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Rating: 
Summary: A cultural study of Weimar
Review:
Reading the book I could not get rid of the impression that Peter E. Gordon uses or misuses Heidegger to polish up Franz Rosenzweig, a philosopher that does not reach up to the philosophical complexity of Heidegger. The comparative lecture is therefore not always in a good balance. The interpretation - though very well written, with a didactic effort - sounds sometimes "forced" and is in several chapters not really philosophic. It is a good study of Weimar intellectual culture, not so much a philosophic one. It seems as if Gordon felt himself obliged to write a "comprehensive" book for a large public, not so much for scholars of philosophy, who will probably skip several chapters to "get to the point".
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Intellectual History
Review: Peter Eli Gordon's book on Rosenzweig and Heidegger is a diamond of modern cultural history. Studying two contemporaries whose biographical, intellectual, and political itineraries could not appear more disparate, Gordon brings out not only the profound affinities and analogies between their philosophical projects, but also the way in which these affinities speak to the problems and paths of post-WWI German and German-Jewish thought and culture in general. He shows how Rosenzweig and Heidegger's opposition to contemporary neo-Kantianism provides a common stage for their different albeit parallel paths, and proceeds to question and reinterpret the work of each thinker on the basis of these parallels; this is not to say that the author easily takes the apparently parallel themes of the two (revelation and authenticity) without extensive and careful review, his care on reading texts is something the present reviewer wishes she saw more often among intellectual historians.
The treatment of Rosenzweig is excellent, easily standing its own against Stéphane Mosès' classic System and Revelation. The long, patient and careful analysis of Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption helps demonstrate not only why this work stands as a theorization of German-Jewish modernity in a manner not limited to its explicit Jewish impulse, but also the reasons why Rosenzweig is of contemporary philosophical promise. Two full chapters of the book are dedicated to understanding this work in these two contexts: the chapter Redemption-in-the-World, though the book's most difficult, is also the most interesting. As noted already, Gordon writes also with an ear to themes common to Rosenzweig and Heidegger (particularly the treatment of death) in a fashion that turns to show their deeper affinities.
Gordon constructs a Heidegger that is historically and philosophically valuable beyond the usual studies of his work: conversant with his contemporaries, not yet bound by his later Nazism, philosophically exciting, and engaged in contemporary questions (as opposed to hiding in his Black Forest hut). Of note is also the final chapter, on the so-called Davos debate between Heidegger and neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer, where Gordon provides a remarkable interpretation of this foundational event of Twentieth-Century thought (and, by extension an interesting theorization of the meaning and significance of intellectual events in general).
The question that always lurks in the background (at least for this reviewer) concerns the influence of historical experience in philosophies concerned specifically with the relationship and limits between immanence and transcendence. On this register, Gordon says quite a lot, and the book can be read as a philosophically acute attempt to answer the question of the influence of WWI on intellectuals and writers of its generation.
This book must be published in paperback, as the hardcover's ridiculous price makes it impossible to properly study outside the cadre of university libraries. For those interested in modern European thought, this book is an exceptional guide to one of its most difficult chapters.
Rating:
Summary: An Exciting Read
Review: Peter Gordon's book has received many rave reviews on the study of Rosenzweig and Heidegger. The book's central idea of linking the two thinkers together is bold and intriguing. Overall the book is well-written and exciting to read.
The book examines Rozensweig's basic philosophy through his major works, starting early on with his dealings with Hermann Cohn, the neo-Kantian who he rejects, through his masterpiece, The Star of Redemption, and up to the Rosenzweig Buber Bible translation. Professor Gordon all the while weaves in Heidegger's theories of Being and Dasein, the notions of temporality, to convincingly suggest a link that Germans shared at that time in thought and other areas of life.
The book implies that had Nazism not arise, and had German Jewry like Rosenzweig and Buber continue their course, then the face of Jewish life, including the Orthodox world would look very different from what we see today. In some sense it is not only a great academic text, but an elegy for a lost life.
Rating:
Summary: Controversial and Convincing
Review: This exemplary work of scholarship focuses on the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig - the last of the great German Jewish thinkers before World War II. Gordon's book provides the most coherant and honest assessment to date. The larger point here is that we have to stop telling the story of modern German-Jewish thought as if it occurred in isolation from the story of modern German thought. Gordon takes issue with the standard view of Jewish thinkers as 'trapped" in a German intellectual context that rejected them, and he provides a truly welcome corrective to the fashionable idea that Jewish philosophy is a pristine and isolated island of "ethics" fixated upon the theme of alterity. Until now, interpretators made Rosenzweig out to be a hero of authentic Jewish identity. They tended to confirm the argument of Emmanuel Levinas, who claimed that Rosenzweig was a thinker of ethical transcendence (just like Levinas himself). Gordon has provided a thorough refutation of this view, and he shows, through a careful reconstruction of Rosenzweig's masterwork, The Star of Redemption, that Rosenzweig was much more closely allied with German thought, especially with the sort of holist, post-Nietzschean discourse of finitude and authenticity developed some years later by Heidegger in Being and Time. It may upset those who would rather think about Rosenzweig as some sort of pious sage, rather than a philosopher. But Gordon's point is that Rosenzweig was really a post-Nietzschean modernist, who was trying to develop a new, post-metaphysical idea of religious life as (in Gordon's words) "redemption-in-the-world." Gordon's book is at times tough-going, but on the whole remarkably lucid, particularly when explaining ideas from Rosenzweig or Heidegger. He always proves his points with great quotations from Rosenzweig and Heidegger, and from other thinkers from the Weimar period. The chapters on the Star of Redemption are superb, though lit-crit types may prefer the chapter on the translation of the Bible by Buber and Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig and Heidegger may be seen as the most controversial and convincing study of modern German and Jewish thought ever written.
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