As a field, German-Jewish Studies emphasizes the dangers of nationalism, monoculturalism, and ethnocentrism, while making room for multilingual and transnational perspectives with questions surrounding migration, refugees, exile, and precarity. Focussing on the relevance and utility of the field for the twenty-first century, German-Jewish Studies explores why studying and applying German-Jewish history and culture must evolve and be given further attention today. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to reconsider the history of antisemitism—as well as intersections of antisemitism with racism and colonialism—and how connections to German Jews shed light on the continuities, ruptures, anxieties, and possible futures of German-speaking Jews and their legacies.

In the context of their recent dispersion, Russian-speaking Jews have become the vast majority of Germany’s longstanding Jewry. An entity marked by permeable boundaries, they show commitment to world Jewry, including Israel, but feeble identification with their hosts. While Jewish singularity is understood here more as “belonging” than “believing”, Jewish education is viewed as a must.

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.

In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garloff traces the emergence of a new Jewish literature in Germany and Austria from 1990 to the present. The rise of new generations of authors who identify as both German and Jewish, and who often sustain additional affiliations with places such as France, Russia, or Israel, affords a unique opportunity to analyze the foundational moments of diasporic literature. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is structured around a series of founding gestures: performing authorship, remaking memory, and claiming places. Garloff contends that these founding gestures are literary strategies that reestablish the very possibility of a German Jewish literature several decades after the Holocaust. Making German Jewish Literature Anew offers fresh interpretations of second-generation authors such as Maxim Biller, Doron Rabinovici, and Barbara Honigmann as well as of third-generation authors, many of whom come from Eastern European and/or mixed-religion backgrounds. These more recent writers include Benjamin Stein, Lena Gorelik, and Katja Petrowskaja. Throughout the book, Garloff asks what exactly marks a given text as Jewish—the author's identity, intended audience, thematic concerns, or stylistic choices—and reflects on existing definitions of Jewish literature.

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies reflects the current state of scholarship in the field as analyzed by an international team of experts in the different and varied areas represented within contemporary Jewish Studies. Unlike recent attempts to encapsulate the current state of Jewish Studies, the Oxford Handbook is more than a mere compendium of agreed facts; rather, it is an exhaustive survey of current interests and directions in the field.

In July of 1998 the European Association for Jewish Studies celebrated its Sixth Congress in Toledo, with almost four hundred participants. In these Proceedings have been collected 169 papers and communications read during the conference. By and large, they offer a broad, realistic perspective on the advances, achievements and anxieties of Judaic Studies at the turn of the 20th century, on the eve of the new millennium. They represent the point of view of the European scholars, enriched with notable contributions by colleagues from other continents. One volume (ISBN 978-90-04-11554-5) includes papers dealing with Jewish studies on biblical, rabbinical and medieval times, as well as with some general subjects, such as Jewish languages and bibliography. A second volume (ISBN 978-90-04-11558-3) is dedicated to the Judaism of modern times, from the Renaissance to our days.

The migration experiences, career paths, and scholarship of historians born in Germany who started emigrating to North America in the 1950s have had a unique impact on the transatlantic practice of Central European History. German Migrant Historians in North America analyzes the experiences of this postwar group of scholars, and asks what informed their education and career choices, and what motivated them to emigrate to North America. The contributors reflect on how these migration experiences informed their own research and teaching, and particularly discuss the more general development of the transatlantic exchange between German and American historians in the scholarship on Modern Central European History.

In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, it seemed there was no place for German in Israel and no trace of Hebrew in Germany — the two languages and their cultures appeared as divergent as the directions of their scripts. Yet when placed side by side on opposing pages, German and Hebrew converge in the middle. Comprised of essays on literature, history, philosophy, and the visual and performing arts, this volume explores the mutual influence of two linguistic cultures long held as separate or even as diametrically opposed. From Moses Mendelssohn’s arrival in Berlin in 1748 to the recent wave of Israeli migration to Berlin, the essays gathered here shed new light on the painful yet productive relationship between modern German and Hebrew cultures.

“Exposes the culpability of scholars who collaborated with Nazi race policy . . . an excellent [book] . . . to understand the mentality of ‘desk murderers.’” (Claudia Koonz, author of The Nazi Conscience) Early in his political career, Adolf Hitler declared the importance of what he called “an antisemitism of reason.” He hoped that his exclusionary and violent policies would be legitimized by scientific scholarship. The result was a disturbing, and long-overlooked, aspect of National Socialism: Nazi Jewish Studies. Studying the Jew investigates the careers of a few dozen German scholars who forged an interdisciplinary field, drawing upon studies in anthropology, biology, religion, history, and the social sciences to create a comprehensive portrait of the Jew?one with devastating consequences. Working within the universities and research institutions of the Third Reich, these men fabricated an elaborate empirical basis to support the Nazi campaign against Jews by defining them as racially alien, morally corrupt, and inherently criminal. A chilling story of academics who distorted their research in support of persecution and genocide, Studying the Jew explores the intersection of ideology and scholarship to provide a new appreciation of the horrors perpetrated in the name of reason. “This brilliant new book reveals how the academy became nazified, shaping a new interdisciplinary enterprise: pathologizing the Jew.” —Susannah Heschel, author of Abraham Geigerand theJewish Jesus “An essential sequel to Max Weinreich's classic of 1946, Hitler's Professors. [Studying the Jew] is a valuable contribution to the extensive history of politicization of scholarship in modern dictatorships.” —Jeffrey Herf, author of The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust

The prominent scholar-contributors to this volume share their experiences developing the field of US German Studies and their thoughts on literature and interdisciplinarity, pluralism and diversity, and transatlantic dialogue.