in Benjamin's Illuminations, John Parker

Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project - The Passagenwerk

Category:1892 births Category:1940 deaths Category:People from Berlin Category:20th-century philosophers Category:Philosophers of language Category:Continental philosophers Category:Frankfurt School Category:German philosophers Category:Jewish philosophers Category:German-language philosophers Category:German Jews Category:German literary critics Category:Literary critics Category:Marxist theorists Category:Political philosophers Category:German Marxists Category:Marxist writers Category:Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni Category:University of Freiburg alumni Category:Humboldt University of Berlin alumni Category:Bibliophiles Category:Book and manuscript collectors Category:Translation scholars Category:People from the Province of Brandenburg Category:German Literary theorists Category:Urban theorists

Shmuley Boteach (born November 19, 1966) is an American Orthodox non-pulpit rabbi, radio and television host, and author.

Early years

Born in Los Angeles, California, Boteach grew up there and in Miami Beach, Florida. Boteach's father is an Iranian Jew from Isfahan.

Career

Boteach received his rabbinic ordination in 1988 from the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement in New York City, as a disciple of its leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. In 1988, Boteach was sent as a Chabad-Lubavitch shaliach (emissary) to become its representative for a student group at Oxford in England, where he founded the L'Chaim Society.

He is the uncle of convicted arms dealer Efraim Diveroli.

Works

DVD's

"Kosher Sex," 2010

Books

"The Blessings of Enough:Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger," 2010

"The Michael Jackson Tapes," 2009

The Broken American Male: And How to Fix Him, 2008

The Kosher Sutra, 2009

Parenting with Fire: Lighting up the Family With Passion and Inspiration, 2006

10 Conversations You Need to Have With Your Children, 2006

Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex, 2005

Face Your Fear: Living with Courage in an Age of Caution, 2004

The Private Adam: Becoming a Hero in a Selfish Age, 2003

Judaism For Everyone: Renewing Your Life Through the Vibrant Lessons of the Jewish Faith, 2002

Kosher Adultery: Seduce and Sin with your Spouse, 2002

Why Can’t I Fall in Love: A 12-Step Program, 2001

The Psychic and the Rabbi: A Remarkable Correspondence., 2001

Confessions of a Psychic and a Rabbi, 2000

Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments, 2000

Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy, 1999

Moses of Oxford: A Jewish Vision of a University and Its Life, Volume One and Two, 1994

Dreams, 1991

Television and radio

'The Rabbi Shmuley Show,' aired on XM channel 156.

Shalom in the Home

References

External links

Official website

YouTube channel

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Robert Eisenman is an American Biblical scholar, writer, historian, archaeologist, and "road" poet who led the campaign to free up access to the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1980s and 90s, and, as a result of this campaign, is widely known for a unique theory that combines "Essenes" with Palestinian Messianism (or what some might refer to as "Palestinian Christianity") - a theory opposed to establishment or "consensus" scholarship. He is also well known for his work in the field of Christian Origins and, in a general way, introducing the public to the character known as "James the brother of Jesus." Before this, Eisenman spent five years "on the road," as it were, in the USA, Europe, and the Middle East as far as India, encapsulating all these things in his poetic travel Diario (1959–62), published in 2007 by North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California and called The New Jerusalem, in which he describes the San Francisco "Beat" scene in 1958-59, Paris when still a "Moveable Feast," working on kibbutzim in Israel, the Peace Corps, and several voyages on the overland route to India. Eisenman received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1958, an M.A. from New York University in 1966, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971.

Current position

He is Professor of Middle East Religions, Archaeology, and Islamic Law and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian and Islamic Origins at California State University Long Beach. Also, he is Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford University, and was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (American Schools of Oriental Research) in Jerusalem.

Education

Eisenman (like Thomas Pynchon ) majored for two and a half years in Engineering Physics (a course theoretically which was to prepare students to enter nuclear physics), graduated from Cornell University in Physics and Philosophy in 1958.

He received an M.A. Degree in Hebrew and Near Eastern Studies with Abraham Katsh from New York University in 1966.

He received a Ph.D. Degree from Columbia University in Middle East Languages and Cultures in 1971 with a Minor in Jewish Studies and a Major in Islamic Law where he studied with Joseph Schacht.

He is a Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, Oxford University, 1979–Present.

He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the American Schools of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, Israel, 1985–86 and, in 1986-87, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Oxford, England.

Early life

Eisenman, like his brother, Deconstructionist architect Peter Eisenman - best known for his design of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Visitor’s Center at Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and the Arizona Cardinal Football Stadium - and second cousin, architect Richard Meier, went to Columbia High School (New Jersey) in Maplewood/South Orange, New Jersey, but he skipped his Senior Year to take up an acceptance in the Engineering Physics Department at Cornell University, which knew such famous personages as Hans Bethe and Philip Morrison and such sometime participants as Thomas Pynchon '59 and John Bierhorst '58 (the translator of Native American Literature). But Eisenman moved in his Junior Year first to Philosophy to study with Max Black and then on to Comparative Literature (John Senior), and then back to Philosophy to graduate in 1958 with a major in Aesthetics and a minor in Physics. He was a participant in the demonstrations, documented in Pynchon’s tribute to Richard Farina, which took place during Senior Week, 1958, anticipating those a decade later at UC Berkeley and Columbia, while he was a doctoral student there and to which he was also, curiously enough, a witness, but not this time a participant.

On the road internationally (1958-63)

Eisenman left college and immediately took to the road (it was the time of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road published the previous year 1957), but now not nationally, internationally. People who knew him then say he was the first to introduce American tennis shoes - substitutes for his college "white bucs" - as white walking shoes to Europe (see the picture at right) and the first American “backpacker” they ever saw (Australians, New Zealanders, and assorted Europeans had been doing it earlier).

