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- [00:00]
Peter Gordon
I was groomed to become one of his wives. This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her.
- [00:13]
Abe Silberstein
I want to see action, and I am demanding action.
- [00:16]
Peter Gordon
Do not just talk the talk.
- [00:18]
Abe Silberstein
You need to start walking the walk now.
- [00:20]
Peter Gordon
It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now
- [00:31]
New Books Network Announcer
hey NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network Audience Survey and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most and and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries and institutions we partner with. When we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing, if you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [01:45]
Peter Gordon
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:50]
Abe Silberstein
Hello and welcome to another episode of the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Abe Silberstein. Today I'm honored to be interviewing Peter Gordon about his new biography of Walter Benjamin, recently published in 2026 by Yale University Press. Peter is the Ababel B. James professor of History at Harvard University, where he's also affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. He is the author of several influential monographs on critical theory and 20th century German philosophy, including most recently A Precarious Adorno and the Sources of normativity, published in 2024 by University of Chicago Press. Peter received his PhD at UC Berkeley, where his advisor was Martin Jay, who into his 80s is still an active scholar of the Frankfurt School, with several interviews on the New Books Network. For listeners Interested in checking those out? Peter Gordon, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:54]
Peter Gordon
Thanks. It's delightful to be here.
- [02:56]
Abe Silberstein
For listeners who may be unfamiliar with him, can you give a brief overview of the life of Walter Benjamin? Sure.
- [03:05]
Peter Gordon
So Walter Benjamin was born in 1892 into a well assimilated German Jewish family in Berlin. And he was one of three children and grew up in a fairly comfortable middle class home. His father, Emil worked for an auction house and as Benjamin grew up the family's wealth improved somewhat and they moved out to the greener, wealthier districts to the west of Berlin. Benjamin was a bookish, gifted child, prone to flights of imagination and would spend his time reading or making up stories. And he. He remained very much of that character throughout his life. He. He spent several years at the Vickersdorf Country School, which was affiliate the youth movements at the time. And Benjamin was very attracted to the youth movements up until the outbreak of World War I, when the leader he most admired in the German youth movement declared his support for the German Empire in the First World War. And Benjamin angrily broke off relations during the war. He moved to Switzerland to avoid service and he lived in a small town called Muri by Bern, and after the war continued to pursue his academic studies and took a degree in German literature, writing a dissertation on the concept of Romanticism in German literature. Sorry, the concept of criticism in German literature, and then had every intention of moving on to pursue a second dissertation, the Habilitation, which would have given him the license to serve as a professor in the German university system. And he wrote a fascinating study of a rather obscure genre called the Traurspiel, a genre of. Of Baroque drama from the 17th century that was refused. The faculty, who were assigned the task of evaluating it for the Habilitation, couldn't make heads or tails of it and they asked Benjamin to withdraw it to save him the humiliation of outright denial. And so he spent the rest of his life as a peripatetic intellectual. He remained chiefly in Berlin until 1933, when the Nazi seizure of power forced Benjamin and nearly all of his colleagues and friends into exile. Benjamin moved to Paris and spent the period from 1933 on to the end of his life mostly in Paris, with a few trips elsewhere, off to Denmark, to Moscow, and in 1940 finally, at the urging of friends and accompanied by his sister, he made his way southward to Marseille, where he was connected up with a group of refugees who were guided across the Pyrenees to the Franco Spanish border. And due to a momentary change in the legislation, Benjamin was convinced that the border would be impassable. And in despair, he took his own life there at the border, and was actually buried in a cemetery in Porbu, right on the border between France and Spain. So that's his rather difficult and ultimately tragic life. That life has not, of course, prevented his reputation from growing. And in the years since his death, he has emerged as one of the foremost figures for cultural criticism, literary criticism, and, one could say, philosophy or political theory, celebrated in an ever increasing number of texts and provoking original speculation across various fields. So he's a. He's a remarkable figure and also a very enigmatic thinker, and some of that enigmatic quality is, I suppose, what attracted me to writing about it.
- [08:34]
Abe Silberstein
Yeah. And we're going to get to some of those details certainly later in the conversation. And as you note, there have been several biographies of Walter Benjamin published in the past, including three that you cite and the acknowledgments as being critical companions in your own work. What do you see as the principal contributions of your biography of Benjamin, which has been published as part of Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series?
