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 Jewish Life in Nazi Germany written by Francis R. Nicosia and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: German Jews faced harsh dilemmas in their responses to Nazi persecution, partly a result of Nazi cruelty and brutality but also a result of an understanding of their history and rightful place in Germany. This volume addresses the impact of the anti-Jewish policies of Hitler’s regime on Jewish family life, Jewish women, and the existence of Jewish organizations and institutions and considers some of the Jewish responses to Nazi anti-Semitism and persecution. This volume offers scholars, students, and interested readers a highly accessible but focused introduction to Jewish life under National Socialism, the often painful dilemmas that it produced, and the varied Jewish responses to those dilemmas.

Download or read book Between Dignity and Despair written by Marion A. Kaplan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-06-10 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their daily lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane. Answering the charge that Jews should have left earlier, Kaplan shows that far from seeming inevitable, the Holocaust was impossible to foresee precisely because Nazi repression occurred in irregular and unpredictable steps until the massive violence of Novemer 1938. Then the flow of emigration turned into a torrent, only to be stopped by the war. By that time Jews had been evicted from their homes, robbed of their possessions and their livelihoods, shunned by their former friends, persecuted by their neighbors, and driven into forced labor. For those trapped in Germany, mere survival became a nightmare of increasingly desperate options. Many took their own lives to retain at least some dignity in death; others went underground and endured the fears of nightly bombings and the even greater terror of being discovered by the Nazis. Most were murdered. All were pressed to the limit of human endurance and human loneliness. Focusing on the fate of families and particularly women's experience, Between Dignity and Despair takes us into the neighborhoods, into the kitchens, shops, and schools, to give us the shape and texture, the very feel of what it was like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Download or read book Being Jewish in 21st Century Germany written by Olaf Glöckner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Die Reihe Europäisch-Jüdische Studien repräsentiert die international vernetzte Kompetenz des »Moses Mendelssohn Zentrums für europäisch-jüdische Studien« (MMZ). Der interdisziplinäre Charakter der Reihe, die in Kooperation mit dem Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg herausgegeben wird, zielt insbesondere auf geschichts-, geistes- und kulturwissenschaftliche Ansätze sowie auf intellektuelle, politische, literarische und religiöse Grundfragen, die jüdisches Leben und Denken in der Vergangenheit beeinflusst haben und noch heute inspirieren. Mit ihren Publikationen weiß sich das MMZ der über 250jährigen Tradition der von Moses Mendelssohn begründeten Jüdischen Aufklärung und der Wissenschaft des Judentums verpflichtet. In den BEITRÄGEN werden exzellente Monographien und Sammelbände zum gesamten Themenspektrum Jüdischer Studien veröffentlicht. Die Reihe ist peer-reviewed.

Download or read book Jewish Life and Culture in Germany after 1945 written by Katrin Keßler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was the re-emerging Jewish religious practice after 1945 shaped by traditions before the Shoah? To what extent was it influenced by new inspirations through migration and new cultural contacts? By analysing objects like prayer books, musical instruments, Torah scrolls, audio documents and prayer rooms, this volume shows how the post-war communities created new Jewish musical, architectural and artistic forms while abiding by the tradition. This peer-reviewed volume presents contributions to the conference „Jewish communities in Germany in Transition", held in July 2021, as well as the results of a related research project carried out by two university institutions and two museums: the Bet Tfila – Research Unit for Jewish Architecture (Technische Universität Braunschweig), the European Center for Jewish Music (Hanover University for Music, Drama and Media), the Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, and the Jewish Museum Augsburg Swabia. For the first time, post war synagogues in Germany and their objects were researched on a broad and interdisciplinary basis – regarding history of architecture, art history of their furniture and ritual objects as well as liturgy and musicology. The project was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) during the years 2018 to 2021 in its funding line „The Language of Objects".

Download or read book How Jews Became Germans written by Deborah Sadie Hertz and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, an urgent priority was to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country’s premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertz’s discovery of these records, the Judenkartei, was the first step on a long research journey that has led to this compelling book. Hertz begins the book in 1645, when the records begin, and traces generations of German Jewish families for the next two centuries. The book analyzes the statistics and explores letters, diaries, and other materials to understand in a far more nuanced way than ever before why Jews did or did not convert to Protestantism. Focusing on the stories of individual Jews in Berlin, particularly the charismatic salon woman Rahel Levin Varnhagen and her husband, Karl, a writer and diplomat, Hertz humanizes the stories, sets them in the context of Berlin’s evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.

Download or read book Three Way Street written by Jay Howard Geller and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-09-21 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing Germany's significance as an essential crossroads and incubator for modern Jewish culture

Download or read book Resurgence of Jewish Life in Germany written by Charlotte Kahn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-08-30 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As early as the first century of the common era, Jews followed the Romans to live on German territory. For two thousand years Jews and the local population co-existed. This relationship has been turbulent at times but has occasionally been a model of multicultural synergism. Together the two groups have produced a unique and rich culture. Germany's Jewish Community, with thriving congregations, schools, publications, and museums, has been the world's fastest growing group. This work focuses on the present while addressing the underlying question of the future for Jews in Germany: How temperate is the German social climate and how fertile is its soil for Jews? This work focuses on the present while addressing the underlying question of the future for Jews in Germany: How temperate is the German social climate and how fertile is its soil for Jews? Seventy people were interviewed for this book to establish what kind of relationships are being established across the Jewish and non-Jewish border. The interviewees represent three generations and all walks of life. This text depicts their legacies, fears, and hopes in their own words. Existing German societal conditions are evaluated for possible future creativity and synergy.

