Nexus


Book Description

Second volume of the biennial publication of the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop, making available important new research and considering the definition and development of the field of German Jewish Studies. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University, the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. It publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies and serves as a venue for introducing new directions in the field, analyzing the development and definition of the field itself, and considering the place of German Jewish Studies within the disciplines of both German Studiesand Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. The second volume of Nexus presents a special forum section on the controversial German Jewish religious historian Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909-80), including contributions by Julius H. Schoeps, Hans J. Hillerbrand, Eric M. Meyers, Laura Lieber, Noah B. Strote, and Paul Reitter, as well as cutting-edge essays thathighlight important new developments in the field of German Jewish Studies. Contributors: Nick Block, Abigail Gillman, Anton Hieke, Hans J. Hillerbrand, Martin Kagel, Richard S. Levy, Laura Lieber, Eric M. Meyers, Andrea Reiter, Paul Reitter, Julius H. Schoeps, Noah B. Strote, Karina von Tippelskirch. William C. Donahue is Bishop-MacDermott Family Professor of Germanic Languages & Literature, and Professor, Program in Literature andJewish Studies, Duke University. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.




Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History


Book Description

What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different eras and social contexts. Working from an expansive concept of “the spatial,” these contributions look not only at physical sites but at professional, political, institutional, and imaginative realms, as well as historical Jewish experiences of spacelessness. Together, they encompass spaces as varied as early modern print shops and Weimar cinema, always pointing to the complex intertwining of German and Jewish identity.




A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945


Book Description

A comprehensive account of Jewish life in a country that carries the legacy of being at the epicenter of the Holocaust. Originally published in German in 2012, this comprehensive history of Jewish life in postwar Germany provides a systematic account of Jews and Judaism from the Holocaust to the early 21st Century by leading experts of modern German-Jewish history. Beginning in the immediate postwar period with a large concentration of Eastern European Holocaust survivors stranded in Germany, the book follows Jews during the relative quiet period of the 50s and early 60s during which the foundations of new Jewish life were laid. Brenner’s volume goes on to address the rise of anti-Israel sentiments after the Six Day War as well as the beginnings of a critical confrontation with Germany’s Nazi past in the late 60s and early 70s, noting the relatively small numbers of Jews living in Germany up to the 90s. The contributors argue that these Jews were a powerful symbolic presence in German society and sent a meaningful signal to the rest of the world that Jewish life was possible again in Germany after the Holocaust. “This volume, which illuminates a multi-faceted panorama of Jewish life after 1945, will remain the authoritative reading on the subject for the time to come.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung “An eminently readable work of history that addresses an important gap in the scholarship and will appeal to specialists and interested lay readers alike.” —Reading Religion “Comprehensive, meticulously researched, and beautifully translated.” —CHOICE




The German-Jewish Experience Revisited


Book Description

In the past decades the “German-Jewish phenomenon” (Derrida) has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various fields: Jewish studies, intellectual history, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, critical theory. In all its complex dimensions, the post-enlightenment German-Jewish experience is overwhelmingly regarded as the most quintessential and charged meeting of Jews with the project of modernity. Perhaps for this reason, from the eighteenth century through to our own time it has been the object of intense reflection, of clashing interpretations and appropriations. In both micro and macro case-studies, this volume engages the multiple perspectives as advocated by manifold interested actors, and analyzes their uses, biases and ideological functions over time in different cultural, disciplinary and national contexts. This volume includes both historical treatments of differing German-Jewish understandings of their experience – their relations to their Judaism, general culture and to other Jews – and contemporary reflections and competing interpretations as to how to understand the overall experience of German Jewry.