Stopping in Paris, he spent the Fall in Alt Aussee in Austria (where Theodore Herzl had spent his summers sixty years before); and from there down to Vienna, Greece, Athens, and ultimately Hydra Island, where he was entertained by the Norwegian writer and poet Axel Jensen and his wife Marianne (later immortalized by Leonard Cohen in his song “So Long, Marianne”).

Having been accepted for graduate study in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, Eisenman returned to the U.S. via Paris and Cape Cod and ultimately went across the country by Greyhound Bus to San Francisco where he found a room on Russian Hill and tested the scene at North Beach. When he finally went across the Bay to register at UC Berkeley, what he saw reminded him so much of Cornell (Bermuda shorts, bobby socks, fraternities/sororities, etc. – this was a decade before the Free Speech Movement there) that he ripped up his computer punch cards right on the Registration line in the Armory and tossed them into a wastepaper basket – a fateful decision.

He then hitchhiked back across the country and returned to what, for him, had already become “a mecca” or “a moveable feast”, Paris. From 1959-60, Eisenman stayed at “the Beat Hotel” where he encountered the likes of William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, et al., but he was not really interested in these sorts of persons or their scene. All this he documents in The New Jerusalem: A Millennium Poetic/Prophetic Travel Diario, 1959-62, published in 2007 and taken directly from the Free verse notebooks he kept during this period, which he in his "Introduction" and his publishers on the back cover both call "an Anti-Beat Manifesto.".

He then went on to Israel and Jerusalem, where he had the epiphany-like experience of encountering his family whom he had previously not known or ever heard of (his great grandfather had gone to Jerusalem at the time of the Turks and was one of the founders of the Bikur Holim Hospital there, while his two oldest sons left him in Istanbul and come directly to America), worked on Kibbutzim in the Galilee (1960-61 - he had previously worked on John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Campaign), and finally went back to join the first Peace Corps Group to go into the field. This, curiously enough, trained at the International House at UC Berkeley, so he was back to where he had started out; but while they went on to meet Kennedy on the White House lawn and to Ghana, he was flown back to New York because, as he saw it, he was on his way to India and the East not Africa.

Resuming his “Passage to India,” he returned to Paris, and then on to kibbutzim in the Galilee again. The next Spring, after staying in monasteries throughout Israel, and a climactic fight with the future Israeli “Peace Pilot” at the California Café in Tel Aviv; Eisenman made the last overland run from Cyprus, across Turkey, Iran, Beluchistan, and Pakistan by bus, train, and boat to India, where he ended his journey as a guest of and sleeping in the Jewish Synagogue of New Delhi, most of whose members were up in the Simla Hill States because it was high summer and monsoon. He returned to Paris over the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea, and across the Mediterranean.

Release of the Dead Sea Scrolls

From about 1986 onwards, Eisenman became the leading figure in the struggle to release and free the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls had been discovered from 1948-56 in several waves, but after a suggestive article by literary critic Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker magazine, editing more or less ground to a halt from about 1959 onwards.

This is not to say the Scrolls were not out. The Israelis had been very forthcoming with the first Scrolls that came into their possession from Cave I. It was the Scrolls from later caves discovered like III-XI, which came in after 1948 and Partition and on-site excavations by persons like Dominican Father Roland de Vaux, which were the problem. In 1985-86, Eisenman, who had written his first book presenting, as he called it, “A New Theory of Qumran Origins” in 1983 and a follow-up on James as Righteous Teacher in 1985, received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem (also known as “the American School’, where Cave I Scrolls had first come in and been photographed in 1947-48.

Ostensibly he was to work on a project Comparing the Jerusalem Community of James the Just to the Community at Qumran, but while at the American Schools of Oriental Research (then the Albright Institute) he found that there was nothing he could do – all paths being barred to him. Notwithstanding, he and a colleague, Philip Davies of Sheffield University, England, went in to see one of the curators of the Shrine of the Book and were told uncategorically, “You will not see the Scrolls in your lifetime.” Subsequently he came into possession of the complete computer print-out of all the Scrolls in possession of the Israel Antiquities Authority, both those before 1967 and those afterwards at the Rockefeller Museum and, not three years later, a complete photographic archive of all previously unpublished materials from Cave IV all the way up to Cave XI.

He sent a copy of this computer-generated print-out to the Editor of "Biblical Archaeology Review," Hershel Shanks. which created a huge stir in the office and the campaign to free the Scrolls really began in earnest.

During his stay at Oxford University as a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and a Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College in 1986-87, a colleague had also passed him a xerox copy of MMT, a document which had been talked about but which no one outside the inner circle had ever been allowed to see. This, too, he freely shared with anyone who wanted to see it as part of the campaign, and, thereafter, it made the rounds.

At this time, too, he brought Prof. James Robinson – a colleague of his at Claremont University and the Editor of the Nag Hammadi Codices (a dispute similar to the Qumran one) – into the mix and together they took the decision to publish all the unpublished photographs. This amounted to 1785 plates. The original publication (in microfiche form) was supposed to occur in April, 1991 through EJ Brill in Leiden, Holland.

However, a few weeks before publication, Brill's representative had attended a Scrolls Conference in Madrid, Spain and mistook the uproar there over Prof. Kapera’s publication the year before in Poland of the samizat copy of MMT he had received from Prof. Davies for a dispute over freedom of access to the Scrolls generally. Following this, newly-appointed Israeli representatives came to Leiden and talked the Brill publishers out of the Eisenman/Robinson microfiche project and into a newly-conceived one of their own. So Eisenman and Robinson had to fall back on the offices of Hershel Shanks and the Biblical Archaeology Society who were unwilling to go to press before October/November of that year.

Simultaneously, while all these things were going on, Eisenman had been invited to become a Consultant to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, who had become aware that it had in its archive a collection of photographs of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, donated to it by Elizabeth Bechtel. The late William Moffatt, its Director, asked whether he thought the Library should open its archive to all scholars. He was projecting this for September, two months before Eisenman's and Robinson’s own projected B.A.S. Edition. Eisenman encouraged him to do so, though he knew the Library would get most of the credit for breaking the monopoly and Robinson and he very little.

