WELCOME!

This is the website of the writer and journalist Göran Rosenberg. I will do my best to keep this page updated with translated articles, papers, excerpts from books and other information. These texts are for your private use only. If you wish to reprint or otherwise reproduce them you will need my permission.
(Navigation for the English version of the site can be found at the bottom of this page.)

MY MOST RECENT BOOK
will appear in English translation in January 2025 (Other Press, NY) as Another Zionism, Another Judaism. The Unrequited Love of Marcus Ehrenpreis. The book appeared in Swedish in 2021 (Bonniers) and has been awarded a number of prizes, among them a prize for outstanding biographical work from The Swedish Academy.

ADVANCE PRAISE:

Marcus Ehrenpreis, a long-serving leader of Sweden’s Jewish community, worked for a renaissance of Jewish life during one of the darkest periods of his people’s history. In telling the story of this admirable man, Göran Rosenberg shows that the questions Ehrenpreis grappled with—about Zionism, assimilation, anti-Semitism, and the possibility of a Jewish future in Europe—could not be more relevant today.” —Adam Kirsch, author of The People and the Books and The Blessing and the Curse

“In this powerful, passionate book, Göran Rosenberg rescues Marcus Ehrenpreis from obscurity and places him in the pantheon of great Jewish thinkers and leaders. This is a deeply moving study of the tensions in twentieth-century Europe between Jews and Christians, Zionism and universalism, the love of community and the love of humanity.” —Derek Penslar, author of Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader

“The extraordinary life of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis opens a window to the momentous twentieth century of Jewish history. From Ukraine to the Balkans to Scandinavia, Ehrenpreis was at the forefront of political and intellectual debates. Göran Rosenberg presents a gripping account of his life and a fascinating account of the broad sweep of Jewish history, from the glowing hopes of the late nineteenth century through the horrors of the Holocaust and the passionate disputes over Zionism.” —Susannah Heschel, editor of Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel

“A finely grained, meticulously researched portrait of a twentieth-century communal rabbi who was ever attentive to the Judennot—the ‘distress’ posed to European Jewry by virulent racial antisemitism—but also no less to the Not des Judentums—the ‘distress’ to which Judaism as a spiritual and ethical calling was subject by the pull of ethnic nationalism as a response to the Judennot. Göran Rosenberg deftly presents Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis as exemplifying how modern Jewry may meet the existential challenge of an unyielding commitment to securing the political dignity of Jewry while unwaveringly affirming the spiritual patrimony of Judaism as a prophetic universal voice transcending the limits of national politics and territorial loyalties.” —Paul Mendes-Flohr, author of Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent

“The search for the forgotten precedes the search for the better. Göran Rosenberg’s gripping story of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis’s spiritual and political endeavor in the fateful time of the Jewish state’s establishment is a strong building block for such a future.” —Dan Diner, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

A BRIEF STOP ON THE ROAD FROM AUSCHWITZ
Ett kort uppehåll på vägen från Auschwitz (Bonniers 2012), was  awarded The August Prize of  2012  for best book of the year. Also published in Danish (Tiderne Skifter) Norwegian (Forlaget Press), Italian (Una breve sosta nel viaggio da Auschwitz, Ponte alle Grazie), German (Ein kurzer Aufenthalt, Rowohlt Berlin), French (Une brève halte après Auschwitz, Seuil, awarded Prix du  Meilleur  livre étranger, 2014), Dutch (Een kort oponthoud, Atlas/Contact), Polish (Krótki przystanek w drodze z Auschwitz, Czarne), Hebrew (Atzira kzara bederech mi Auschwitz, Yedioth Ahronoth), Finnish (Lyhyt pysähdys matkalla pois Auschwitzista, Atena) and English (A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, Granta, UK, Nov 2014, and Other Press, USA, February 2015).

INTERVIEW
Lousiana Art Channel: The Road from Auschwitz.

REVIEWS
A towering and wondrous work about memory and experience, exquisitely crafted, beautifully written, humane, generous, devastating, yet somehow also hopeful.
Philippe Sands in The Financial Times on Nov 8 2014

Written with tender precision, “A Brief Stop on the Road From Auschwitz,” recently published in the United States, is the most powerful account I have read of the other death — the death after the camps.
Roger Cohen in The New York Times on March 10, 2015

Rosenberg schreibt in eine einfache Sprache, so schnörkellos und schlicht wie skandinavisches Design. Seine Sätze sind von einer bestehenden Klarheit, durch Wiederholungen erreicht er eine gewisse Elegie, ein sehnsuchtsvoll bedauernde Grundmelodie, die das Buch zu mehr macht als „nur“ der Überlebensgeschichte seines Vaters: nämlich zu großer Literatur. Mitunter ist sein Buch auch von einer bösen Traurigkeit durchzogen, einem beißenden Witz, die sich an den Ungerechtigkeiten, die seinem Vater widerfahren sind, festbeißt und nicht lockerlässt, bis er sie dekonstruiert hat und in aller ihrer Widerwärtigkeit entblößt.
Johanna Andorran in The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on March 3 2013.

