Figuring Jerusalem

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is professor emerita of comparative literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is the author of By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination, and two books in Hebrew.

• List of IllustrationsPrologue Why Jerusalem? The Politics of PoetryIntroduction “This House, which is called by My Name”Part 1 Literary Archaeologies1 “Yes, you did laugh!”: The Secret of the Akeda2 “You are as majestic as Jerusalem”: The Song and the City3 “Apples of gold in ornaments of silver”: Maimonides’s Guide to the Poetic ImaginationPart 2 Agnon’s Dilemma4 “What may this be likened to?”: Agnon and the Poetics of Space5 “Every day I have regretted not having stood in the breach”: Agnon in JerusalemPart 3 Amichai in the Breach6 “He comes out of a swimming pool or the sea . . . and he laughs and blesses”: Yehuda Amichai, Poet of the Sacred Quotidian7 “Visit my tears and the east wind, which is the true Western Wall”: Amichai in JerusalemCodaAcknowledgments: Ancient Debts and Ongoing GratitudeNotesBibliographyIndex

“Figuring Jerusalem, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi’s most far-ranging and ambitious book, is a morally bracing and politically urgent argument against spatially literalizing the sacred in Jerusalem. Instead, DeKoven Ezrahi offers a persuasive plea for the quotidian, in which the symbolism of the holy is not confused with the physical space of the holy. Her defense of ordinary existence's preciousness begins with Genesis, moves through Maimonides, and culminates in insightful readings of Agnon and Amichai.”