German Jews and the Persistence of Jewish Identity in Conversion

German Jews and the Persistence of Jewish Identity in Conversion PDF Author: Angela Kuttner Botelho
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110731967
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
This book explores the fraught aftermath of the German Jewish conversionary experience through the story of one family as it grapples with the meaning of its Jewish origins in a post-Holocaust, post-conversionary milieu. Utilizing archival family texts and multiple interviews spanning three generations, beginning with the author’s German Jewish parents, 1940s refugees, and engaging the insights of contemporary scholars, the book traces the impact of a contested Jewish identity on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the Jewish self. The Holocaust as post-memory and the impact of the German Jewish culture personified by the author’s parents leads to a retrieval of a lost Jewish identity, postmodern in its implications, reinforcing the concept of Judaism as ultimately a family affair. Focusing on the personal to illuminate a complex historical phenomenon, this book proposes a new cultural history that challenges conventional boundaries of what is Jewish and what is not.

German Jews and the Persistence of Jewish Identity in Conversion

German Jews and the Persistence of Jewish Identity in Conversion PDF Author: Angela Kuttner Botelho
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110731967
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the fraught aftermath of the German Jewish conversionary experience through the story of one family as it grapples with the meaning of its Jewish origins in a post-Holocaust, post-conversionary milieu. Utilizing archival family texts and multiple interviews spanning three generations, beginning with the author’s German Jewish parents, 1940s refugees, and engaging the insights of contemporary scholars, the book traces the impact of a contested Jewish identity on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the Jewish self. The Holocaust as post-memory and the impact of the German Jewish culture personified by the author’s parents leads to a retrieval of a lost Jewish identity, postmodern in its implications, reinforcing the concept of Judaism as ultimately a family affair. Focusing on the personal to illuminate a complex historical phenomenon, this book proposes a new cultural history that challenges conventional boundaries of what is Jewish and what is not.

German Jews and the Persistence of Jewish Identity in Conversion

German Jews and the Persistence of Jewish Identity in Conversion PDF Author: Angela Kuttner Botelho
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110732068
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book explores the fraught aftermath of the German Jewish conversionary experience through the story of one family as it grapples with the meaning of its Jewish origins in a post-Holocaust, post-conversionary milieu. Utilizing archival family texts and multiple interviews spanning three generations, beginning with the author’s German Jewish parents, 1940s refugees, and engaging the insights of contemporary scholars, the book traces the impact of a contested Jewish identity on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the Jewish self. The Holocaust as post-memory and the impact of the German Jewish culture personified by the author’s parents leads to a retrieval of a lost Jewish identity, postmodern in its implications, reinforcing the concept of Judaism as ultimately a family affair. Focusing on the personal to illuminate a complex historical phenomenon, this book proposes a new cultural history that challenges conventional boundaries of what is Jewish and what is not.

Social History of German Jews

Social History of German Jews PDF Author: Miriam Rürup
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805394541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Tracing the social history of modern German Jews from the end of the 18th century up to the aftermath of World War II, Miriam Rürup follows their ascent into the middle and upper middle classes through repeated experiences of setbacks but also of self-assertion. In doing so it is explained how Jewish life changed under the auspices of emancipation and what impact these changes had on the demographic and social profile of the Jewish minority. With a focus on the daily interactions between Jews and other Germans when choosing a home, profession, or school, for example, Social History of German Jews shows the contrasting processes of integration and exclusion in a new light.

Nexus

Nexus PDF Author: William C. Donahue
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 157113963X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Biennial volume of new and innovative essays on German Jewish Studies, featuring forum sections on Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009 and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish Studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-à-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. Nexus 3 features special forum sections on Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. Renowned Heine scholar Jeffrey Sammons offers a magisterial critical retrospective on this towering "German Jewish" author, followed by a response from Ritchie Robertson, while the deanof Kraus scholarship, Edward Timms, reflects on the challenges and rewards of translating German Jewish dialect into English. Paul Reitter provides a thoughtful response. Contributors: Angela Botelho, Jay Geller, Abigail Gillman, Jeffrey A. Grossman, Leo Lensing, Georg Mein, Paul Reitter, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Egon Schwarz, Edward Timms, Liliane Weissberg, Emma Woelk. William Collins Donahue is the John J. CavanaughProfessor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame, where he chairs the Department of German and Russian. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, TheState University of New Jersey.