- [09:04]
Peter Gordon
Well, yeah, that's a great question. I do want to acknowledge that my biography is a slender one and modest in its contributions to what's sometimes been called the Benjamin industry. I should note that I had the opportunity to review one of the earlier books in that series, which was published several years ago by Harvard University Press. It was written by Michael Jennings and Howard island, and that is a definitive biography which goes into great depth in ways that mine cannot. My own, which was, as you noted, published as part of the Jewish Lives series, does try to make some comment on Benjamin's own Jewish identity and his own debates with other German Jews of his time. But I would say probably what distinguishes it as a book for me is that it's an experiment in literary nonfiction. I felt that most of the basic features of Benjamin's life and reputation were fairly well known. And so what I tried to do in this book is write in a manner that would capture some of the mood of Benjamin himself and also pay homage to his own. His own literary skills. Now, I'm by no means as skilled a writer as Benjamin was, not by a long shot. But I've always taken some interest in literary fiction and nonfiction. And in writing this book, I tried to write in a way that would draw the reader in with some of the skills of poetic and literary prose. One of my main inspirations for writing the book was a short study by the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, who Wrote a book called Three Rings, and it's a very, very interesting book. One of the many features of the book that I found especially inspiring was that Mendelssohn explains and then makes use of something called ring composition. And I won't go into detail about that, but suffice it to say that it involves digressions and repeated phrases. And I made very sparing use of that method in my book. But I did make some use of it and found it a very welcome way to disrupt typical linear temporalities. When narrating Benjamin's life, the first thing people will notice, of course, is that I start with Benjamin's tragic end, and I narrate the end of his life and his death before then, moving on after that sad end to the very beginning of his life. And. And then I leave the book. I leave Benjamin at a hopeful moment when he still thought he might survive. Using that kind of circular structure was, for me, a helpful way to resist the tragic forward motion of a typical biography of Benjamin, because we all know how it ended, and I wanted to put the end right at the beginning and then set it aside.
- [13:02]
Abe Silberstein
Yeah. And one. One reason I have found Benjamin to be such a fascinating figure, and perhaps this is also the reason why his work spread so far and wide after his tragic death, is that he was situated at a somewhat marginal intersection of German intellectual life, where he interacted with a diverse set of interlocutors. The first generation of the Frankfurt School, including Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the future Nazi jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, a young Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, and of course, Gershom Schallem, with whom he had an extensive correspondence. What in Benjamin's biography enabled him to occupy such a space? And even just asking this question almost reminds me of Isaac Deutsc, non Jewish Jew, of someone who's kind of at this intersection of being marginal to the larger society, but also in some ways to the community into which he was born.
- [14:05]
Peter Gordon
Yeah, that's a wonderful question. I mean, you use the word marginal, and I do think that sometimes the word marginal can mean unimportant or far from the center of action. But as you know, and I think you're implying this marginality can also be a place of advantage. Benjamin was always a figure at the periphery of various movements of his time, and you mentioned the most important of those he was affiliated with, but by no means a central player in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, the Institute for Social Research. He had fairly close relations and a troubled friendship with Teodor Adorno and was very close to Gershom Scholem who moved to Palestine while Benjamin stayed in Europe. He was also close to Bertholdt Brecht, but there too it was a troubled friendship. So Benjamin participated in the various movements associated with these figures, but was also resistant to joining in a wholehearted way. And I would say that throughout his life this was his typical pattern. He was better at longing than commitment. He was better at experiment than full throated dedication to any particular doctrine. I will note that regarding Frankfurt School critical theory, he never could fully adapt himself to the Institutes requests that he make his work fully legible within the framework of neo Marxist critical theory that they promoted. You know, as early as 1924 he wrote to his friend Gershom Scholem that he was reading Georg Lukacs book History and Class Consciousness. And yet he admitted that he felt himself somehow unable to fully endorse the arguments of that Marxist Hegelian text. And I'll just read to you a little phrase that he wrote to Sholme in a letter. He said, I would be surprised if the foundations of my nihilism were not to manifest themselves against communism in an antagonistic confrontation with the concepts and assertions of Hegelian dialectics. Now that's a quite revealing phrase. What Benjamin called his nihilism might be more charitably described as a resistance to living comfortably and thinking comfortably with any particular intellectual or ideological system. And that made him marginal to any one of those systems and movements, but perhaps for that very reason especially well equipped to understand and contest their premises. I think this is just a. This is one of the most fascinating things about him. It makes him, I should say, very hard to understand. Because if people come to Benjamin expecting that they will encounter a set of arguments that they've learned about elsewhere, they will find that Benjamin's typical strategy of reading is so transformative that he gives those ideas an inimitable original twist. And the result is that he turns every. Every movement and doctrine, every teaching, into something uniquely his own. This is worth knowing.
