Staircase to Heaven

Existential Encounters of Jewish Savants with Death

Tova Gamliel (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

264 Seiten

2024 | Unabridged edition
Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Verlag)
9781036409166 (ISBN)

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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.

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).

Erscheinungsdatum	15.05.2025
Verlagsort	Newcastle upon Tyne
Sprache	englisch
Maße	148 x 212 mm
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Psychologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Psychoanalyse / Tiefenpsychologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Trennung / Trauer
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-13	9781036409166 / 9781036409166
Zustand	Neuware