Video recording now availableJerusalem: City of the Book

22 December 2022

Photo: CSMC

Benjamin Balint (left) and Sebastian Schirrmeister at CSMC.

On 18 December, CSMC and Jüdischer Salon am Grindel invited Benjamin Balint to present his ‘Jerusalem: City of the Book’ in a conversation with Sebastian Schirrmeister. The video is now online.

There are many books about Jerusalem. At the same time, not many authors have ventured to tell the story of books in Jerusalem. Benjamin Balint and Merav Mack have done just that. Their Jerusalem: City of the Book (Yale University Press, 2019) tells the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In their hands, Jerusalem itself — perched between East and West, antiquity and modernity, violence and piety — comes alive as a kind of labyrinthine library. The result is, as Moshe Halbertal put it, ‘one of the most intimate and beautiful portraits ever written of Jerusalem’.

On 18 December, CSMC and Jüdischer Salon am Grindel invited Benjamin Balint to present his work to a Hamburg audience. In a conversation with Sebastian Schirrmeister, he shared his forays into the city’s libraries and archives and his encounters with the custodians who safeguard Jerusalem’s literary legacies.

For all those who missed it or want to listen to the conservation again, the full recording of the event is now available.