Publications

Animal, Vegetal, Marginal explores the oft-forgotten yet provocative German genre of die Groteske, or the literary grotesque. This short prose form challenges the norms of being human and being accepted as such by society in exaggerated and satirical ways. Between the Kaiser's and Hitler's Reichs, the genre's irreverent comedy and criticism sold out cabarets, drew droves of radio listeners, and created bestsellers.

Yet, because its authors were ruthlessly censored and persecuted, die Groteske is virtually unknown today and neglected by scholarship.
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Contents

I. NAVIGATING IN-BETWEENNESS: JEWISH REFUGEES IN GLOBAL TRANSIT

SIMONE LÄSSIG AND SWEN STEINBERG: Navigating Liminality: Jewish Refugees in Global Transit

LISA GERLACH: ‘I think he will be able to adjust’. Letters of Recommendation Accompanying Jewish Refugees in Transit during National Socialism

NATALIE EPPELSHEIMER: Diasporic (Dis)connections and In-betweennesses: German-Jewish Refugees and Indians in Kenya

KIMBERLY CHENG: Chongqing Transit:…

Sabine Schmidtke reconstructs the scientific biography of Martin Schreiner (1863-1926), a prominent student of Ignaz Goldziher and important representative of the ‘study of Judaism’, from his education in Budapest up until his productive phase in Berlin.

XVI, 830 pages. ISBN: 978-3-16-162374-5 DOI: -

Cathy S Gelbin and David Rechter

The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 68, Issue 1, October 2023, Page ix, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/ybad006

David Rechter

The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 68, Issue 1, October 2023, Pages 3–4, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/ybad003

Renate Evers…

Interconnectivity and Entanglements
Edited by Susanne Marten-Finnis and Michael Nagel

Susanne Marten-Finnis Born 1957; Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Portsmouth; visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies); honorary research fellow at the Centre of Migration, Diaspora and Exile at the University of Central Lancashire (MIDEX).

A cultural history of friendship in Germanic Judaism

Gerade für die junge Generation der um 1900 Geborenen repräsentierte die Ideologie, das Versprechen der Freundschaft so vieles, das ihrem alltäglichen Leben Sinn und Bedeutung gab. Die Frage, wie »richtig« zu leben sei, konnte die Tradition oft nicht mehr beantworten. Stattdessen verbürgte die Freundschaft ein Leben, das auf Loyalität und Treue, auf Wahrheit und Gleichberechtigung basierte. Man wurde in eine Freundschaft nicht hineingeboren, sondern wählte sie sich aus freien Stücken und demonstrierte damit zugleich…

How did German Jews present their claims for equality to everyday Germans in the first half of the nineteenth century? We Will Never Yield offers the first English-language study of the role of the German press in the fight for Jewish agency and participation during the 1840s.
 
David Meola explores how the German press became a key venue for public debates over Jewish emancipation; religious, educational, and occupational reforms; and the role of Jews in German civil society, even against a background of escalating violence against the Jews in Germany.
 
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In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garloff traces the emergence of a new Jewish literature in Germany and Austria from 1990 to the present. The rise of new generations of authors who identify as both German and Jewish, and who often sustain additional affiliations with places such as France, Russia, or Israel, affords a unique opportunity to analyze the foundational moments of diasporic literature. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is structured around a series of founding gestures: performing authorship, remaking memory, and claiming places…

Lisa Sophie Gebhard

Published in German.

Lisa Sophie Gebhard explores the multifaceted activities of the Zionist Davis Trietsch (1870–1935), who was once a remarkable figure on the Jewish nationalist scene but after his death disappeared almost entirely from historical memory. In this work, the author brings together coherent biographical information about him for the very first time. Trietsch, who initiated several forward-looking projects, emerges as a dynamic social actor whose thought was particularly influenced by innovations developed in the United States.

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The influence of theatre director Kurt Hirschfeld on German theatre both in Swiss exile and after 1945 is second to none. This book explores both the fragmentary experiences of exile of this central figure in German-Jewish history, as well as his intellectual relationships to authors like Berthold Brecht and Max Frisch.

VII, 208 pages. ISBN: 978-3-16-161162-9 DOI: -

In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new…

Published in English.

The Wissenschaft des Judentums was born in the battle for equality, integration, and regeneration in nineteenth-century Germany and in its turn to history posed an intellectual revolution for modern Judaism. In this volume of collected essays, Ismar Schorsch provides a contextual study of the perilous origins and rapid developments of jüdische Wissenschaft outside the framework of the German university, which dominated the field of historical scholarship at the time.

Ismar Schorsch Born 1935; 1957 B.A., Ursinus College…

Ernst Lubitsch (1982–1947) was one of the most successful and influential German filmmakers in American film comedy. In this volume, Rick McCormick argues for a more transnational view of Lubitsch's career and films with respect to nationality, ethnicity, migration, class, sexuality, and gender. McCormick focuses on Lubitsch's Jewishness, which is inseparable from the distinct transnational character of the director, categorizing his early films as "Jewish comedies" where Lubitsch strikes a tenuous balance between Jewish humor, antisemitic jokes, stereotypes, and the incorporation of…

Steinke, Ronen: Fritz Bauer. The Jewish Prosecutor Who Brought Eichmann and Auschwitz to Trial, (2020) German Jewish judge and prosecutor Fritz Bauer (1903–1968) played a key role in the arrest of Adolf Eichmann and the initiation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. Author Ronen Steinke tells this remarkable story while sensitively exploring the many contributions Bauer made to the postwar German justice system. As it sheds light on Bauer's Jewish identity and the role it played in these trials and his later career, Steinke's deft narrative contributes to the larger story of Jewishness in…

Preface By Cathy S. Gelbin, David Rechter, And Daniel Wildmann

I. Medieval Legacies 

Renate Evers: The 1484 Nuremberg Jewry Oath (More Judaico) Amir Engel: German-jewish Esotericism: The Case Of Meir Wiener’s Expressionist Kabbalah

II. German Jewish Encounters 

Amy Hill Shevitz And Susanne Hillman: Franz Rosenzweig, Adele Alsberg Rosenzweig, And The German-jewish Family Sarah Wobick-segev: Fighting Hatred And Teaching Love In A ‘World That Is Common To Us All’: Recontextualizing Stefan Zweig’s…

Since the refugee crisis of 2015, the topic of migration has moved to the center of global political debates. Despite the frequently invoked notion that current developments are without historical precedent, migration has been a constant feature of contemporary history, particularly in Europe. Jannis Panagiotidis considers a particular type of migration, co-ethnic migration, where migrants seek admission to a country based on their purported ethnicity or nationality being the same as the country of destination. Panagiotidis looks at immigration to Germany and Israel, focusing on individual…

During the mid-19th century, the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner sparked an impulse toward German cultural renewal and social change that drew on religious myth, metaphysics, and spiritualism. The only problem was that their works were deeply antisemitic and entangled with claims that Jews were incapable of creating compassionate art. By looking at the works of Jewish composers and writers who contributed to a lively and robust biblical theatre in fin de siècle Vienna, Caroline A. Kita shows how they reimagined myths of the Old Testament to offer new aesthetic and ethical…

[Plants for Palestine. Otto Warburg and the Natural Sciences in the Yishuv.] Published in German.

2019. VII, 267 pages.

What story does the cultivation of Palestinian plants and other Botanical Zionism crops tell us about the historical and political relations between people, politics, and ideology? Dana von Suffrin investigates the impact made by a group of Otto Warburg-inspired Zionists who wanted to establish a Jewish state with the help of science.

As history was being recorded, the so-called botanical Zionism that grew up around the German-Jewish colonial botanist…