- [18:29]
Abe Silberstein
TikTok Shop helps you discover good value products and surprise deals fast. No endless searching, just smart finds. Download TikTok now. Yeah, and that's just. And I think this would be a good opportunity to turn to the subtitle of your book, which is called the Pearl Diver. And as anyone is, as you just said, who's read Benjamin can attest he was clearly a man of eclectic interests and concerns who did not fully commit to any intellectual, political or literary movement. Yet you do see a through line in Method, at least from his earliest works to his final ones.
- [19:15]
Peter Gordon
Yeah, well, that subtitle the Pearl Diver was really my homage to Hannah Arendt, who when working at Shocken Books in New York, published first English language collection of Benjamin's work and wrote an introduction. And in that introduction she refers to Benjamin's method as pearl diving. Now, it's a lovely image. Whether it's wholly appropriate, I'm not sure, but I thought it would serve my purposes quite well. The reason why it may be well suited to our understanding of Benjamin's work is that he had a way of sifting among the, the most degraded or disdained elements of bourgeois culture. I mean, he was a man who was very erudite and trained very well in the literary tradition of Europe. I mean, he wrote on Goethe and he wrote on, on Proust and Baudelaire. He even translated fair portions of Proust's Recherche to Temps Perdu. But he was also very interested in the lower register of European culture. His writing on the Traurspiel, which I mentioned before, German Baroque drama, was writing on a genre of Baroque theater that had been disdained by previous critics as a decadent style that had very little aesthetic merit. And yet this is one of the things that Benjamin found interesting about it. He thought, what's going on in this genre that has been neglected by so many esteemed German academics? I think what he saw there was that sometimes the most instructive features of a culture are best revealed not through its greatest monuments, but in those elements of a culture that are most despised or least successful. And this means he was always diving into the ruins of the past to search there for the unforeseen treasure, for the surprising and instructive artifacts of the past. He did that with the genre of German Baroque drama. But later on he did it with Paris. And perhaps the most well known achievement of his life was the unfinished achievement of the Passagenwerk, or the Arcades project, which was a study of 19th century Paris using the passage, the Arcades through bourgeois apartment buildings lined with shops as allegories for all of, of bourgeois modernity. And here too he would fasten his attention on the neglected detail, scattered remnants of the past that were half buried or half forgotten. And he would draw them up, pluck them from the past in order to find in them some philosophically instructive lesson for the present. And pearl diving seems to me not bad as an illustration for that method.
- [23:20]
Abe Silberstein
Yes, your book traces Benjamin's uneasy, but nevertheless steady relationships with the Frankfurt School critical theorists, and to Gershom Shalom, who in the 1920s had already moved to Palestine. What were some of the points of synergy and conflict in those personal relationships? And is it fair to say they symbolized Benjamin's own struggles with Marxism, Judaism and Zionism? And maybe we could add one more after just your answer to the last question, which might have been Modernism, which in some ways his method and his interests ran counter to those of Adorno's.