Surveys, Groundscans, and Excavations

Since 1988, Eisenman has lead the Judean Desert Explorations/Excavations Project under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at CSULB he headed. These expeditions included students from CSULB and other institutions. Its aim was to search for possible new caves that might contain scrolls. This was before the release of the Scrolls in 1991-92 so his philosophy was: “since they wouldn’t show us any Scrolls, let’s see if we can find new Scrolls.” It was his feeling that, though the Bedouin in their enthusiasm to find artifacts had clearly been in almost all accessible caves, there might have been others, inaccessible to them or hidden in some manner or cave-ins. These were the best possibilities of finding new Scrolls.

In the first expedition, between 1988–89, he and his students were involved in the excavation of a cave a kilometer or two south of Qumran, in which they found some Bronze Age artifacts, including an arrow that had evidently been shot into the cave, which still displayed its lacquer rings and feather marks and went into the Israel Museum, an oil jug, and the wooden remains possibly of a plough.

From 1989-92 Eisenman and his students conducted a walking survey of the entire Dead Sea Shore and its environs from seven kilometers north of Qumran to thirty-five kilometers south, past Wadi Murabba'at, to the Northern limits of Ein Gedi, mapping the whole area. In this survey they went into some 485 caves and depressions.

In 1990-91, with the help of author Michael Baigent and radar groundscan specialist Tony Wood, he conducted the first radar groundscan of the Qumran plateau, its ruins and, in particular, the top of the various marls, including Caves 4-6 where he felt there was the best chance of finding hidden pockets that previously might not have been visible to the eye. Ground-scanning on the marls and below Cave VI did point to several such pockets and seemingly empty areas in the marls adjourning Cave IV.

In 2001-03, his teams joined an expedition led by Hanan Eshel and Magen Broshi and sponsored by John Merrill and the B.A.S. In the course of this expedition, two of his students, Dennis Walker and Ron Dubay, discovered a burial enclosure at the Head of the Qumran Cemetery. This was an extremely important find, as was the rare zinc sarcophagus found elsewhere in the graveyard, others of his students were involved in uncovering, cleaning, and unearthing. The next year everyone went back to do more work on the enclosure and the bones it contained and to further survey the graveyard at Qumran, which evolved into the first comprehensive map of the Qumran settlement and adjacent cemetery.

In 2004, they had the opportunity to return and investigate the empty areas in the marls of Cave IV, but with little result.

Theories

Dead Sea Scrolls

Eisenman contends that the preconceptions of the group of scholars around Father Roland De Vaux who first worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls led them to erroneously date the non-biblical, sectarian community documents to the Maccabean period, and to read them as the writings of a serene, retiring community of Essene monks exiled to the wilderness in the course of a dispute with the reigning priesthood of the day led by the "Wicked Priest"/"Spouter of Lying."

Eisenman reads the attitude of these documents as militant, nationalistic and zealous and places them not in the Maccabean period but the later, Herodian era (c. 35 B.C. to 70 C.E. and beyond), which means the establishment priesthood that they oppose is the collaborating, compromising, corrupt Herodian priesthood. He sees parallels between the political, religious and ethical stance of these sectarian documents and that of James the brother of Jesus, whom he identifies as the scrolls' Teacher of Righteousness, and sees 'the Wicked Priest' and 'the Man of Lying' as two different adversaries of the scroll community, the Wicked Priest being the High Priest Ananus ben Ananus, James' executioner, and the Man of Lying, St. Paul.

He is critical of the ways radiocarbon dating and paleography have been employed to date the Dead Sea Scrolls, and relies instead on the internal evidence, what the texts say themselves. He finds parallels between the James-Jesus first century milieu and the scrolls' repeated allusion to ‘the Star Prophecy,' the aggressiveness of the War Scroll and similar documents, the hiding of the Jerusalem Temple treasure as delineated in the Copper Scroll, the description of foreign armies (the Kittim) invading on a much more massive scale than any Hellenistic invasion during the Maccabean period, and the reference to themselves several times as "the Congregation," "Church of the Poor" and “the Poor” (the name of James’ community as described in Early Church literature and Paul). Eisenman lays particular emphasis on the scroll community's description of the Kittim's military and religious practices in their interpretation of Habakkuk 2:2-2:4 (the Habakkuk Commentary) as “sacrificing to their standards and worshiping their weapons of War,” and their reference to Roman “tax-farming” across the whole of the civilized world.

Interpretation of Habakkuk 2:4 at Qumran

The recourse to an interpretation of Habakkuk 2:4 (“the Righteous shall live by his Faith”), the center piece and real building block of all Christian theology both in the Pauline corpus (Romans, Galatians, et al.) and in the Epistle of James. He sees as proof positive that these documents were written more or less contemporaneously and at a time when this prophecy or proof-text was in play.

In addition, he sees the interpretation in the Habakkuk Commentary at Qumran, seemingly written in the latter part of the Community’s history and witnessing its fall and the fall of the Jerusalem Temple (c. 70 C.E.), as ‘Jamesian’ as opposed to ‘Pauline’. That is, first of all it is confined to “Jews” or, in the language of the Commentary, “the House of Judah,” and second of all, it applies only to “Torah-doing” Jews (“doing” here, the basis of the Hebrew word for “works” throughout the Qumran corpus and also being an extremely important usage in the Epistle of James), that is, it does not apply to “non-Torah-doing Jews” and certainly not "non-Torah-doing Gentiles."

For Eisenman this is a direct riposte and a rejection of the Pauline interpretation of this prophecy, and the basis of the Pauline theology one finds in Galatians and Romans and actually, in fact, seemingly argued against in the extant Epistle of James whether seen as authentic, not authentic, or just part of ‘the Jamesian School’; and, therefore, a definitive chronological indicator for the document as a whole.

