Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany

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.”

 

Jay Howard Geller is Samuel Rosenthal Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.  He is the author of The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction (Cornell University Press, 2019) and Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), as well as co-editor Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational (University of Michigan Press, 2016).

Michael Meng is Associate Professor of History at Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina. He is the author of Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Harvard University Press, 2011) and co-editor of Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (Indiana University Press 2015) and co-editor of Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective (Berghahn Books, 2017), among other publications on modern European intellectual and cultural history.