German Jewish Cultures

Frakes, Jerold C.: The Emergence of Early Yiddish Literature. Cultural Translation in Ashkenaz, (2017) 
 

Spector, Scott: Modernism without Jews?. German-Jewish Subjects and Histories, (2017)

In this rich transnational history, Cornelia Aust traces Jewish Ashkenazi families as they moved across Europe and established new commercial and entrepreneurial networks as they went. Aust balances economic history with elaborate discussions of Jewish marriage patterns, women's economic activity, and intimate family life. Following their travels from Amsterdam to Warsaw, Aust opens a multifaceted window into the lives, relationships, and changing conditions of economic activity of a new Jewish mercantile elite.

Ilany, Ofri: In Search of the Hebrew People. Bible and Nation in the German Enlightenment, (2018) 

As German scholars, poets, and theologians searched for the origins of the ancient Israelites, Ofri Ilany believes they created a model for nationalism that drew legitimacy from the biblical idea of the Chosen People. In this broad exploration of eighteenth-century Hebraism, Ilany tells the story of the surprising role that this model played in discussions of ethnicity, literature, culture, and nationhood among the German-speaking intellectual elite. He reveals the novel portrait…

Kita, Caroline A.: Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna. Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater, (2019)

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…

Panagiotidis, Jannis: The Unchosen Ones. Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany, (2019)

Steinke, Ronen: Fritz Bauer. The Jewish Prosecutor Who Brought Eichmann and Auschwitz to Trial, (2020) 

McCormick, Richard W.: Sex, Politics, and Comedy. The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch, (2020)

Caplan, Marc: Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin. A Fugitive Modernism, (2021)

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…

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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