Finally, he points to the fact that there are even collections of messianic proof-texts at Qumran which include, for instance, the Star Prophecy of Numbers 24:17 which Josephus, at the end of the Jewish War, singles out as the reason for the outbreak of the revolt, and even one dedicated to “the Promises to the Seed” or “House of David.” For Eisenman the Dead Sea Scrolls are Messianic, it being not properly appreciated just how messianic the Scrolls actually are. They represent "the literature of the Messianic Movement in Palestine" which he prefers to the usage “Christianity in Palestine".

Though, one might call them “Essene”, one must take the definition for this from what the Scrolls themselves say, not necessarily what others think or say the Essenes were. Hippolytus, for instance, possibly preserving an alternate version of Josephus, thinks there are two or even three groups of “Essenes”, “Zealot” or “Sicarii Essenes”, and for Eisenman, this is a better definition of what the Essenes were than the more normative ones people are familiar with. For him the Essenes are what Christians were in Palestine before ‘the Movement’ went overseas and was Paulinized, turning it into the mirror opposite of what it was in Palestine before the fall of the Temple.

For him, Acts confirms this, averring that “Christians were first called Christians” in Antioch in Syria in the mid-Fifties C.E. As opposed to this, he considers the more historically-oriented sectarian or later documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be the messianically inspired literature of a pietist, Law-oriented, and nationalistic Party in opposition to Roman/Herodian rule in Palestine which uses the language as “Sons of Zadok” (in some vocabularies, “Sadducees”) or “Zaddikim (צדיקים),” a derivate usage, in referring to itself or even “Messianic Sadducees”, as opposed to “Herodian Sadducees” pictured in both the New Testament and Josephus.

Call for AMS Carbon Dating

Hand and hand with his attempts to free up access to the Scrolls, Eisenman was the first to call for AMS carbon dating of the Scrolls. The reason for this was simple. Since he and others like him could not have free access to the Scrolls, the Israel Antiquities Authority could at least do something like AMS carbon testing of the unpublished Scrolls. This proposal was contained in a series of letters to John Strugnell, Eisenman wrote with Prof. Philip Davies of Sheffield University in England and copied to Amir Drori, the Head of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

This transpired in the following manner - at the same time that he was writing for access to the unpublished copies of the Damascus Document in the Scroll corpus (the one everyone had been using up till then was from the Cairo Genizah of 1896-7), Eisenman hit upon the idea of asking for AMS carbon dating of the Scrolls. Though he knew there had been earlier carbon dating of the Scrolls, this was to prove their authenticity and nothing had been done since the new method known as “AMS” had been developed. Though he realized that even the new method would not be precise enough to determine actual dates - the margin of errors being too large - his wish was to use it to test the claims of paleography by "relative dating," that is, earlier vs. later in the same test run.

Not two months after he and Davies made this request to the Antiquities Authority, to which they attached a recent article about AMS Radiocarbon techniques, it announced its intention to run just such tests while neglecting to mention from whom the initial suggestion had come. But he and Davies had also included in their letter to the IAA a caveat, that “Opposition Scholars” be included in process because it was they who felt the most need for the tests and they who could identify which documents should be tested. As it transpired, they were completely frozen out of the testing, the results of which were uneven and on the whole rather “skewed.” Nor was any attention paid to testing the paleographic arguments of “earlier vs. later,” but rather absolute dating was sought.

The point was that all such tests, these and the later ones that were done, sought to achieve “absolute dating” – just the thing Eisenman and Davies felt it impossible to achieve given the narrow chronological parameters of the Qumran documents. They thought the best that could be hoped for was "relative dating." All neglected, too, what the FBI Crime Lab had recently discovered, that tests of this kind usually came out either to reflect or reinforce the preconceptions of those conducting them. This was why it would have been better to include “Opposition Scholars" in the process, in particular, those who had actually proposed conducting the tests in the first place; and, finally, to take into consideration that all such tests involved “interpretation,” the “interpretation” of the labs doing the testing – some of them, the very same ones that had conducted the widely-disputed testing of the Turin Shroud.

James

As far as Eisenman is concerned, James the Just, the individual Paul actually refers to as either "brother of Jesus" or “the brother of the Lord,” is the historical character who exhibits the most in common with “the Teacher of Righteousness" pictured at Qumran and he considers that these events are the ones vividly portrayed in the Habakkuk Commentary. Historically speaking, it is this character who led the “Opposition Movement,” including “Essenes,” “Zealots,” “Sicarii,” and/or “Nazoreans” - even “Ebionites” - and who, as “Zaddik (צדיק),” i. e., “the Zaddik of the Opposition Movement,” about whom all these groups revolved until his death at the hands of the High Priest Ananus ben Ananus in 62 C.E. as described both in Josephus and Early Church literature. For him, the popularity of James and the illegality of the manner of his death at the hands of the Herodians, Establishment High Priesthood, and Pharisees in 62 C.E. set the stage for and possibly even triggered the First Jewish Revolt against the Rome in 66-73 C.E. - to say nothing of the fire in Rome, not long afterwards which, aside from his probably having set it himself, Nero was reported to have blamed on “Christians.”

For his part, the Jewish historian Josephus makes it clear that those he is calling “Essenes’” (as opposed to these same Herodians, Sadducees, and Pharisees) participated in the Uprising, willing to undergo any torture or any form of death rather than "eat things sacrificed to idols" or "break the Law." For Eisenman, these “Nazoreans,” (נצרים) “Zealots,” (קנאים) “Zaddikim” (צדיקים) or “Ebionim” (אביונים) were marginalized by an Herodian named Saul (Paul of Tarsus) and the Gentile Christians who followed him. This version of Christianity, as it later emerged from a Gentile milieu as led by Paul, transformed the apocalyptic militancy of the Ebionite/Essene Zaddikim into a universalist peaceful doctrine. In this manner, Eisenman sees the doctrine of Christianity as largely the product of Pauline dialectic and apologetics. In so doing, Eisenman attempts to recover the authentic teaching of Jesus and/or James from the obscurity into which it seems to have been intentionally cast by resultant orthodoxy. As he puts it at the end of James the Brother of Jesus, once you have found the Historical James, you have found the Historical Jesus or alternatively, “who and whatever James was so too was Jesus.”

