Download or read book Germans Jews and the Claims of Modernity written by Jonathan M. Hess and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the analysis of the debates in Germany over Jews, Judaism and Jewish emancipation in the late 18th and 19th centuries, Jonathan M. Hess reconstructs a crucial chapter in the history of secular anti-Semitism. He examines not only the thinking of German intellectuals of the time but also that of Jewish writers, revealing the connections between anti-Semitism and visions of modernity, and the Jewish responses to the treat posed by these connections.
Download or read book Mobile Modernity written by Todd Samuel Presner and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Treating the German railway as both an iconic symbol of modernity and a crucial social, technological, and political force, Presner advances a groundbreaking interpretation of the ways in which mobility is inextricably linked to German and Jewish visions of modernity. Moving beyond the tired model of a failed German-Jewish dialogue, Presner emphasizes the mutual entanglement of the very categories of German and Jewish and the many sites of contact and exchange that occurred between German and Jewish thinkers." "Rather than a conventional, linear history that culminates in the tragedy of the Holocaust, Presner produces a cultural mapping that articulates a much more complex story of the hopes and catastrophes of mobile modernity. By focusing on the spaces of encounter emblematically represented by the overdetermined triangulation of Germans, Jews, and trains, he introduces a new genealogy for the study of European and German-Jewish modernity."--Jacket.
Download or read book Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German Jewish Identity written by Jonathan M. Hess and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-12 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought written by Chad Alan Goldberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French tradition: 1789 and the Jews -- The German tradition: capitalism and the Jews -- The American tradition: the city and the Jews
Download or read book The Modernity of Others written by Ari Joskowicz and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-06 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.
Download or read book Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought written by Chad Alen Goldberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions and emphasized different features of modern society, they repeatedly invoked Jews as a touchstone for defining modernity and national identity in a context of rapid social change. In Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought, Chad Alan Goldberg brings us a major new study of Western social thought through the lens of Jews and Judaism. In France, where antisemites decried the French Revolution as the “Jewish Revolution,” Émile Durkheim challenged depictions of Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary reaction. When German thinkers such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism, they reproduced, in secularized form, cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. In the United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students conceived the modern city and its new modes of social organization in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there. In all three countries, social thinkers invoked real or purported differences between Jews and gentiles to elucidate key dualisms of modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of their own wider societies. Goldberg rounds out his fascinating study by proposing a novel explanation for why Jews were such an important cultural reference point. He suggests a rethinking of previous scholarship on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America, arguing that history extends into the present, with the Jews—and now the Jewish state—continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Germans Jews and Antisemites written by Shulamit Volkov and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ferocity of the Nazi attack upon the Jews took many by surprise. Volkov argues that a new look at both the nature of antisemitism and at the complexity of modern Jewish life in Germany is required in order to provide an explanation. While antisemitism had a number of functions in pre-Nazi German society, it most particularly served as a cultural code, a sign of belonging to a particular political and cultural milieu. Surprisingly, it only had a limited effect on the lives of the Jews themselves. By the end of the nineteenth century, their integration was well advanced. Many of them enjoyed prosperity, prestige, and the pleasures of metropolitan life. This book stresses the dialectical nature of assimilation, the lead of the Jews in the processes of modernization, and, finally, their continuous efforts to 'invent' a modern Judaism that would fit their new social and cultural position.
Download or read book Space and Spatiality in Modern German Jewish History written by Simone Lässig and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Judaism Within Modernity written by Michael A. Meyer and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of articles, most of them published previously. The following deal with antisemitism:
Download or read book Between Redemption and Doom written by Noah William Isenberg and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between Redemption and Doom is a revelatory exploration of the evolution of German-Jewish modernism. Through an examination of selected works in literature, theory, and film, Noah Isenberg investigates the ways in which Jewish identity was represented in German culture from the eve of the First World War through the rise of National Socialism. He argues that various responses to modernity?particularly to its social, cultural, and aesthetic currents?converge around the discourse on community: its renaissance, its crisis, and its dissolution. ø Isenberg opens with a general discussion of German modernism?its primary forms, movements, and manifestations. Subsequent chapters on Franz Kafka and Arnold Zweig deal with particular instances of the modern, and often ambivalent, search for forms of German-Jewish identity based on cultural and ethnic community. Discussions of Paul Wegener?s film Der Golem and Walter Benjamin?s childhood memoirs explore the culmination of German modernism and the modes through which Jews were identified in mass society. Throughout, Isenberg shows how Jewish authors and figures confronted the dilemma of self-understanding?the exigencies of community in the modern world?in language, culture, memory, and representation.
