The German-Jewish Experience Revisited

The German-Jewish Experience Revisited PDF Author: Steven E. Aschheim
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311036719X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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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.

The German-Jewish Experience Revisited

The German-Jewish Experience Revisited PDF Author: Steven E. Aschheim
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311036719X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

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.

The German-Jewish Experience Revisited

The German-Jewish Experience Revisited PDF Author: Steven E. Aschheim
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110393328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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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.

The Future of the German-Jewish Past

The Future of the German-Jewish Past PDF Author: Gideon Reuveni
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1557537291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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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.

Sojourners

Sojourners PDF Author:
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803212558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This absorbing book of interviews takes one to the heart of modern German Jewish history. Of the eleven German Jews interviewed, four are from West Berlin, and seven are from East Berlin. The interviews provide an exceptionally varied and intimate portrait of Jewish experience in twentieth-century Germany. There are first-hand accounts of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the divided Germany of the Cold War era. There are also vivid descriptions of the new united Germany, with its alarming resurgence of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Some of the men and women interviewed affirm their dual German and Jewish identities with vigor. There is the West Berliner, for instance, who proclaims, "I am a German Jew. I want to live here". Others describe the impossibility of being both German and Jewish: "I don't have anything in common with the whole German people". Many confess to profound ambivalence, such as the East Berliner who feels that he is neither a native nor a foreigner in Germany: "If someone asks me, 'Who are you?' then I can only say, 'I am a fish out of water.'"

Space and Time Under Persecution

Space and Time Under Persecution PDF Author: Guy Miron
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226828158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
"The rapid and radical transformations of the Nazi Era challenged the ways German Jews experienced space and time, two of the most fundamental characteristics of human existence. In Space and Time under Persecution, Guy Miron documents how German Jews came to terms with the harsh challenges of persecution-from social exclusion, economic decline, and relocation to confiscation of their homes, forced labor, and deportation to death in the east-by rethinking their experiences in spatial and temporal terms. Miron first explores the strategies and practices German Jews used to accommodate their shrinking access to public space, in turn reinventing traditional Jewish space and ideas of home. He then turns to how German Jews redesigned the annual calendar, came to terms with the ever-growing need to wait for nearly everything, and developed new interpretations of the past. Miron's insightful analysis reveals how these tactics expressed both the continuous attachment of Jews to key elements of German bourgeois life as well as their struggle to maintain Jewish agency and express Jewish defiance under Nazi persecution"--

Jewish Life in Germany

Jewish Life in Germany PDF Author: Monika Richarz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253350244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
"It is the best group portrait of German Jewry that we have." —Washington Post Book World " . . . weaves a fascinating social tapestry of German Jewry from 1780 to 1945. . . . Richarz's introduction furnishes a probing analytic overview of German Jewish social history." —Library Journal "Richarz's Jewish Life in Germany represents a major contribution to filling the void between broad generalization and actual human experience." —Contemporary Jewry " . . . a most remarkable collection of documents . . . extremely well selected, very full . . . immensely useful to anyone wanting to study modern Jewish history, modern German history, or for that matter modern history as such." —Peter Gay The social history of German Jewry from 1780 through 1945 comes to life in this unique collection of autobiographical documents by ordinary individuals from all social strata, from city and country, and from various professions and political and religious groups.

The Jews of Germany

The Jews of Germany PDF Author: Ruth Gay
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300060522
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This unique book provides a panoramic overview of a now extinct culture: the 1500-year history of the Jews in Germany. Through texts, pictures, and contemporary accounts, it follows the German Jews from their first settlements on the Rhine in the fourth century to the destruction of the community in World War II. Using both voices and images of the past, the book reveals how the German Jews looked, how they lived, what they thought about, and what others thought of them. Ruth Gay's text, interwoven with passages from memoirs, letters, newspapers, and many other contemporary sources, shows how the German Jews organized their communities, created a new language (Yiddish), and built their special culture--all this under circumstances sometimes friendly, but often murderously hostile. The book explores the internal debates that agitated the community from medieval to modern times and analyzes how German Jewry emerged into the modern world. The earliest document in the book is a fourth-century decree by the Roman emperor Constantine permitting Jews to hold office in Cologne. Among the last are poignant letters from Betty Scholem in Berlin, writing during the Nazi years to her son Gershom in Palestine. In between are accounts of a ninth-century Jewish merchant appointed by Charlemagne to a diplomatic mission to Baghdad, a thirteenth-century Jewish minnesinger, a seventeenth-century pogrom in Frankfurt in which gentiles helped to save their Jewish neighbors, and the nineteenth-century innovation of department stores, palaces of consumerism. The book tells a story--moving, terrifying, and exhilarating--that must be remembered.