- [24:02]
Peter Gordon
What a great question. Yes. So there are many different facets of Benjamin's life that could be understood in terms of an uneasy relationship with the movements and intellectuals around him. Let me begin with the earliest one that I address in my book, which is his relationship with Judaism itself, because I published this in the Jewish Lives series. This is one of the themes of his life that I emphasize, though I hope not in a distorting fashion. Benjamin, as I mentioned when we started, was born into a well assimilated German Jewish household. They celebrated some of the high some of the holidays, but they didn't keep kosher. He was distantly related, I should say, to one of the greatest early 19th century luminaries of German Jewish letters, Heinrich Heine. But it was a fairly distant relation and in fact Benjamin doesn't seem to have appreciated Heine's poetry a great deal. He thought of himself as Jewish and he did value it. But he valued it among various other identities, no one of which enjoyed absolute precedence in his life. Maybe one of the most amusing anecdotes for illustrating this ambivalence about his Jewish identity can be found in a memoir that he wrote about his own early life. It was called Berlin childhood around 1900. Now he wrote this some years later, but in it he describes his earliest years as a little boy at the end of the 19th century and into the first decade of the 20th century. And he tells one anecdote in that which is was rather controversial. His friend Gershom Sholem didn't even want him to include it. In the published book he tells the story that he was supposed to meet a relative when he was young and go to the high holiday services. But on his way there, Benjamin relates that he lost his route and found himself straying into the red light district in Berlin. And he tells this story in a way that seems to imply that maybe he lost his way intentionally and that he was drawn more to the sexual allure of the red light district than to the religious edification that he would have found at the Synagogue. Now, as I just mentioned, Sholem didn't like this at all. He said, look, you don't mention your Judaism hardly at all in this memoir, yet you're going to mention this. This will invite all kinds of insult and prejudice and you should delete it. Benjamin said he would, but something seems to have happened, and in fact it did make it into the published edition and then was included in every edition thereafter. I think that that little episode with the possible misunderstanding about publication does tell us something about Benjamin's own conflicted identity. Even as a young man before World War I, he remained fairly conflicted about his Judaism, and it wasn't clear to him that he felt it to be the most important feature of his identity at all. There's an exchange of letters that he had with a childhood friend named Ludwig Strauss. And Strauss wanted Benjamin to endorse the Zionist movement and drew Benjamin into a fairly long and interesting correspondence in which they debated the question of Zionism. Now, Benjamin's attitudes towards Zionism were as conflicted as his attitudes toward anything else. He understood that the situation of the Ostuten of Eastern European Jewry was an embattled one, that they were in a position of great difficulty from pogroms and poverty and so forth. And he specified in his correspondence with Strauss that for East European Jewry, political Zionism was justified. Sometimes this fact about him is forgotten, but then he goes on and he says, but for someone like me, a West European Jew, assimilated and well educated, I'm comfortable in Europe and my place as a Jew will be in Europe. Now he insists that this is nonetheless the place in which one can have a viable Jewish existence. And he affirms that he will actively work for Jewish identity, but in Europe, but already here, you can see that there's some ambivalence that he resists the tug of Zionism. He endorses Jewish identity. And yet at the same time, he says to Strauss, my Judaism in my childhood was hardly known to me at all. It was known to me through a few incidents of antisemitism and mostly as an aroma, he says, a strange word to use that tells us something quite interesting about how Benjamin never felt entirely at home in settled identities. This became a very tragic fact and a source of great disagreement later on in his life, when his friend Gershom Sholem moved to Palestine and secured a position at the newly founded Hebrew University in Jerusalem and urged Benjamin to follow him to move to Palestine as well. And Benjamin would often agree in principle, but then defer the invitation By a year or two, he promised to learn Hebrew. He even secured some funds from Rabbi Yuda Magnus from San Francisco to learn Hebrew and then would experiment with Hebrew a little bit, even learning enough to write down some Hebrew phrases and letters on a postcard and mail them off to Sholem as proof that he was diligently pursuing the work. But he always deferred the invitation and although promising Sholem again and again to come to Palestine, would never do so. Now I don't think that was just a matter of neglect or deferral. I think this had something to do with the fact that Benjamin was, at the end of the day, incorrigibly a European and that the idea of such an abrupt shift from Europe to Palestine was just not something that was consonant with his own European identity. Now, that's only one facet of Benjamin's life, his Judaism and also his Zionism. The two that you mentioned, let me mention the third, which is his relationship to Marxism. This was no less conflicted. There have been heated debates since the 1960s regarding the extent to which we should see Benjamin as a Marxist. My own view on that is complicated, but I'm inclined to say that there are fundamental features of Benjamin's work that do not accord with Marxist principles. Adorno and Horkheimer seem to have recognized that Benjamin was trying, perhaps a little too hard, to transform his work in a purely cosmetic way in order to make it look more compatible with the Institute's neo Marxist agenda. But no matter how hard Benjamin tried, he seemed to never get it right. And Adorno would write him long and sometimes rather aggressive letters explaining how Benjamin's attempt to develop a materialist theory of culture ended up lapsing into the most vulgar form of materialism that didn't exhibit the proper kind of dialectical sophistication that the Institute required. So on that ground, Benjamin didn't quite fit the Marxist, the Marxist expectations of the Institute. There's one other feature of his writing that I'll mention in this regard. We all know that at the very end of his life, and one of the very last things that Benjamin would ever write, he detailed his own concept of history. The. The text is often known as the Thesis on the Philosophy of History. And in that he describes this angel who is caught in a storm of progress. And it's a, it's a well known image in Benjamin's work. Benjamin in this text suggests that historical materialism can function only if it enlists the services of theology. And specifically historical materialism must make use of a concept of the messianic so that history appears not as the unfolding of a dialectical process that will overcome contradiction and lead eventually to revolution. History should be conceived in such a way that we can imagine a sudden break in time. Discontinuity, Benjamin says, is more important than continuity for historical materialism. Historical materialism must imagine that history comes to a standstill and that something like the messianic breaks into the historical continuum, and that should be our proper image of revolution. Now, the one thing I want to say about that. And then I'll. And then I'll. And then I'll end this point, is that it's hard to square that with any recognizable form of Marxism. One of the essential features of Marxism is that it sees revolution as emerging out of the imminent contradictions of history itself. The notion that historical contradiction could be rectified by appealing to something extra historical like the messianic, seems to me to violate one of the central principles of historical materialism. And in that respect, I want to say that at least in that last text, at the very end of his life, Benjamin was entertaining thoughts that are not just heterodox in Marxism, but incompatible with Marxism. Now, that doesn't mean they're wrong or right. I'm simply insisting that we should evaluate Benjamin's thinking on its own terms and not try to distort his thinking by placing it within a Marxist frame. Yeah.