German as a Jewish Problem


Book Description

The German language holds an ambivalent and controversial place in the modern history of European Jews, representing different—often conflicting—historical currents. It was the language of the German classics, of German Jewish writers and scientists, of Central European Jewish culture, and of Herzl and the Zionist movement. But it was also the language of Hitler, Goebbels, and the German guards in Nazi concentration camps. The crucial role of German in the formation of Jewish national culture and politics in the late nineteenth century has been largely overshadowed by the catastrophic events that befell Jews under Nazi rule. German as a Jewish Problem tells the Jewish history of the German language, focusing on Jewish national movements in Central and Eastern Europe and Palestine/Israel. Marc Volovici considers key writers and activists whose work reflected the multilingual nature of the Jewish national sphere and the centrality of the German language within it, and argues that it is impossible to understand the histories of modern Hebrew and Yiddish without situating them in relation to German. This book offers a new understanding of the language problem in modern Jewish history, turning to German to illuminate the questions and dilemmas that largely defined the experience of European Jews in the age of nationalism.




The Future of the German-Jewish Past


Book Description

Germany’s acceptance of its direct responsibility for the Holocaust has strengthened its relationship with Israel and has led to a deep commitment to combat antisemitism and rebuild Jewish life in Germany. As we draw close to a time when there will be no more firsthand experience of the horrors of the Holocaust, there is great concern about what will happen when German responsibility turns into history. Will the present taboo against open antisemitism be lifted as collective memory fades? There are alarming signs of the rise of the far right, which includes blatantly antisemitic elements, already visible in public discourse. The evidence is unmistakable—overt antisemitism is dramatically increasing once more. The Future of the German-Jewish Past deals with the formidable challenges created by these developments. It is conceptualized to offer a variety of perspectives and views on the question of the future of the German-Jewish past. The volume addresses topics such as antisemitism, Holocaust memory, historiography, and political issues relating to the future relationship between Jews, Israel, and Germany. While the central focus of this volume is Germany, the implications go beyond the German-Jewish experience and relate to some of the broader challenges facing modern societies today.




German-Jewish History in Modern Times: Emancipation and acculturation, 1780-1871


Book Description

This four-volume collective project by a team of leading scholars offers a vivid portrait of Jewish history in German-speaking countries over nearly four centuries. This series is sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute, established in 1955 in Jerusalem, London, and New York for the purpose of advancing scholarship on the Jews in German-speaking lands.




Jewish Pasts, German Fictions


Book Description

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions is the first comprehensive study of how German-Jewish writers used images from the Spanish-Jewish past to define their place in German culture and society. Jonathan Skolnik argues that Jewish historical fiction was a form of cultural memory that functioned as a parallel to the modern, demythologizing project of secular Jewish history writing. What did it imply for a minority to imagine its history in the majority language? Skolnik makes the case that the answer lies in the creation of a German-Jewish minority culture in which historical fiction played a central role. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Jewish writers and artists, both in Nazi Germany and in exile, employed images from the Sephardic past to grapple with the nature of fascism, the predicament of exile, and the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. The book goes on to show that this past not only helped Jews to make sense of the nonsense, but served also as a window into the hopes for integration and fears about assimilation that preoccupied German-Jewish writers throughout most of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, Skolnik positions the Jewish embrace of German culture not as an act of assimilation but rather a reinvention of Jewish identity and historical memory.




A History of German Jewish Bible Translation


Book Description

Between 1780 and 1937, Jews in Germany produced numerous new translations of the Hebrew Bible into German. Intended for Jews who were trilingual, reading Yiddish, Hebrew, and German, they were meant less for religious use than to promote educational and cultural goals. Not only did translations give Jews vernacular access to their scripture without Christian intervention, but they also helped showcase the Hebrew Bible as a work of literature and the foundational text of modern Jewish identity. This book is the first in English to offer a close analysis of German Jewish translations as part of a larger cultural project. Looking at four distinct waves of translations, Abigail Gillman juxtaposes translations within each that sought to achieve similar goals through differing means. As she details the history of successive translations, we gain new insight into the opportunities and problems the Bible posed for different generations and gain a new perspective on modern German Jewish history.




Germany On Their Minds


Book Description

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable—whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.