Jews and Germans

Jews and Germans PDF Author: Guenter Lewy
Publisher: Jewish Publication Society
ISBN: 0827615035
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Jews and Germans is the only book in English to delve fully into the history and challenges of the German-Jewish relationship, from before the Holocaust to the present day. The Weimar Republic era—the fifteen years between Germany’s defeat in World War I (1918) and Hitler’s accession (1933)—has been characterized as a time of unparalleled German-Jewish concord and collaboration. Even though Jews constituted less than 1 percent of the German population, they occupied a significant place in German literature, music, theater, journalism, science, and many other fields. Was that German-Jewish relationship truly reciprocal? How has it evolved since the Holocaust, and what can it become? Beginning with the German Jews’ struggle for emancipation, Guenter Lewy describes Jewish life during the heyday of the Weimar Republic, particularly the Jewish writers, left-wing intellectuals, combat veterans, and adult and youth organizations. With this history as a backdrop he examines the deeply disparate responses among Jews when the Nazis assumed power. Lewy then elucidates Jewish life in postwar West Germany; in East Germany, where Jewish communists searched for a second German-Jewish symbiosis based on Marxist principles; and finally in the united Germany—illuminating the complexities of fraught relationships over time.

Continental Britons

Continental Britons PDF Author: Marion Berghahn
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
"...a scholarly yet readable book...pioneering work" Journal of Jewish Studies Based on numerous in-depth and personal interviews with members of three generations, this is the first comprehensive study of German-Jewish refugees who came to England in the 1930s. The author addresses questions such as perceptions of Germany and Britain and attitudes towards Judaism. On the basis of many case studies, the author shows how the refugees adjusted, often amazingly successfully, to their situation in Britain. While exploring the process of acculturation of the German-Jews in Britain, the author challenges received ideas about the process of Jewish assimilation in general, and that of the Jews in Germany in particular, and offers a new interpretation in the light of her own empirical data and of current anthropological theory. Marion Berghahn, Independent Scholar and Publisher, studied American Studies, Romance Languages and Philosophy at the universities of Hamburg, Freiburg and Paris. These subjects, together with history, later on formed the basis of her scholarly publishing program.

Exodus, Revisited

Exodus, Revisited PDF Author: Deborah Feldman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593185277
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The definitive follow-up to Unorthodox (the basis for the award-winning Netflix series)—now updated with more than 50 percent new material—the unforgettable story of what happened in the years after Deborah Feldman left a religious sect in Williamsburg in order to forge her own path in the world. In 2009, at the age of twenty-three, Deborah Feldman packed up her young son and their few possessions and walked away from her insular Hasidic roots. She was determined to find a better life for herself, away from the oppression and isolation of her Satmar upbringing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And in Exodus, Revisited she delves into what happened next—taking the reader on a journey that starts with her beginning life anew as a single mother, a religious refugee, and an independent woman in search of a place and a community where she can belong. Originally published in 2014, Deborah has now revisited and significantly expanded her story, and the result is greater insight into her quest to discover herself and the true meaning of home. Travels that start with making her way in New York expand into an exploration of America and eventually lead to trips across Europe to retrace her grandmother’s life during the Holocaust, before she finds a landing place in the unlikeliest of cities. Exodus, Revisited is a deeply moving examination of the nature of memory and generational trauma, and of reconciliation with both yourself and the world.