- [36:49]
Abe Silberstein
And that brings us to the question of Benjamin's reception, which you referenced earlier. And today, of course, Benjamin is mainly read by intellectual historians, but also students of literature and media studies who use him and his work as a critical guide, you know, from whom they could. From which they could draw insights that generate novel and even emancipatory interpretations of art and literature today. In your book, you describe in detail several of Benjamin's seminal essays, including on the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which I know you translate slightly differently in the book. Why do you think Benjamin's cultural criticism has had such a profound influence, particularly in the academy, which is, of course, ironic, given his own troubles and acclimating to the academic life of his time.
- [37:48]
Peter Gordon
Yeah, I'm so glad you asked me this. This is one of the major features of Benjamin's legacy that raises a host of interpretive puzzles. So in that essay. Yeah, I call it the Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, which is closer to the German, Benjamin reflects on the fact that traditional works of art appear to us as if they are unique and embedded in a tradition, as if they are to be approached, almost as if they are sacred objects, as if wrapped in what Benjamin calls an aura. It was Benjamin's view that in the modern period, chiefly due to technologies, techniques of reproduction in photography and film, artworks can shed the aura. The aura begins to decay and reproduced works of art circulate without there being any such thing as an original. These circulating works of art become available for mass appreciation and appropriation by people who no longer have to assume the worshipful posture of spectators, say, in museums or concert halls. Instead, they can consume works of art while they are in motion, in urban space, while they are distracted. Then you mean actually celebrates that state of distraction that accompanies a work of art when it's encountered in urban space, say, on the street or on a poster. This helps to explain why Benjamin's work has proved so appealing to people who study mass culture. And, and they have tried to mobilize Benjamin's insights for redeeming mass culture from the usual attitude of disdain that erudite intellectuals typically adopt when they look at the ephemera of our modern media saturated world. This is why, as you said, Benjamin has become such a avatar for media studies, why he's a kind of guru for pop culture studies. I want to say that this is a somewhat distorted understanding of Benjamin's own work. Even in the essay on the Artwork in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility. Benjamin's chief examples are not ones that come from mass culture. They're ones that come from the aesthetic avant garde of his own time. He was very interested in the films of Sergei Eisenstein, for example, and he was also very interested in Brechtian theater. His friend Bertholdt Brecht was himself, of course, a pioneer in the theatrical avant garde. And Brechtian theater is by no means a theatrical movement that prepares the way for, say, Hollywood film today. Brecht theorized something called the effect, the alienation effect. He wanted to shatter the illusion of the theater by exposing the mechanism of the play itself, breaking through the fourth wall, getting rid of the curtain, getting rid of the backstage, having the performers in a way make it transparent that they are doing something artificial, that they are workers putting on a play in front of you. And this, for Brecht, was a way of breaking free of the illusion of realism that had dominated theater in the 19th century and up to Brecht's own time. Well, Brecht was a member of the avant garde, and Benjamin's own interest in modern aesthetics was not an interest in popular Aesthetics, but an interest in the aesthetic avant garde of his own time. Nonetheless, people have read his work and found in his work a more favorable approach, favorable appreciation of mass culture, such that his argument against the aura can be mobilized in order to focus our attention on what might be of value in mass cultural products today. Now, I should point out that here too, we found that we find that Benjamin was in conflict with many of his contemporaries, perhaps first and foremost, Teodor Adorno, who strongly resisted Benjamin's celebratory attitude toward art without an aura, and especially resisted Benjamin's idea that technical reproducibility would somehow help the masses to experience their own agency and lead to revolution. Adorno rejected that completely, and he said, look, what happens when an artwork sheds its aura is it becomes fully exposed to the process of commodification. So rather than becoming an artwork that's available for revolution, the artwork without an aura becomes a victim of the commodity form.
