Staircase to Heaven
Existential Encounters of Jewish Savants with Death
Tova Gamliel(Autor*in)
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
1. Auflage
Erschienen am 16. Juni 2025
Buch
Softcover
264 Seiten
978-1-0364-5174-5 (ISBN)
Beschreibung
Is there anyone who does not imagine the moment of their death? Who is unaware of their steady march to the endline? By suppressing and denying death, Westerners overlook the positive side of death anxiety. This ethnography fills this lacuna by describing a colorful and rich "death culture" among survivors of Holocaust and war who endure their last palpitations of life in a Tel Aviv old-age home. Unable to suppress the consciousness of end-of-life, the protagonists climb a "staircase to heaven" among different fields of existence. Resourcefully they transform their anxiety and suffering into paths of choice-comforting each other, filling their days with acts of respect and unity, and replacing all-consuming individualism with social existentialism and Judeo-Christian religious ideas.
This book holds us up to an existential mirror that bridges old and young, a geriatric institution and a concentration camp, and natural death and tragic death induced by terrorism.
This book holds us up to an existential mirror that bridges old and young, a geriatric institution and a concentration camp, and natural death and tragic death induced by terrorism.
Weitere Details
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN-13
978-1-0364-5174-5 (9781036451745)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Weitere Ausgaben
Andere Ausgaben

Buch
09/2024
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
107,84 €
Versand in 15-20 Tagen
Person
Autor*in
Tova Gamliel is professor of anthropology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
Her academic identity is that of a philosophical and psychological anthropologist. Among her books are Aesthetics of Sorrow: The Wailing Culture of Yemenite Jewish Women (2014) and The Theatrical Spectaculum: An Anthropological Theory (2019).