Paul as an Herodian

Hand in hand with these theories went Eisenman’s identification of Paul as an Herodian, based on the view that Paul's version of Judaism was so peculiar that, more than anything else, it seemed to represent the interests of the Herodian family both in Palestine and as it sought to extend its influence into Asia Minor and further East into Northern Syria and Mesopotamia. He covered this in a series of papers and books beginning in 1984 and found the proof of this in Paul’s own salutation (if authentic), at the end of his Letter to the Romans, where he sent his greetings to his “kinsman Herodion” (i. e., “the Littlest Herod”) and “all those in the Household of Aristobulus” (the putative son of Herod of Chalcis and the ultimate husband of the infamous Salome – in fact, their son was “the Littlest Herod”).

He also found it in Josephus’ picture of a curious member of the Herodian family, an individual he also calls “Saulos” who actually seemed to have many characteristics in common with “Paul” in New Testament portraiture. Not only was this “Saulos” involved in an appeal of sorts to “Caesar,” he was also involved in violent behaviour in Jerusalem (although on the surface, at a somewhat later time); and it was he who made the final report to Nero in Corinth about the Roman reverses in Jerusalem which resulted in the dispatch of his best general Vespasian from Britain.

Finally he found this in Paul’s own outlook, his philosophy of “winning“ or being a “Jew to the Jews, a Law-keeper to the Law-keeper and a Law-breaker to the Law-breaker, etc.” also expressed in I Corinthians 9:19-27. and in his own identification of himself as of “the Tribe of Benjamin” (Romans 11:1 and Philippians 3:5), a claim he might have felt Herodians as Edomites were making for themselves, and his founding “a Community where Greeks and Jews could live in harmony, etc.,” where there were “no foreign visitors,” as well as in the easy access he seems to have had to positions of power, and his own Roman citizenship.

To complete his arguments, Eisenman cites the matter of an unidentified “nephew” of Paul, seemingly the son of Paul’s sister, resident in Jerusalem (Cypros married to the Temple Treasurer Helcias? – see his genealogies at the end of The New Testament Code and James the Brother of Jesus), who has unfettered entrée to the Commander of the Roman garrison in the Tower of Antonia who, in turn, then saves him from “Nazirite oath-taking” “Zealot”-like Jewish extremists who take an oath “not to eat or drink till they have killed Paul” (Acts 23:12-4) – Eisenman identifies this individual as Julius Archelaus, the son of this Saulos’ sister by the name of Cypros above. Nor is this to say anything further about his Roman citizenship or his own philosophy of paying the Roman tax to Caesar and seemingly placing Roman Law above Jewish Law as an expression of “the Righteousness Commandment” of “loving your neighbor as yourself” in Romans 13:1-10.

First to Call the James Ossuary Fraudulent

Eisenman was the first to publicly claim that the "James Ossuary" was fraudulent when it originally surfaced in October, 2002 and he did this on the first day it appeared in news articles from AP and op-ed pieces as in the Los Angeles Times on the basis of what the inscription actually said and not on the basis of ‘scientific’ or ‘pseudo-scientific aids like those of palaeography or patina analysis.

In the first place, when he actually saw the ossuary at the AAR/SBL Conference in Toronto three weeks later, it was clear there were two separate hands on the inscription, the second patently more cursive. Secondly, even if the “Jacob the Son of Joseph” part were authentic (there being plenty of ossuaries of this kind available around Jerusalem), the second “Brother of Jesus” part would have to have been added a substantial amount of time later, either in antiquity by a pious pilgrim or in modern times, by a not-very-sophisticated forger because at the time (62 CE), ‘Jesus’ – if he existed as such - would have been no more well known in Jerusalem than his putative brother ‘James,’ and probably far less so; so there would have been no need to add such a rare cognomen except to please believers.

Moreover, as he said in his Los Angeles Times Op Ed of 10/29/02, he would have been much more impressed if the first part of the inscription had said “son of Clopas’/‘Cleophas’/‘Cephas’ or some such thing, which is how individuals connected to this family were known in Palestine in this period and not the more pat or theologically-consistent “Joseph”; or if the second part had simply added the cognomen “the Zaddik” (הׂצדיק) or “Just One,” which was also how James was known by everyone in Palestine at this time too according to Eusebius.

Works

Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel E. J. Brill, Leiden (1976).

Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran: A New Hypothesis of Qumran Origins E. J. Brill, Leiden (1984).

James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher E. J. Brill Leiden (1986).

A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls (with James Robinson), Biblical Archaeology Society (1991).

The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered (with Michael Wise), Penguin USA (1992) ISBN 1852303689.

(1997) ISBN 1842930265.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians (1996) ISBN 1852307854.

The New Testament Code: The Cup of the Lord, the Damascus Covenant, and the Blood of Christ (2006) ISBN 1842931865.

The New Jerusalem: A Millennium Poetic/Prophetic Travel Diario 1959-1962 (2007) ISBN 1556436378.

References

External links

Robert Eisenman's web site

http://www.csulb.edu/centers/sjco/ Robert Eisenman's articles, interviews and reviews of his books.

http://www.youtube.com/user/EisenmanLecture Eisenman's Dead Sea Scrolls lectures and courses

http://www.youtube.com/user/EisenmanontheRocks Interviews on site at Qumran

http://www.youtube.com/user/EisenmanTalks An assortment of Eisenman's talks and TV appearances

http://www.youtube.com/user/Eisenmania Eisenman before non-Christian Groups, etc.