Download or read book Toward Modernity written by Jacob Katz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume throw light on one of the central problems of modern Jewish historiography: How has Jewry and Judaism survived the crisis of the breakup of Jewish traditional society, the transition from the dosed, ghetto existence into a more or less open environment? The process of development, starting in eighteenth-century Germany, gradually encompassed the entire world of European Jewish experience.Toward Modernity compares modernization in Germany with its counterparts in other countries to see if the German-Jewish development had any influence on what transpired elsewhere. The authors explore the history of Jewish modernization in Russia, Galicia, Vienna, Prague, Hungary, Holland, France, England, Italy, and the United States. Topics covered include: the political and social authority of Jewish community institutions; external impediments and internal inhibitions for Jews to be absorbed by the dominant culture; the relationship of the state to the Jewish community; educational and religious reform; the influence of the rational scientific worldview; and the possibility of inclusion in the emerging middle classes.Contents: Jacob Katz, Introduction; Emanuel Etkes, Immanent Factors and External Influences in the Development of the Haskala Movement in Russia; Israel Bartal, 'The Heavenly City of Germany' and Absolutism a la Mode D'Autriche: The Rise of the Haskala in Galicia; Robert S. Wistrich, The Modernization of Viennese Jewry: The Impact of German Culture in a Multiethnic State; Hillel J. Kieval, Caution's Progress: The Modernization of Jewish Life in Prague, 1780-1830; Michael Silber, The German Jewish Experience and Its Impact on Hungarian Jewry, 1780-1870; Michael Graetz, The History of an Estrangement between Two Jewish Communities: German and French Jewry during the Nineteenth Century; Joseph Michman, The Impact of German-Jewish Modernization on Dutch Jewry; Lois C. Dubin, Trieste and Berlin: The Italian Role in the Cultural Politics of the Haskalah; Todd M. Endelman, The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England; Michael A. Meyer, German Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century America.
Download or read book German Jewish History in Modern Times Emancipation and acculturation 1780 1871 written by Mordechai Breuer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mediating Modernity written by Lauren B. Strauss and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-02 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of Jewish studies, German history, and religious history will appreciate this timely volume.
Download or read book A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945 written by Michael Brenner and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue written by Jeffrey S. Librett and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking work, the author effects the first extended rhetorical-philosophical reading of the historically problematic relationship between Jews and Germans, based on an analysis of texts from the Enlightenment through Modernism by Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. The theoretical underpinning of the work lies in the authors rereading, in terms of contemporary rhetorical theory, of the medieval tradition known as figural representation, which defines the Jewish-Christian relation as that between the dead, prefigural letter and the living, fulfilled spirit. After arguing that the German Enlightenment ultimately plays out the historical phantasm of a necessary Judaization of Protestant rationality, the author shows that German Early Romanticism consists fundamentally in the attempt to solve the aporias raised by this impossible confrontation between Protestant spirit and Jewish letter. In readings of Dorothea SchlegelMendelssohns daughterand her husband Friedrich Schlegel, the author provides a new interpretation of the Neo-Catholic turn of later German Romanticism. Further, he situates the proleptic end and reversal of the project of Jewish emancipation in the two extreme versions of late-nineteenth-century anti-Judaism, those of Marx and Wagner, here viewed as binary concretizations of a specifically post-Romantic paganized Protestantism. Finally, the author argues that twentieth-century Modernism as represented by Nietzsche and Freud renews, if in a multiply ironic displacement, the secret Judaizing tendencies of the Enlightenment. Fascism and Communism both denigrate this Modernism, which affirms the letter of language as quasi-synonymous with the force of temporalityor anticipatory repetitionthat disrupts all claims to the full presence of spirit. The book ends with a note on recent debates about Holocaust memory.
Download or read book Modernism Without Jews written by Scott Spector and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nowhere else have Jews contributed so massively and consequentially to the general culture than in Germany. From Mendelssohn to Marx, from Freud to Einstein, Jewish contributions to secular German thought have been both wide-ranging in scope and profound in their impact. But how are these intellectual innovations contributions to European Jewish culture? How are they to be defined as Jewish? Scott Spector argues for a return to the actual subjects of German-Jewish history as a way to understand them and their worlds. By engaging deeply with the individual as well as with the literary or philosophical character of the text, Spector offers a fresh view of the presumed contradictions, uncertainties, and paradoxes that underlie the project of Jewish participation in culture. Spector forges a new definition of what modernist creativity means in our understanding of German-Jewish culture.
Download or read book Antisemitism and Modernity written by Hyam Maccoby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-02-14 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of anti-Semitism, not long ago thought to be a dead issue, has been revised due to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Maccoby traces the now topical discussion of the origins of Anti-Semitism, and especially its development in the modern world. The key questions that are addressed include: How is it that this medieval prejudice proved so lasting and potent? Are the roots of anti-Semitism religious? If so, how do these roots differ in Christianity and Islam? By what means did it bridge the gap between medievalism and Enlightenment? How was it that many of the most respected Enlightenment figures (such as Voltaire) dedicated as they were to tolerance and pluralism, retained a virulent anti-Semitism? These questions, and many more, are dealt with as Maccoby explores the roots of the anti-Semitism, tracing it from its origins, and shows how it has changed in accordance with the shifting ideas of the modern world but without changing in its essence. Antisemitism and Modernity is essential reading for those with interests in the development of anti-Semitism, its manifestation in the current world and its future.