WHITHER ISRAEL?
A discussion between myself and professor Avi Shlaim at Lund University in April 2016.

RECENT ARTICLES (for a full list of articles in English, go to Texts.)

Cultural essay in Swedish Expressen, Danish Information and Norwegian Klassekampen, April 7-8, 2024
Israel at Road’s End?
Many years ago (1996) I wrote a book called The Lost Land in which I set out to explore and understand the ideas and forces that had created the State of Israel. I also wanted to tell a personal story about the role of Israel in my own life. For a few teenage years in the early 1960s, I lived in Israel, rooted myself in Israel, devoured its dreams and promises, and when just over two years later, at the age of fifteen, I had to return to Sweden, I was determined to reclaim my pioneering role in the building of the Jewish state as soon as possible. Read more>

Op-ed column, Dagens Nyheter, April 29, 2004
Israel’s Politics of Suicide
Fifteen years from now, the Palestinians will be the majority in the territory that Israel dominates and occupies. Israel's ruling extremists may plan to expel as many of them as possible and confine the rest to walled, Bantustan-like areas, but the society they create will increasingly resemble an isolated fortress in the desert, held together by fear, built on walls and ruled by fanatics. You don't have to read Flavius Josephus to realize that this is the path to collective suicide.

Op-ed in Swedish Expressen, Norwegian Klassekampen and Danish Weekendavisen, November 12, 2023.
Israel’s impasse
Regardless of how much of Hamas is wiped out this time, and how much of Gaza is razed to the ground, and how many thousands of Palestinians are killed or driven from their homes, Hamas horrific attack marks the end of an Israeli security doctrine built on political-military hubris and strategic self-deception.

Putting the current Israel-Gaza war into perspective, here is an essay in the Swedish weekly magazine Fokus, September 9th, 2011.
Israel’s Perfect Storm
On the narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the remains of past civilisations and communities lie in layers thousands of years old. Also the remains of the heavy fortifications and thick walls that once defended them. At some point in the future, the remains of the nearly eighty-mile-long separation barrier, largely an eight-metre-high concrete wall, built in the first decades of the 21st century by the State of Israel to protect itself from terrorist attacks from the occupied Palestinian territories.

Excerpt from Det förlorade landet, The Lost Land (Bonniers 1996, 2007, revised edition forthcoming in 2024)
Children of the Holocaust
Alex Danzig, a schoolmate from my years in Israel (1962-64) was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Nearly a fourth of the population of kibbutz Nir Oz was either killed or kidnapped.
This what I wrote about Alex and Nir Oz in my book Det förlorade landet, Bonniers 1996, L’utopie perdue, Denoël 2002, Das verlorene Land, Suhrkamp, Jüdischer Verlag, 1998).

Essay for Eurozine, August 2023.
Is Europe Possible?
The European Union is the product of wars. Of two world wars that nearly put an end to Europe as we know it.
Of a cold war that seemingly forever drew an iron curtain through it. Of the near-death experience of Europe as an idea.
For more than anything Europe is an idea; the idea of the many peoples, languages and cultures crowded together on a patchy peninsula at the western edge of the Asian landmass sharing a common home and a common destiny.
Is Europe still possible?

Column in Godmorgon världen, Swedish Radio, 11.6.2023
Ukraine and Europe
Once again, Europe's many states, large and small, have received a brutal reminder that if they cannot by themselves maintain - and if necessary defend - a common European house, there may be no house left to defend.
Which is the main reason why the cause of Ukraine must be the cause of Europe.
And why the nations of Europe must urgently strengthen their common house instead of weakening it.

Column in Godmorgon världen, Swedish Radio,, 25.9.2022
In Defense of the West
I too can see the weaknesses and failings, and most often the hypocrisy, of what Putin now hatefully calls the West, but I can also see that the world order in which we have lived since the end of the Second World War, and which is largely based on Western ideas and ideals, and which for better or worse has had the USA as its ultimate guarantor, is well worth defending against the world order for which Vladimir Putin has gone to war, and for which Xi Jinping seems to be gearing up, and which, judging by what they are now saying and doing, they both want to base on the principle that might is right and power is justice.

An essay written for Counterpoint, UK.
Sweden – the Reluctant Nation
An essay in Sweden written in 2012, giving the background to the remarkable rise of a nationalist-populist party in 2022. On why Sweden for so long resisted the nationalist-populist temptation, and why it no longer does.

Contribution to seminar on Ukraine and academic freedom at Lund University, Marc h 17th, 2022.
Ukraine and Freedom
In the war in Ukraine, the term freedom takes on a new dimension. Or rather, its true, existential, dimension. That freedom which consist in the human ability and capacity to choose. Or in that inner knowledge that we have a choice. That life is not predetermined, not imposed on us by a force or a destiny that we cannot influence by our choice of action or thinking.
Freedom as opposed to the power of what has to be.
Freedom as the power of what ought to be.
Freedom as opposed to the notion that might is always right.

