Synopses & Reviews
The essays in this volume seek to confront some of the charged meeting points of European—especially German—and Jewish history. All, in one way or another, explore the entanglements, the intertwined moments of empathy and enmity, belonging and estrangement, creativity and destructiveness that occurred at these junctions. These encounters typically unfolded within an uneasy continuum of conflict and co-operation, conformity and resistance, refashioning or maintaining personal and collective dimensions of identity. Clearly, they never allowed for the luxury of indifference. Yet it would be wrong to present meetings of this kind as exclusively confrontational, as stark either-or choices. Life at the junctions may be vulnerable and insecure but it can also yield fresh angles of perception and new opportunities. If these boundary situations generated a modicum of friction, confusion and anxiety, and at times even murderousness, they also produced new alliances and friendships, creative projects and novel fusions and formations of identity. In exploring these dramatic moments in history, Steven Aschheim provides valuable new insights into the history of Europe, Israel, and global Judaism.
About the Author
Steven E. Aschheim is a professor emeritus of History at Hebrew University. The author of numerous books on German and Jewish history over the last 30 years, his writing regularly appears in publications such as The Times Literary Supplement and Ha'aretz. In recent years he has held visiting professorships at such schools as Columbia, the University of Michigan, and Trinity College Dublin.
Table of Contents
Icons Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Intellectual Legacy at the Beginning of the Twenty First Century * The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism *
Bildung in Palestine: Zionism, Bi-nationalism and the Strains of German-Jewish Humanism * Hannah Arendt: Jewishness at the Edges * The Metaphysical Psychologist: 0n the Life and Letters of Gershom Scholem * Comrade Klemperer: Communism, Liberalism and Jewishness in the DDR * Locating Nazi Evil: The Contrasting Visions of Gershom Scholem, Hannah Hannah Arendt and Victor Klemperer * The Bonfires of Berlin: Historical and Contemporary Reflections on the Nazi Book Burnings * Imaging the Absolute: Mapping Western Conceptions of Evil * Tempering Evil at the Edges: The (Ambiguous) Political Economy of Empathy * Towards a Phenomenology of the Jewish Intellectual:The German and French Cases Compared * Reflections on Theatricality, Identity and the Modern Jewish Experience* Between Rights, Respectability, and Resistance: Reframing the German-Jewish Experience