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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.
Jewish designers and architects played a key role in shaping the interwar architecture of Central Europe, and in the respective countries where they settled following the Nazi's rise to power. This book explores how Jewish architects and patrons influenced and reformed the design of towns and cities through commercial buildings, urban landscaping and other material culture. It also examines how modern identities evolved in the context of migration, commercial and professional networks, and in relation to the conflict between nationalist ideologies and international aspirations in Central Europe and beyond. Pointing to the production within cultural platforms shared by Jews and Christians, th...
Building upon recent German Studies research addressing the industrialization of printing, the expansion of publication venues, new publication formats, and readership, Market Strategies maps a networked literary field in which the production, promotion, and reception of literature from the Enlightenment to World War II emerges as a collaborative enterprise driven by the interests of actors and institutions. These essays demonstrate how a network of authors, editors, and publishers devised mutually beneficial and, at times, conflicting strategies for achieving success on the rapidly evolving nineteenth-century German literary market. In particular, the contributors consider how these actors shaped a nineteenth-century literary market, which included the Jewish press, highbrow and lowbrow genres, and modernist publications. They explore the tensions felt as markets expanded and restrictions were imposed, which yielded resilient new publication strategies, fostered criticism, and led to formal innovations. The volume thus serves as major contribution to interdisciplinary research in nineteenth-century German literary, media, and cultural studies.
The sea and maritime spaces have long been neglected in the field of Jewish studies despite their relevance in the context of Jewish religious texts and historical narratives. The images of Noah’s arche, king Salomon’s maritime activities or the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea immediately come into mind, however, only illustrate a few aspects of Jewish maritime activities. Consequently, the relations of Jews and the sea has to be seen in a much broader spatial and temporal framework in order to understand the overall importance of maritime spaces in Jewish history and culture. Almost sixty years after Samuel Tolkowsky’s pivotal study on maritime Jewish history and culture and the...
From Christian missionary publications to the media strategies employed by today’s NGOs, this interdisciplinary collection explores the entangled histories of humanitarianism and media. It traces the emergence of humanitarian imagery in the West and investigates how the meanings of suffering and aid have been constructed in a period of evolving mass communication, demonstrating the extent to which many seemingly new phenomena in fact have long historical legacies. Ultimately, the critical histories collected here help to challenge existing asymmetries and help those who advocate a new cosmopolitan consciousness recognizing the dignity and rights of others.
A new history of how the Nazi era upended German-Jewish experiences of space and time from eminent historian Guy Miron. In Space and Time under Persecution, Guy Miron considers how social exclusion, economic decline, physical relocation, and, later, forced evictions, labor, and deportation under Nazi rule forever changed German Jews’ experience of space and time. Facing ever-mounting restrictions, German Jews reimagined their worlds—devising new relationships to traditional and personal space, new interpretations of their histories, and even new calendars to measure their days. For Miron, these tactics reveal a Jewish community’s attachment to German bourgeois life as well as their defiant resilience under Nazi persecution.
Brandeis University is the United States’ only Jewish-sponsored nonsectarian university, and while only being established after World War II, it has risen to become one of the most respected universities in the nation. The faculty and alumni of the university have made exceptional contributions to myriad disciplines, but they have played a surprising formidable role in American politics. Stephen J. Whitfield makes the case for the pertinence of Brandeis University in understanding the vicissitudes of American liberalism since the mid-twentieth century. Founded to serve as a refuge for qualified professors and students haunted by academic antisemitism, Brandeis University attracted those wh...
“Places of risk” and “sites of modernity” refer not merely to physical locations, but also objects and institutions that stand at the center of contemporary debates on security and risk. These are social and political domains where energy and infrastructure are produced, where domestic security is pursued and maintained, and where citizens encounter the state in its punitive or monitory roles. Taking a wide view of the period from the 1970s to today, this volume brings together innovative, interdisciplinary case studies of sites of modernity that promise to provide security and safety, yet at the same time are deemed responsible for creating new risks. With a particular contemporary interest in the technocratic changes of security and risk control the contributors to Sites of Modernity — Places of Risk position the 1970s as a turning point in the path from industrial to post-industrial modernity.
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.”