German–Jewish Studies

History / By /
German–Jewish Studies

Author: Kerry Wallach

Publisher: Berghahn Books

ISBN: 9781800736788

Category: History

Page: 310

View: 781

As a field, German-Jewish Studies emphasizes the dangers of nationalism, monoculturalism, and ethnocentrism, while making room for multilingual and transnational perspectives with questions surrounding migration, refugees, exile, and precarity. Focussing on the relevance and utility of the field for the twenty-first century, German-Jewish Studies explores why studying and applying German-Jewish history and culture must evolve and be given further attention today. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to reconsider the history of antisemitism—as well as intersections of antisemitism with racism and colonialism—and how connections to German Jews shed light on the continuities, ruptures, anxieties, and possible futures of German-speaking Jews and their legacies.

Nexus

History / By /
Nexus

Author: William Collins Donahue

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

ISBN: 9781571135636

Category: History

Page: 202

View: 753

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.

The German-Jewish Experience Revisited

History / By /
The German-Jewish Experience Revisited

Author: Steven E. Aschheim

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

ISBN: 9783110393323

Category: History

Page: 288

View: 497

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.

Transatlantic German Studies

Biography & Autobiography / By /
Transatlantic German Studies

Author: Paul Michael Lutzeler

Publisher: Camden House

ISBN: 9781640140127

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 302

View: 182

The prominent scholar-contributors to this volume share their experiences developing the field of US German Studies and their thoughts on literature and interdisciplinarity, pluralism and diversity, and transatlantic dialogue.

German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust

History / By /
German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust

Author: David A. Brenner

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781134041541

Category: History

Page: 128

View: 396

David A. Brenner examines how Jews in Central Europe developed one of the first "ethnic" or "minority" cultures in modernity. Not exclusively "German" or "Jewish," the experiences of German-speaking Jewry in the decades prior to the Third Reich and the Holocaust were also negotiated in encounters with popular culture, particularly the novel, the drama and mass media. Despite recent scholarship, the misconception persists that Jewish Germans were bent on assimilation. Although subject to compulsion, they did not become solely "German," much less "European." Yet their behavior and values were by no means exclusively "Jewish," as the Nazis or other anti-Semites would have it. Rather, the German Jews achieved a peculiar synthesis between 1890 and 1933, developing a culture that was not only "middle-class" but also "ethnic." In particular, they reinvented Judaic traditions by way of a hybridized culture. Based on research in German, Israeli and American archives, German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust addresses many of the genres in which a specifically German-Jewish identity was performed, from the Yiddish theatre and Zionist humour all the way to sensationalist memoirs and Kafka’s own kitsch. This middle-class ethnic identity encompassed and went beyond religious confession and identity politics. In focusing principally on German-Jewish popular culture, this groundbreaking book introduces the beginnings of "ethnicity" as we know it and live it today.

Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

Literary Criticism / By /
Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

Author: Jonathan M. Hess

Publisher: Stanford University Press

ISBN: 9780804774239

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 280

View: 409

For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.

German-Jewish Thought Between Religion and Politics

Religion / By /
German-Jewish Thought Between Religion and Politics

Author: Christian Wiese

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

ISBN: 9783110247756

Category: Religion

Page: 467

View: 391

German-Jewish intellectuals have occupied center stage in the discourse on Judaism and modernity since the Enlightenment. Dedicated to Paul Mendes-Flohr, this volume explores the complex interaction between Jewish thought and the often competing claims of non-Jewish society and culture, thus creating a rich image of German Jewry’s intellectual world in the modern period. The outcome is a unique collection of essays that provides crucial new insights into the religious and political dimension characterizing the thought of those populating the pantheon of German-Jewish thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Foreign Entanglements: Transnational American Jewish Studies

Religion / By /
Foreign Entanglements: Transnational American Jewish Studies

Author: Hasia Diner

Publisher: Universitätsverlag Potsdam

ISBN: 9783869565200

Category: Religion

Page: 194

View: 328

The field of American Jewish studies has recently trained its focus on the transnational dimensions of its subject, reflecting in more sustained ways than before about the theories and methods of this approach. Yet, much of the insight to be gained from seeing American Jewry as constitutively entangled in many ways with other Jewries has not yet been realized. Transnational American Jewish studies are still in their infancy. This issue of PaRDeS presents current research on the multiple entanglements of American with Central European, especially German-speaking Jewries in the 19th and 20th centuries. The articles reflect the wide range of topics that can benefit from a transnational understanding of the American Jewish experience as shaped by its foreign entanglements.

The German-Jewish Legacy in America, 1938-1988

Social Science / By /
The German-Jewish Legacy in America, 1938-1988

Author: Abraham J. Peck

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

ISBN: 0814322638

Category: Social Science

Page: 278

View: 209

The essays in this volume were written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the fateful pogrom in early November 1938 which was a watershed in the treatment of Jews in Germany and signaled the end to more than a century of specific Jewish culture there. Historian George Mosse in the opening essay characterizes this spirit as represented by Bildung, a post-emancipation notion that included character formation, moral education, the primacy of culture, the acquisition of aesthetic taste, and the belief in the potential of humanity. Bildung became to large portions of German Jewry an important, if not central, expression of their Jewishness. It is this legacy that this volume explores and seeks to understand. Among the questions contributors examine are the meaning of this legacy in our time, what has happened to it in its American context, whether it has found a home in the United States or whether it remains in exile, and which elements of the legacy are worth preserving for the next generation. Two groups address this range of questions. The first is made up of Jews born in Germany but who reached their professional maturity in the United States. The second is made up primarily of American-born individuals whose Jewish parents had either fled Nazi Germany or who, as German Jews, survived the Holocaust. The Germany Jewish Legacy in America commemorates the end of one of the greatest communities in Jewish history and explores those elements of its greatness which may still be relevant in insuring a vibrant and productive Jewish community in a free and democratic American society.

The German-Hebrew Dialogue

Religion / By /
The German-Hebrew Dialogue

Author: Amir Eshel

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

ISBN: 9783110471601

Category: Religion

Page: 269

View: 128

In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, it seemed there was no place for German in Israel and no trace of Hebrew in Germany — the two languages and their cultures appeared as divergent as the directions of their scripts. Yet when placed side by side on opposing pages, German and Hebrew converge in the middle. Comprised of essays on literature, history, philosophy, and the visual and performing arts, this volume explores the mutual influence of two linguistic cultures long held as separate or even as diametrically opposed. From Moses Mendelssohn’s arrival in Berlin in 1748 to the recent wave of Israeli migration to Berlin, the essays gathered here shed new light on the painful yet productive relationship between modern German and Hebrew cultures.

Jewish Studies in the Digital Age

History / By /
Jewish Studies in the Digital Age

Author: Gerben Zaagsma

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

ISBN: 9783110744828

Category: History

Page: 390

View: 823

As in all fields and disciplines of the humanities, Jewish Studies scholars find themselves confronted with the rapidly increasing availability of digital resources (data), new technologies to interrogate and analyze them (tools), and the question of how to critically engage with these developments. This volume discusses how the digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies. It explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems that Jewish Studies scholars confront. In a field characterised by dispersed sources, and heterogeneous scripts and languages that speak to a multitude of cultures and histories, of abundance as well as loss, what is the promise of Digital Humanities methods--and what are the challenges and pitfalls? The articles in this volume were originally presented at the international conference #DHJewish - Jewish Studies in the Digital Age, which was organised at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) at University of Luxembourg in January 2021. The first big international conference of its kind, it brought together more than sixty scholars and heritage practitioners to discuss how the digital turn affects the field of Jewish Studies.