The European Jews, Patriotism and the Liberal State 1789-1939

The European Jews, Patriotism and the Liberal State 1789-1939 PDF Author: David Aberbach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136158952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The fragility of the liberal democratic state after 1789 is illustrated in the history of the European Jews from the French Revolution to the Holocaust. Emancipation and hope of emancipation amongst the European Jewish population created a plethora of Jewish identities and forms of patriotism. This book takes the original approach of studying European Jewish patriotism as a whole, with particular attention given to creative literature. Despite their growing awareness of racial, genocidal hatred, most European Jews between 1789 and 1939 tended to be patriotic toward the countries of their citizenship, an attitude reflected in the literature of the time. Yet, the common assumption among emancipated Jews that anti-Semitism would fade in a world governed by reason proved false. For millions of European Jews, the infinite possibilities they associated with emancipation came to nothing. The Jewish experience exposed many of the weaknesses and failings of the liberal multicultural state, and demonstrated that its survival cannot be taken for granted but is dependent on vigilance and struggle. By focusing on Jewish patriotism from 1789-1939, this book explores the nature of the liberal state, how it can fail, and the conditions needed for its survival.

Divided Souls

Divided Souls PDF Author: Elisheva Carlebach
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300133065
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
divThis pioneering book reevaluates the place of converts from Judaism in the narrative of Jewish history. Long considered beyond the pale of Jewish historiography, converts played a central role in shaping both noxious and positive images of Jews and Judaism for Christian readers. Focusing on German Jews who converted to Christianity in the sixteenth through mid-eighteenth centuries, Elisheva Carlebach explores an extensive and previously unexamined trove of their memoirs and other writings. These fascinating original sources illuminate the Jewish communities that the converts left, the Christian society they entered, and the unabating tensions between the two worlds in early modern German history. The book begins with the medieval images of converts from Judaism and traces the hurdles to social acceptance that they encountered in Germany through early modern times. Carlebach examines the converts’ complicated search for community, a quest that was to characterize much of Jewish modernity, and she concludes with a consideration of the converts’ painful legacies to the Jewish experience in German lands. “Carlebach’s reading of autobiographical texts by converts from Judaism is careful, intelligent, and skeptical--a model of how to treat spiritual memoirs.”--Todd M. Endelman, University of Michigan “This superb book highlights the ambiguous identities of these boundary crossers and their impact on both German and Jewish self-definitions.”--Paula E. Hyman, Yale University Elisheva Carlebach is professor of history at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish History, and coeditor of Jewish History and Jewish Memory. /DIV

German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic

German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic PDF Author: John M. Efron
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691192758
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as German Jews struggled for legal emancipation and social acceptance, they also embarked on a program of cultural renewal, two key dimensions of which were distancing themselves from their fellow Ashkenazim in Poland and giving a special place to the Sephardim of medieval Spain. Where they saw Ashkenazic Jewry as insular and backward, a result of Christian persecution, they depicted the Sephardim as worldly, morally and intellectually superior, and beautiful, products of the tolerant Muslim environment in which they lived. In this elegantly written book, John Efron looks in depth at the special allure Sephardic aesthetics held for German Jewry. Efron examines how German Jews idealized the sound of Sephardic Hebrew and the Sephardim's physical and moral beauty, and shows how the allure of the Sephardic found expression in neo-Moorish synagogue architecture, historical novels, and romanticized depictions of Sephardic history. He argues that the shapers of German-Jewish culture imagined medieval Iberian Jewry as an exemplary Jewish community, bound by tradition yet fully at home in the dominant culture of Muslim Spain. Efron argues that the myth of Sephardic superiority was actually an expression of withering self-critique by German Jews who, by seeking to transform Ashkenazic culture and win the acceptance of German society, hoped to enter their own golden age. Stimulating and provocative, this book demonstrates how the goal of this aesthetic self-refashioning was not assimilation but rather the creation of a new form of German-Jewish identity inspired by Sephardic beauty.

German-Jewish History in Modern Times: Emancipation and acculturation, 1780-1871

German-Jewish History in Modern Times: Emancipation and acculturation, 1780-1871 PDF Author: Mordechai Breuer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231074742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This four-volume collective project by a team of leading scholars offers a vivid portrait of Jewish history in German-speaking countries over nearly four centuries. This series is sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute, established in 1955 in Jerusalem, London, and New York for the purpose of advancing scholarship on the Jews in German-speaking lands.

Broadening Jewish History

Broadening Jewish History PDF Author: Todd M. Endelman
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 180034533X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Key themes and issues relevant to writing the social history of the Jews in the modern period are brought to the fore here in a way that is accessible both to professional historians and to educated readers with an interest in Jewish history. Some of the articles are programmatic and argumentative, others are case studies. Together they create a strong, coherent volume that demonstrates the advantages of the social historical perspective as a tool for interpreting the Jewish world.

German Women's Writing in the Twenty-first Century

German Women's Writing in the Twenty-first Century PDF Author: Hester Baer
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571135847
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which German women's literature has been conceived.