A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945

A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945 PDF

Author: Michael Brenner

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2018-01-25

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0253029295

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A comprehensive account of Jewish life in a country that carries the legacy of being at the epicenter of the Holocaust. Originally published in German in 2012, this comprehensive history of Jewish life in postwar Germany provides a systematic account of Jews and Judaism from the Holocaust to the early 21st Century by leading experts of modern German-Jewish history. Beginning in the immediate postwar period with a large concentration of Eastern European Holocaust survivors stranded in Germany, the book follows Jews during the relative quiet period of the 50s and early 60s during which the foundations of new Jewish life were laid. Brenner’s volume goes on to address the rise of anti-Israel sentiments after the Six Day War as well as the beginnings of a critical confrontation with Germany’s Nazi past in the late 60s and early 70s, noting the relatively small numbers of Jews living in Germany up to the 90s. The contributors argue that these Jews were a powerful symbolic presence in German society and sent a meaningful signal to the rest of the world that Jewish life was possible again in Germany after the Holocaust. “This volume, which illuminates a multi-faceted panorama of Jewish life after 1945, will remain the authoritative reading on the subject for the time to come.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung “An eminently readable work of history that addresses an important gap in the scholarship and will appeal to specialists and interested lay readers alike.” —Reading Religion “Comprehensive, meticulously researched, and beautifully translated.” —CHOICE

Jews in Germany After the Holocaust

Jews in Germany After the Holocaust PDF

Author: Lynn Rapaport

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-07-17

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780521588096

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

What is it like to be Jewish and to be born and raised in Germany after the Holocaust? Based on remarkably candid interviews with nearly one hundred German Jews, Lynn Rapaport's book reveals a rare understanding of how the memory of the Holocaust shapes Jews' everyday lives. As their views of non-Jewish Germans and of themselves, their political integration into German society, and their friendships and relationships with Germans are subtly uncovered, the obstacles to readjustment when sociocultural memory is still present are better understood. This is also a book about Jewish identity in the midst of modernity. It shows how the boundaries of ethnicity are not marked by how religious Jews are, or their absorption of traditional culture, but by the moral distinctions rooted in Holocaust memory that Jews draw between themselves and other Germans. Jews in Germany after the Holocaust has won an award for being the best book in the sociology of religion from the American Sociological Association.

After the Holocaust

After the Holocaust PDF

Author: Michael Brenner

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1999-04-12

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9780691006796

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Including never-before-published eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, this is a comprehensive account of the lives of the Jews who remained in Germany immediately following the war.

Into the Forest

Into the Forest PDF

Author: Rebecca Frankel

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 125026765X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist One of Smithsonian Magazine's Best History Books of 2021 "An uplifting tale, suffused with a karmic righteousness that is, at times, exhilarating." —Wall Street Journal "A gripping narrative that reads like a page turning thriller novel." —NPR In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States. During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life. From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.

Three-Way Street

Three-Way Street PDF

Author: Jay Howard Geller

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2016-09-21

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0472130129

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Tracing Germany's significance as an essential crossroads and incubator for modern Jewish culture

Night of Pogroms

Night of Pogroms PDF

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A collection of material for commemorative observance of the "Kristallnacht" pogroms which occurred in Germany and Austria, giving historical background, texts of documents, suggested program ideas, study aids, and resources (resource centers, a short bibliography, and a list of films on the Holocaust).

How Jews Became Germans

How Jews Became Germans PDF

Author: Deborah Sadie Hertz

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0300110944

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, an urgent priority was to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country’s premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertz’s discovery of these records, the Judenkartei, was the first step on a long research journey that has led to this compelling book. Hertz begins the book in 1645, when the records begin, and traces generations of German Jewish families for the next two centuries. The book analyzes the statistics and explores letters, diaries, and other materials to understand in a far more nuanced way than ever before why Jews did or did not convert to Protestantism. Focusing on the stories of individual Jews in Berlin, particularly the charismatic salon woman Rahel Levin Varnhagen and her husband, Karl, a writer and diplomat, Hertz humanizes the stories, sets them in the context of Berlin’s evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.

Why the Germans? Why the Jews?

Why the Germans? Why the Jews? PDF

Author: Götz Aly

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2014-04-15

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 080509704X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A provocative and insightful analysis that sheds new light on one of the most puzzling and historically unsettling conundrums Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Countless historians have grappled with these questions, but few have come up with answers as original and insightful as those of maverick German historian Götz Aly. Tracing the prehistory of the Holocaust from the 1800s to the Nazis' assumption of power in 1933, Aly shows that German anti-Semitism was—to a previously overlooked extent—driven in large part by material concerns, not racist ideology or religious animosity. As Germany made its way through the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, the difficulties of the lethargic, economically backward German majority stood in marked contrast to the social and economic success of the agile Jewish minority. This success aroused envy and fear among the Gentile population, creating fertile ground for murderous Nazi politics. Surprisingly, and controversially, Aly shows that the roots of the Holocaust are deeply intertwined with German efforts to create greater social equality. Redistributing wealth from the well-off to the less fortunate was in many respects a laudable goal, particularly at a time when many lived in poverty. But as the notion of material equality took over the public imagination, the skilled, well-educated Jewish population came to be seen as having more than its fair share. Aly's account of this fatal social dynamic opens up a new vantage point on the greatest crime in history and is sure to prompt heated debate for years to come.

After the Holocaust

After the Holocaust PDF

Author: Michael Brenner

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0691232202

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This landmark book is the first comprehensive account of the lives of the Jews who remained in Germany immediately following the war. Gathering never-before-published eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, Michael Brenner presents a remarkable history of this period. While much has been written on the Holocaust itself, until now little has been known about the fate of those survivors who remained in Germany. Jews emerging from concentration camps would learn that most of their families had been murdered and their communities destroyed. Furthermore, all Jews in the country would face the stigma of living, as a 1948 resolution of the World Jewish Congress termed it, on "bloodsoaked German soil." Brenner brings to life the psychological, spiritual, and material obstacles they surmounted as they rebuilt their lives in Germany. At the heart of his narrative is a series of fifteen interviews Brenner conducted with some of the most important witnesses who played an active role in the reconstruction--including presidents of Jewish communities, rabbis, and journalists. Based on the Yiddish and German press and unpublished archival material, the first part of this book provides a historical introduction to this fascinating topic. Here the author analyzes such diverse aspects as liberation from concentration camps, cultural and religious life among the Jewish Displaced Persons, antisemitism and philosemitism in post-war Germany, and the complex relationship between East European and German Jews. A second part consists of the fifteen interviews, conducted by Brenner, with witnesses representing the diverse background of the postwar Jewish community. While most of them were camp survivors, others returned from exile or came to Germany as soldiers of the Jewish Brigade or with international Jewish aid organizations. A third part, which covers the development of the Jewish community in Germany from the 1950s until today, concludes the book.