Comment in the wake Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Expressen 26 February 2022.
Mutual madness?
With the ascent to superpower of presidents like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin it seems clear that the central premise of nuclear deterrence, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD, has fallen. We now know that a more or less unhinged person can become the leader of a superpower and gain control of its nuclear weapons, and that MAD therefore is no longer a reliable deterrent.

Essay in Eco-Ethica, vol 9 2020.
The Peculiarities of Nations
In the evolving relationship between the European Union and its member states, the evolution of a democratic deficit at theEuropean level has become increasingly manifest and problematic. At the core of the problem are the persistent peculiarities of European nation-states, in this case, the reluctance of successful nation-states like Sweden and Denmark to concede democratic power and legitimacy to a common European polity. 

What is antisemitism?
The definition of antisemitism that the Swedish government has committed itself to has contributed to the ongoing and dangerous trivialization and politicization of the fight against antisemitism in order to discredit and disarm even those criticisms of the State of Israel that must be considered fully legitimate.

Essay in the Swedish daily Expressen June 4th 2017
Measuring Israel.  It is sometimes said that Israel is measured on a different scale than other countries, which is probably true, and moreover quite explicable, and for me a given as well. When the idea of "Jewish state" was born at the first Zionist congress in Basel hundred twenty years ago, and when the British government in the Balfour Declaration hundred years ago committed itself to a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine, and when the UN General Assembly seventy years ago voted for the partition of the British mandate in a Jewish and Arab state, and when fifty years ago the new state of Israel won what looked like a David’s victory over Goliath, no ordinary scales applied. Someone would say that biblical scales applied, and there is some truth to this as well.

Comment in the Swedish daily Expressen, April 29, 2017.
Donald Trump's hundred days of destruction. After a hundred days, President Donald Trump has accomplished a lot. Not by making anything, or getting anything done (rather a record of not getting anything done) but by undermining some of the foundations of American democracy. The authority of the Presidency has been gambled away on a faint twitter account for the nightly production of alternative facts and shameless lies. The President’s oval office has been remade into a TV-studio for the making of the daily reality show, "The President signs another historic document to make America great again", against a interchangeable backdrop of constantly smiling and applauding yes-men (and an occasional woman) - like in any banana republic. The independence and the disinterestedness of the office of the President he has without a moment’s hesitation sacrificed to Mammon, or more precisely to the ability of the Trump family to enrich itself by using the power of government to promote its private businesses – like in any banana republic.

Comment on Swedish Radio P1, Sunday morning show, Godmorgon världen, January 22, 2017.
Donald Trump and the Global  Return of Nationalism
At his inauguration on January 20, 2017, the 45th president of the United States made abundantly clear to the world that the world no longer is America’s concern, and that a world order which so far had been built on that very premise would have to find something else to build on.
Like walls between nations instead of open borders, isolationism and protectionism instead of international agreements and treaties, the right of the mighty instead of a common system of international rights and obligations that was instituted at the end of the WW II  to make sure that the nationalist outbreaks and breakdowns that twice had ravaged the world would never happen again. 

Comment on Swedish Radio P1, Sunday morning show, Godmorgon världen, November 20, 2016.
History has not ended
No, “ordinary people” didn’t necessarily say and think as Donald Trump before Donald Trump made his voice heard. The voice of the classical demagogue.
The democrats of Greek antiquity feared the demagogue more than anything else, since they knew well what the unscrupulous voice of a demagogue could to do democracy, namely undo it.

Comment in Expressen, November 13, 2016.
Sleepless in Europe
The election of Donald Trump has demonstrated  that a language of defamation, hatred and lying can attract more voters than it repels, and that verbal brutality can be a road to power. The outcome of the US election is a clear message to the burgeoning populist and xenophobic parties of Europe that they henceforth should feel free to smear, vilify and incite without any fear of transgressing the “politically correct” borders of decency and shame. 
See also this version published by Huffington Post.

Comment on Godmorgon världen, Swedish Radio, October 23 2016.
Democracy after Trump
Donald Trump will not become America's next president, on this I dare put my money, but the problem is no longer Donald Trump. The problem is the many millions of Americans who are still going to vote for what the whole world now knows is a notorious liar, a shameless molester of women, a xenophobe, an advocate of torture, an admirer of dictators, an inciter of violence, who' is handing out promises he cannot possibly keep. 

Comment on Godmorgon världen, Swedish Radio, July 31st 2016.
When lying becomes norm
It is true that Machiavelliinformed his prince that “the deceiver always will always find someone ready to be deceived”, but I find it hard to believe that he could have imagined millions of people willingly being deceived by someone who openly and shamelessly had declared to anyone willing to listen that his truth of today was his lie of tomorrow.

A RE-READ FROM THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM
New Perspectives Quarterly, Summer 1999
The Heritage of a Century
Things have changed, important collective experiences have been made, history does not repeat itself, but when we wish to assess the heritage of a century, we cannot but mote that the tensions we thought were history, are still with us, or can easily be recreated.