- [44:04]
Abe Silberstein
Yep. So in some ways, Benjamin's work has been media studies response to Adorno and Horkheimer's culture industry argument in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
- [44:17]
Peter Gordon
I think that's a beautiful way to put it. I think media studies tends to side with Benjamin over Adorno, though here too, one needs to qualify matters. There are sophisticated people in media studies who would take a more skeptical adornian line when it comes to the world of commodified culture.
- [44:44]
Abe Silberstein
Yeah. This has been such a fascinating conversation, and I want to conclude with a question about Benjamin's work in relation to Jewish studies, which is my field, but even the contemporary conditions of Jews today. Where do you see Benjamin and his writing fit in, if at all, to those matters?
- [45:07]
Peter Gordon
Well, I'll quote to you a little phrase from the afterword, because I touch on this directly in the afterword, feeling that I needed to explain why this book merits inclusion in the Jewish Lives series, I addressed the question directly. I wrote what Benjamin knew of Judaism was little more than a paucity of rituals and illusions. And what he learned as an adult came chiefly from his friendship with Gershom Sholem, whose knowledge was vast and deep. What Benjamin did with this learning, however, was no different than what he did with anything he found. He brought it up like a pearl from the ocean floor, and he polished it again and again until it shone as brightly as a star. Well, I like that particular passage, and I tried to explain with that passage what I see as Benjamin's ongoing connection to Jewish studies. Or to. To use a phrase, I don't much like Jewish identity today. Judaism has always been an interpretive tradition. It hasn't always been one self identical thing. It's very difficult to identify one particular set of claims that distinguishes something as Judaism. And Judaism will continue, I suppose, to be a set of arguments carried forth by an interpretive community. And in that interpretive community there are likely to be disagreements, sometimes violent disagreements over what it means to be a Jew, how Judaism is best practiced, what political commitments it entails, and so forth. Benjamin, in this respect is maybe not an exception to the Jewish tradition, but maybe a good exemplar of that ongoing interpretive, volatile debate within Judaism. I'm sure you know the joke. You know that when there are two Jews, there are three opinions. Even when there was just Benjamin himself, there were at least three opinions. And certainly when it comes to reading his work, no one can agree on what it says. What I think is maybe most pertinent today about Benjamin's work is that he was, throughout his life, a wandering intellectual, a peripatetic who never felt entirely at home in any one place. And I would say that in some respects, that extraterritoriality, that not being at home, quality is what perhaps most distinguishes Benjamin as a member of the modern Jewish world. To be a Jew today is, I think, to find oneself ill at ease in any particular home. So Jewish nationalism eventually led to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. The fact that Benjamin could never make his peace with Zionism and follow his friend Sholem to Palestine is, I don't think, an accident. I think he was not at ease with any form of final nationalist attachment, not as a German, not as a Frenchman, not as a Jewish. And his life therefore symbolizes the kind of ongoing extraterritoriality that became such a widespread condition not only among Jews, but among many people in the 20th century, including, of course, after the founding of the State of Israel, Palestinians, many of whom were thrust into exile and continue to feel themselves in exile today. I wrote a piece recently in the New York Review of Books about the phrase never again. And for me, what's important about that phrase is that it should encourage all of us, whatever our particular identity, to welcome the stranger and to welcome the refugee. Benjamin, after all, was a refugee and would have survived had borders been opened, had the process of movement been made just a bit easier in his time. In our own time, the difficulty of movement and the plight of refugees is quite pronounced. And I would like to think that Benjamin's memory could be a reminder to all of us that in some sense we're all wandering. We're all refugees, and we all deserve to be welcomed.
- [50:31]
Abe Silberstein
Peter Gordon, thank you so much for taking the time with me today to discuss your book.
- [50:37]
Peter Gordon
Thanks for having me. I really appreciated the chance to talk with you there.