Reel Kabbalah: Jewish Mysticism and Neo-Hasidism in Contemporary Cinema (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781978840249)

Reel Kabbalah: Jewish Mysticism and Neo-Hasidism in Contemporary Cinema​ studies the ways in which fictional film in the first decade of the twenty-first century represents the esoteric Jewish speculative traditions known as Kabbalah and Hasidism. It examines the textual and conceptual traditions behind five important cinematic representations -- Pi (1998), Ushpizin (2004), Bee Season (2005), The Secrets (2007), and A Serious Man (2009) -- and it considers how film both stands in continuity with those traditions and modifies them in the New Age vein of what is known as neo-Kabbalah and neo-Hasidism. Brian Ogren transform our understanding of reception history by focusing on how cinema has altered perceptions of Jewish mysticism. In showing how the Jewish speculative traditions of Kabbalah and Hasidism have been able to affect mass consumed cinematic portrayals of ultimate Truth, this book sheds light on the New Age, pop-cultural dialectic of the particular within the universal and of the universal within the particular.

Author: Brian Ogren
ISBN-10: 1978840241
ISBN-13: 9781978840249
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Language: English
Published: 09/13/2024
Pages: 188
Format: Paperback