The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate

After the Nazi seizure of power on January 30, 1933, over 250 German rabbis, rabbinical scholars, and students for the rabbinate fled to the United States. The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate follows their lives and careers over decades in America.

Although culturally uprooted, the group's professional lives and intellectual leadership, particularly those of the younger members of this group, left a considerable mark intellectually, socially, and theologically on American Judaism and on American Jewish congregational and organizational life in the postwar world.

Meticulously researched and representing the only systematic analysis of prosopographical data in a digital humanities database, The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate reveals the trials of those who had lost so much and celebrates the legacy they made for themselves in America.

Cornelia Wilhelm is Professor of modern history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. Her work focuses on comparative and transnational aspects of (Jewish) history and on race, ethnicity, migration, and religion. She is author of Pioneers of a New Jewish Identity: The Independent Orders of B'nai B'rith and True Sisters and, in German, Bewegung oder Verein? Nationalsozialistische Volkstumspolitik in den USA (Movement or association: Nazi "Volkstumspolitik [racialized ethnic politics]" in the United States). Currently she works on a digital research portal highlighting the cultural transfers related to the emigration of the German rabbinate after 1933.