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2010/12/5/lifebookshelf/7478493&sec;=lifebookshelf Robert Eisenman: Man of New Ideas

Category:American archaeologists Category:Biblical archaeology Category:Biblical scholars Category:California State University, Long Beach faculty Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Cornell University alumni Category:Fellows of Linacre College, Oxford Category:Living people Category:Year of birth missing (living people)

Name	Michelle Obama
Image name	Michelle Obama official portrait headshot.jpg
Alt	|imagesize = 225px
Office	First Lady of the United States
Term start	January 20, 2009
Predecessor	Laura Bush
Birth date	January 17, 1964
Birth place	Chicago, Illinois
Birthname	Michelle LaVaughn Robinson
Nationality	American
Party	Democratic
Spouse	Barack Obama (m. 1992)
Children	Malia and Sasha Obama
Residence	Kenwood, Chicago (private)The White House (official)
Alma mater	Princeton University (A.B.)Harvard Law School (J.D.)
Profession	Lawyer
Religion	Protestant Christian
Signature	Michelle Obama Signatrue.svg

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) is the wife of the 44th and incumbent President of the United States, Barack Obama, and is the first African-American First Lady of the United States. Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Obama attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School before returning to Chicago and to work at the law firm Sidley Austin, where she met her future husband. Subsequently, she worked as part of the staff of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, and for the University of Chicago Medical Center.

Throughout 2007 and 2008, she helped campaign for her husband's presidential bid and delivered a keynote address at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. She is the mother of two daughters, Malia and Sasha, and is the sister of Craig Robinson, men's basketball coach at Oregon State University. As the wife of a Senator, and later the First Lady, she has become a fashion icon and role model for women, and a notable advocate for poverty awareness and healthy eating.

Family and education

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois to Fraser Robinson III, The family entertained together by playing games such as Monopoly and by reading. The family attended services at nearby South Shore Methodist Church. The Robinsons used to vacation in a rustic cabin in White Cloud, Michigan. She and her brother, Craig (who is 21 months older), skipped the second grade. By sixth grade, Michelle joined a gifted class at Bryn Mawr Elementary School (later renamed Bouchet Academy). The round trip commute from her South Side home to the Near West Side took three hours. She was a high school classmate of Santita Jackson, the daughter of Jesse Jackson and sister of Jesse Jackson, Jr.

Michelle was inspired to follow her brother to Princeton University; he graduated in 1983. At Princeton, she challenged the teaching methodology for French because she felt that it should be more conversational. As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a thesis entitled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." While at Princeton, she got involved with the Third World Center (now known as the Carl A. Fields Center), an academic and cultural group that supported minority students, running their day care center which also included after school tutoring. In July 2008, Obama accepted the invitation to become an honorary member of the 100-year-old black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, which had no active undergraduate chapter at Princeton when she attended. The couple's first date was to the Spike Lee movie Do the Right Thing. Now Jarrett is one of her husband’s closest advisors. The Obamas' daughters now attend Sidwell Friends School in Washington, after also considering Georgetown Day School. Marian Robinson, Michelle's mother, has moved into the White House to assist with child care.

In 1991, she held public sector positions in the Chicago city government as an Assistant to the Mayor, and as Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development. In 1993, she became Executive Director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit organization encouraging young people to work on social issues in nonprofit groups and government agencies. She worked there nearly four years and set fundraising records for the organization that still stood 12 years after she left.

In 1996, she served as the Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago, where she developed the University's Community Service Center. by early February 2008 her participation had increased significantly, attending thirty-three events in eight days. She made several campaign appearances with Oprah Winfrey. The View appearance was partly intended to help soften her public image, and it was widely-covered in the press. New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd wrote: }}

On the first night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Craig Robinson introduced his younger sister. Obama said both she and her husband believed "that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, and you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them." and also to Barbara Bush for her discipline and decorum. She has also sent representatives to schools and advocated public service. Like her predecessors Clinton and Bush, who supported the organic movement by instructing the White House kitchens to buy organic food, Obama has received attention by planting an organic garden and installing bee hives on the South Lawn of the White House, which will supply organic produce and honey to the First Family and for state dinners and other official gatherings. She is notable for her support from military families and some Republicans. There were questions raised in the American and British media regarding protocol when the Obamas met Queen Elizabeth II, She has named the movement "Let's Move!".

See also

Family of Barack Obama

References

Further reading

External links

First Lady Michelle Obama, Whitehouse.gov

"Meet Michelle", biographical entry at BarackObama.com

"Michelle Obama On Love, Family & Politics", interview with Katie Couric of CBS News

Photoessay in Newsweek

Archive at The New York Times

Archive at U.S.News & World Report

archive at Chicago Tribune

"Michelle Obama's plea for education", on TED (conference), May 2009

Category:1964 births Category:African American history Category:African American lawyers Category:African-American people Category:American female lawyers Category:First Ladies of the United States Category:Harvard Law School alumni Category:Illinois Democrats Category:Illinois lawyers Category:Living people Category:Obama family Category:People from Chicago, Illinois Category:Princeton University alumni Category:Spouses of Illinois politicians Category:Spouses of United States Senators Category:United Church of Christ members Category:Women in Illinois politics

Region	Arab Mediterranean
Era	Medieval Philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Image name	Rambam-portrait.jpg
Name	Moses ben Maimon ("Maimonides")
Birth date	1135
Birth place	Córdoba, Spain
Death date	12 December 1204 (aged 67–68)
Death place	Fostat, Egypt, or Cairo, Egypt Maimonides's family, along with most other Jews, chose exile. For the next ten years they moved about in southern Spain, avoiding the conquering Almohades, but eventually settled in Fes in Morocco, where he studied at the University of Al-Karaouine. During this time, he composed his acclaimed commentary on the Mishnah in the years 1166–1168. Arabist S.D. Goitein believes the leadership he displayed during the ransoming of the Crusader captives led to this appointment. Frank, however, indicates that in his medical writings he sought not to explore new ideas but to interpret works of authorities so that they could become acceptable. Maimonides displayed in his interactions with patients attributes that today would be called intercultural awareness and respect for the patient's autonomy. The Prayer appeared first in print in 1793 and has been attributed to Marcus Herz, a German physician, pupil of Immanuel Kant.
Name	Maimonides, Moses
Alternative names	ben Maimon, Moshe
Short description	rabbi, physician, philosopher
Date of birth	1137 or 1138
Place of birth	Córdoba, Spain
Date of death	December 12, 1204
Place of death	Fostat, Egypt

