Survival

"[A] remarkable study...If one reads only the epigraph and the epilogue, one would already be witnessing nimbleand generative theorizing at work. Luckily, these framing plot points are fleshed out with a rich substance...The book requests the reader’s patience, curiosity, and recollection of the pleasure entailed in watching careful, masterful exegesis unfold sentence by sentence and, literally, word by word."—Journal of Religion

"Adam Stern's remarkable book offers a set of lucidly argued readings of twentieth-century German-Jewish thinkers through the prism of 'survival.' Joining biopolitics to theology, he constructs a revelatory critical genealogy of survival by tracing the importance of a Christian-inflected discussion of survival in Jewish thought, and outlines its political forms. Casting a critical eye on competing claims to sovereignty, Stern shows how all sacralizing discourses about survival-including Israeli military mobilizations-paper over the fragility of the mortal body. His is an original, highly innovative work that is deeply informed and rigorously argued."—Carolyn J. Dean, Yale University

"Adam Stern's innovative and astute study of the concept of survival is both expansively far-reaching and acutely focused. One might mistakenly think that the work is another survey of a certain line of twentieth-century German-Jewish thought. In fact, it is a work on the Christian logic that pervades these thinkers. Stern's analysis ranges masterfully from Pseudo-Dionysius to Shakespeare, to tell its own story about the surreptitious power of Christianity. Stern decenters the concept of survival, which has become so frequently synonymous with post-Holocaust Judaism, and reveals how the image of resurrection is in fact its driving force."—Sarah Hammerschlag, University of Chicago