“Urban’s superb study combines remarkable erudition with refined interpretative skills in an innovative contribution to our understanding of the often elusive role of Hasidism in Martin Buber’s thought. Because her focus on Buber always points towards an evocative periphery, her book opens a field of larger relevance that will engage readers far beyond the circle of Buber scholars.”
— Asher D. Biemann, University of Virginia
“Martina Urban’s Aesthetics of Renewal is an excellent work and certainly one of the most important books on Buber to appear in recent years. By bringing together Buber’s writings on Hasidism and Zionism, Urban allows Buber’s critical voice to speak once again in contemporary cultural conversations.”
— Leora Batnitzky, Princeton University
“Martina Urban’s lucid and erudite study situates Martin Buber’s collections of Hasidic tales and teachings within the larger project of modern Jewish anthology-making and its effort to retrieve and revitalize Jewish spirituality. This book fills a lacuna in our knowledge of Jewish thought and literature in modernity, and makes an important, indispensable contribution to our understanding of modern Jewish theology as cultural criticism.”
— David M. Stern, University of Pennsylvania
"Buber may yet teach us something about a Jewish vitality that can be renewed without searching for the authenticity of something naively essentialized, and it will be thanks to Urban if this possibility can be reconsidered as modeled by Buber."
— Michael Zank, Journal of Religion
"Urban's Aesthetics of Renewal has done an invaluable service to scholars not only of Buber but of the intellectual exchanges that defined fin-de-siecle culture, Zionism in its most creative phase, and modernism with all its deeply entrenched contradictions and inner dialectic. . . . Her book is lucid and accessible, well organized and impressively learned."
— Asher Biemann, Shofar
"Urban convincingly frames the esthetics of Jewish renewal as anti-metaphysical and anti-historical discourse ala Nietzsche, with Hasidism acting as the vital bridge between Apollonian form-appearance-illusion and Dionysian ecstatic experience. . . . Buber's early hasidica is brought into deep conversation with the German culture and intellectual currents that were contemporary to him."
— Zachary Braiterman, Religious Studies Review