Category:1130s births Category:1204 deaths Category:People from Córdoba, Spain Category:Medieval Jewish physicians of Spain Category:Medieval Jewish physicians of Egypt Category:Aristotelian philosophers Category:Philosophers of Judaism Category:Sephardi rabbis Category:Egyptian rabbis Category:Spanish rabbis Category:Spanish refugees Category:12th-century rabbis Category:13th-century rabbis Category:Rishonim Category:Jewish theologians Category:Burials in Tiberias Category:Rabbis whose tombs have become pilgrimage sites

Name	Christopher Hitchens
Color	green
Caption	Hitchens in 2007
Birthname	Christopher Eric Hitchens
Birthdate	April 13, 1949
Birthplace	Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, UK
Occupation	Writer and pundit
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Nationality	American/British
Religion	None
Genre	Polemicism, journalism, essays, biography, literary criticism
Spouse	Carol Blue (1989–present)
Children	Alexander, Sophia, Antonia
Relatives	Peter Hitchens (brother)
Influences	George Orwell, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Joseph Heller, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Llewellyn, Aldous Huxley, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Paul Mark Scott, James Fenton, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Oscar Wilde, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Ian McEwan, Leon Trotsky, Colm Tóibín, Bertrand Russell, Wilfred Owen, Isaiah Berlin

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born 13 April 1949) is an English-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. His father's Naval career required the family to move and reside in bases throughout the United Kingdom and its dependencies, including in Malta, where his brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.

Because Yvonne argued that "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it," In 1968 he took part in the TV quiz show University Challenge. Shortly thereafter, he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxemburgist sect". Throughout his student days, he was on many occasions arrested and assaulted in the various political protests and activities in which he participated.

He then became a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism, in what was initially thought to be a murder scene, after overdosing on sleeping pills in adjoining hotel rooms with Bryan slashing his wrists in the bath to be sure. Hitchens flew alone to Athens to recover her remains. While there he reported on the Greek constitutional crisis of the military junta that was happening at the time. It became his first leading article for the New Statesman. Hitchens stated his belief that his mother was pressured into taking her own life under the fear of his father becoming aware of her infidelity, in an already strained and unhappy marriage, and with both her children now independent adults. but others — including Hitchens — believe it to be Spy Magazines "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" Anthony Haden-Guest. In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition". In an interview with Radar in 2007, Hitchens said that if the Christian right's agenda were implemented in the United States "It wouldn't last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part."

Following the September 11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and of the proper response to it. In October 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation. He has supported the legalization of cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes, citing it as a cure for glaucoma and as treatment for numerous side-effects induced by chemotherapy, including severe nausea, describing the prohibition of the drug as "sadistic".

Regarding his own religious background, Hitchens was raised nominally Christian, and went to Christian boarding schools but from an early age declined to participate in communal prayers. Later in life, Hitchens discovered that he was part Jewish. According to Hitchens, when his brother Peter Hitchens took his fiancée to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her 90s, Dodo said, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, that her ancestors had the family name Blumenthal, and were from Poland.

Personal life

Marriage and children

Hitchens married Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, in 1981. They had two children, Alexander and Sophia. Hitchens left Meleagrou for Carol Blue, an American writer, in 1989. They have one daughter, Antonia.

Relationship with younger brother

Hitchens' younger brother by two-and-a-half years, Peter Hitchens, is a Christian and socially conservative journalist in London. The brothers had a protracted falling-out after Peter wrote that Christopher had once joked that he "didn't care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon" (a suburb of London). Christopher denied having said this and broke off contact with his brother. He then referred to his brother as "an idiot" in a letter to Commentary, and the dispute spilled into other publications as well. Christopher eventually expressed a willingness to reconcile and to meet his new nephew; shortly thereafter the brothers gave several interviews together in which they said their personal disagreements had been resolved. They appeared together on the 21 June 2007 edition of BBC current affairs discussion show Question Time. The pair engaged in a formal televised debate for the first time on 3 April 2008, at Grand Valley State University.

Health and lifestyle

Smoking and drinking

A June 2006 profile on Hitchens by NPR stated: "Hitchens is known for his love of cigarettes and alcohol — and his prodigious literary output." However in early 2008 he gave up smoking, undergoing an epiphany in Madison, Wisconsin. His brother Peter later wrote of his surprise at this decision. It was while writing his memoir Hitch-22 that he resumed smoking cigarettes and continued until his cancer diagnosis. Hitchens admits to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule", noting that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind".

Anti-war British politician George Galloway, on his way to testify in front of a United States Senate sub-committee investigating the scandals in the U.N. Oil for Food program, called Hitchens a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist ", to which Hitchens quickly replied, "Only some of which is true". Later, in a column for Slate promoting his debate with Galloway which was to take place on 14 September 2005, he elaborated on his prior response: "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a "popinjay" (true enough, since the word's original Webster's definition is a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)."

Oliver Burkeman writes, "Since the parting of ways on Iraq [...] Hitchens claims to have detected a new, personalised nastiness in the attacks on him, especially over his fabled consumption of alcohol. He welcomes being attacked as a drinker 'because I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem.' He drinks, he says, 'because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur.'"

