German Jewish Cultures

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…

Frakes, Jerold C.

While much early Yiddish literature belonged to pious genres, quasi-secular genres—epic, drama, and lyric—also developed. Jerold Frakes contends that the historical context of the emergence of Yiddish literature is an essential factor in any understanding of its…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.
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