Download or read book Jewish Daily Life in Germany 1618 1945 written by Marion A. Kaplan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-03 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the seventeenth century until the Holocaust, Germany's Jews lurched between progress and setback, between fortune and terrible misfortune. German society shunned Jews in the eighteenth century and opened unevenly to them in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only to turn murderous in the Nazi era. By examining the everyday lives of ordinary Jews, this book portrays the drama of German-Jewish history -- the gradual ascent of Jews from impoverished outcasts to comfortable bourgeois citizens and then their dramatic descent into genocidal torment during the Nazi years. Building on social, economic, religious, and political history, it focuses on the qualitative aspects of ordinary life -- emotions, subjective impressions, and quotidian perceptions. How did ordinary Jews and their families make sense of their world? How did they construe changes brought about by industrialization? How did they make decisions to enter new professions or stick with the old, juggle traditional mores with contemporary ways? The Jewish adoption of secular, modern European culture and the struggle for legal equality exacted profound costs, both material and psychological. Even in the heady years of progress, a basic insecurity informed German-Jewish life. Jewish successes existed alongside an antisemitism that persisted as a frightful leitmotif throughout German-Jewish history. And yet the history that emerges from these pages belies simplistic interpretations that German antisemitism followed a straight path from Luther to Hitler. Neither Germans nor Jews can be typecast in their roles vis à vis one another. Non-Jews were not uniformly antisemitic but exhibited a wide range of attitudes towards Jews. Jewish daily life thus provides another vantage point from which to study the social life of Germany. Focusing on both internal Jewish life -- family, religion, culture and Jewish community -- and the external world of German culture and society provides a uniquely well-rounded portrait of a world defined by the shifting sands of inclusion and exclusion.

Download or read book Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany written by Jay Howard Geller and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring essays by scholars of history, literature, television, and sociology, Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany illuminates important aspects of Jewish life in Germany since 1949, including institution building, the internal dynamics and changing demographics of the Jewish community, and the central role of Jewish writers and public intellectuals.

Download or read book Stranger in My Own Country written by Yascha Mounk and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving and unsettling exploration of a young man's formative years in a country still struggling with its past As a Jew in postwar Germany, Yascha Mounk felt like a foreigner in his own country. When he mentioned that he is Jewish, some made anti-Semitic jokes or talked about the superiority of the Aryan race. Others, sincerely hoping to atone for the country's past, fawned over him with a forced friendliness he found just as alienating. Vivid and fascinating, Stranger in My Own Country traces the contours of Jewish life in a country still struggling with the legacy of the Third Reich and portrays those who, inevitably, continue to live in its shadow. Marshaling an extraordinary range of material into a lively narrative, Mounk surveys his countrymen's responses to "the Jewish question." Examining history, the story of his family, and his own childhood, he shows that anti-Semitism and far-right extremism have long coexisted with self-conscious philo-Semitism in postwar Germany. But of late a new kind of resentment against Jews has come out in the open. Unnoticed by much of the outside world, the desire for a "finish line" that would spell a definitive end to the country's obsession with the past is feeding an emphasis on German victimhood. Mounk shows how, from the government's pursuit of a less "apologetic" foreign policy to the way the country's idea of the Volk makes life difficult for its immigrant communities, a troubled nationalism is shaping Germany's future.

Download or read book Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany written by Jay Howard Geller and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, 100,000 Jews live in Germany. Their community is diverse and vibrant, and their mere presence in Germany is symbolically important. In Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany, scholars of German-Jewish history, literature, film, television, and sociology illuminate important aspects of Jewish life in Germany from 1949 to the present day. In West Germany, the development of representative bodies and research institutions reflected a desire to set down roots, despite criticism from Jewish leaders in Israel and the Diaspora. In communist East Germany, some leftist Jewish intellectuals played a prominent role in society, and their experience reflected the regime’s fraught relationship with Jewry. Since 1990, the growth of the Jewish community through immigration from the former Soviet Union and Israel have both brought heightened visibility in society and challenged preexisting notions of Jewish identity in the former “land of the perpetrators.”

Download or read book Jewish Life in Germany written by Monika Richarz and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1991-08-22 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

Download or read book Jews Germans Memory written by Y. Michal Bodemann and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assesses the past, present, and future of German-Jewish relations in light of recent political charges and the opening up of historical resources

Download or read book Jews Germans and Allies written by Atina Grossmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-10 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. Jews, Germans, and Allies draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives. In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germany's surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters. Jews, Germans, and Allies shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.

Download or read book Germans No More written by Margarete Limberg and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-08 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most books on Nazi Germany focus on the war years. Much less is known about the preceding years although these give important clues with regard to the events after November 1938, which culminated in the Holocaust. This book is based on eyewitness accounts chosen from the many memoirs that Harvard University received in 1940 after it had sent out a call to German-Jewish refugees to describe their experiences before and after 1933. These invaluable documents became part of the Harvard archives where the editors of this volume discovered them fifty years later. These memoirs, written so soon after the emigration when the impressions were still vivid, movingly describe the gradual deterioration of the situation of the Jews, the daily humiliations and insults they had to suffer, and their desperate attempts to leave Germany. An informative introduction puts these accounts into a wider framework.

Download or read book Portraits of Our Past written by Emily C. Rose and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-04-01 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An absorbing look at the daily lives of rural Jews in eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany. Includes over 75 black and white illustrations, a guide for researchers, maps, and a bibliography.