In the question and answer session following a speech Hitchens gave to the Commonwealth Club of California on 9 July 2009, one audience member asked what was Hitchen's favorite whiskey. Hitchens replied that "the best blended scotch in the history of the world" is Johnnie Walker Black Label. He also playfully indicated that it was the favorite whiskey of, among others, the Iraqi Baath Party, the Palestinian Authority, the Libyan dictatorship and "large branches of the Saudi Arabian Royal Family". He concluded his answer by calling it the "breakfast of champions" and exhorted the audience to "accept no substitute".

In his 2010 memoir Hitch-22, Hitchens wrote: "There was a time when I could reckon to outperform all but the most hardened imbibers, but I now drink relatively carefully." He described his current drinking routine on working-days as follows: "At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker's amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No 'after dinner drinks' — ​most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. 'Nightcaps' depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there."

Cancer

On 30 June 2010, Hitchens postponed his book tour for Hitch-22 to undergo treatment for metastatic esophageal cancer that has spread to his lymph nodes and lungs. He first made the announcement of his diagnosis in Vanity Fair magazine. In August, Hitchens discussed his diagnosis with Anderson Cooper on CNN. He told Cooper that the long-term prognosis is far from positive and that when one uses cigarettes and alcohol, which he has used heavily, there is a tendency to "make yourself a candidate" for the disease. He also says not to credit any reports that he has repented to God. Speaking with The Atlantics Jeffrey Goldberg, Hitchens stated that he would be a "very lucky person" to live another five years.

See also

List of atheists

*

List of English Americans

List of essayists

List of syndicated columnists

Peter Hitchens

Film and television appearances

As referenced from the Internet Movie Database, Hitchens Web or Charlie Rose. {|class="wikitable" style="text-align:center" |- ! Year ! Film |- |1984 |align="left" | Opinions: "Greece to their Rome" |- |1988 |align="left" | Frontiers |- |1993 |align="left" | Everything You Need to Know |- |1994 |align="left" | Tracking Down Maggie: The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher |- |1994 |align="left" | Hell's Angel |- |1996 |align="left" | Where's Elvis This Week? |- |1996–2010 |align="left" | Charlie Rose (13 episodes) |- |1998 |align="left" | Princess Diana: The Mourning After |- |1999–2002 |align="left" | Dennis Miller Live (4 episodes) |- |2002 |align="left" | The Trials of Henry Kissinger |- |2003 |align="left" | Hidden in Plain Sight |- |2003–2009 |align="left" | Real Time with Bill Maher (6 episodes) |- |2004 |align="left" | Mel Gibson: God's Lethal Weapon |- |2004–2006 |align="left" | Newsnight (3 episodes) |- |2004–2010 |align="left" | The Daily Show (4 episodes) |- |2005 |align="left" | (1 episode) |- |2005 |align="left" | The Al Franken Show (1 episode) |- |2005 |align="left" | Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope |- |2005 |align="left" | |- |2005–2008 |align="left" | Hardball with Chris Matthews (3 episodes) |- |2006 |align="left" | American Zeitgeist |- |2006 |align="left" | Blog Wars |- |2007 |align="left" | Manufacturing Dissent |- |2007 |align="left" | Question Time (1 episode) |- |2007 |align="left" | Your Mommy Kills Animals |- |2007 |align="left" | Personal Che |- |2007 |align="left" | Heckler |- |2007 |align="left" | In Pot We Trust |- |2008 |align="left" | Discussions with Richard Dawkins: Episode 1: "The Four Horsemen" |- |2009 |align="left" | Holy Hell |- |2009 |align="left" | Presidency |- |2009 |align="left" | Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?" |}

Bibliography

1987 Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles, Chatto and Windus (UK)/Hill and Wang (US, 1988) / 1997 UK Verso edition as The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (with essays by Robert Browning and Graham Binns)

1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (contributor; co-editor with Edward Said) Verso, ISBN 0-86091-887-4 Reissued, 2001

1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Verso

2000 , Verso

2001 The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.

2001 Letters to a Young Contrarian, Basic Books

2004 , Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3

2005 , Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-059896-4

2007 , [Editor] Perseus Publishing. ISBN 978-0-306-81608-6

2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN 0-446-57980-7 / Published in the UK as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion, Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-586-6

2008 (with Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman), New York University Press

2008 Is Christianity Good for the World? – A Debate (co-author, with Douglas Wilson), Canon Press, ISBN 1-59128-053-2

2010 , Hachette Book Group, ISBN 978-0-446-54033-9

References

External links

in 2007 in 2010 ;Profiles

"Christopher Hitchens" feature story in Prospect magazine, May 2008

"Incendiary Author Spares No Targets" feature story in The New Zealand Herald, May 2008

Such, Such are His Joys David Brooks assessment in The New York Times, 1 July 2010

Hitchens on Dying with Cancer - August 2010 video interview with The Atlantic

Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your future regrets' in The Guardian, 14 November 2010

"Christopher Hitchens’s Jewish Problem" feature article on Jewish Ideas Daily, December 13, 2010

;Articles by Hitchens

Contributor page for Vanity Fair

Index at The Atlantic Monthly

Christopher Hitchens Blog The Mirror (British tabloid)

Hitchens Web

Build Up That Wall – Christopher Hitchens online directory

Hitchens articles at Slate

Category:1949 births Category:Living people Category:Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford Category:American atheists Category:American biographers Category:American essayists Category:American journalists Category:American Marxists Category:American media critics Category:American people of Polish descent Category:American people of English descent Category:American political pundits Category:American political writers Category:American humanists Category:Anti-Vietnam War activists Category:Atheism activists Category:British republicans Category:Cancer patients Category:English atheists Category:English biographers Category:English essayists Category:English humanists Category:English journalists Category:English immigrants to the United States Category:English Marxists Category:English people of Polish descent Category:English political writers Category:English socialists Category:Genital integrity activists Category:Marxist journalists Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:Old Leysians Category:People from Portsmouth Category:Slate magazine people Category:Socialist Workers Party (Britain) members Category:The Nation (U.S. periodical) people Category:University Challenge contestants