German Jews and Migration to the United States, 1933–1945 is a collection of first-person accounts, many previously unpublished, that document the flight and exile of German Jews from Nazi Germany to the USA,. The authors of the letters and memoirs included in this collection share two important characteristics: They all had close ties to Munich, the Bavarian capital, and they all emigrated to the USA, though sometimes via detours and/or after stays of varying lengths in other places of refuge. Selected to represent a wide range of exile experiences, these testimonies are carefully edited, extensively annotated, and accompanied by biographical introductions to make them accessible to readers, especially those who are new to the subject. These autobiographical sources reveal the often-traumatic experiences and consequences of forced migration, displacement, resettlement, and new beginnings. In addition, this book demonstrates that migration is not only a process by which groups and individuals relocate from one place to another but also a dynamic of transmigration affected by migrant networks and the complex relationships between national policies and the agency of migrants.

This book is first of its kind to deal with the interwar Jewish emigration from Germany in a comparative framework and follows the entire migration process from the point of view of the emigrants. It combines the usage of social and economic measures with the individual stories of the immigrants, thereby revealing the complex connection between the socio-economic profile varieties and the decisions regarding emigration – if, when and where to. The encounter between the various immigrant-refugee groups and the different host societies in different times produced diverse stories of presence, function, absorption and self-awareness in the three major overseas destinations – Palestine, the USA, and Great Britain -- despite the ostensibly common German-Jewish heritage. Thus German-Jewish immigrants created a new and nuanced fabric of the German-Jewish Diaspora in its main three centers, and shaped distinct identifications and legacies in Israel, Britain, and the United States.

In the United States, Jews have bridged minority and majority cultures - their history illustrates the diversity of the American experience.

Refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe in British Overseas Territories focusses on exiles and forced migrants in British colonies and dominions in Africa or Asia and in Commonwealth countries. The contributions deal with aspects such as legal status and internment, rescue and relief, identity and belonging, the Central European encounter with the colonial and post-colonial world, memories and generations or knowledge transfers and cultural representations in writing, painting, architecture, music and filmmaking. The volume covers refugee destinations and the situation on arrival, reorientation–and very often further migration after the Second World War–in Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Palestine, Shanghai, Singapore, South Africa and New Zealand. Contributors are: Rony Alfandary, Gerrit-Jan Berendse, Albrecht Dümling, Patrick Farges, Brigitte Mayr, Michael Omasta, Jyoti Sabharwal, Sarah Schwab, Ursula Seeber, Andrea Strutz, Monica Tempian, Jutta Vinzent, Paul Weindling, and Veronika Zwerger.

Presented for the first time in English, the huge archive of secret Nazi reports reveals what life was like for German Jews and the extent to which the German population supported their social exclusion and the measures that led to their annihilation.

The essays in this volume were written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the fateful pogrom in early November 1938 which was a watershed in the treatment of Jews in Germany and signaled the end to more than a century of specific Jewish culture there. Historian George Mosse in the opening essay characterizes this spirit as represented by Bildung, a post-emancipation notion that included character formation, moral education, the primacy of culture, the acquisition of aesthetic taste, and the belief in the potential of humanity. Bildung became to large portions of German Jewry an important, if not central, expression of their Jewishness. It is this legacy that this volume explores and seeks to understand. Among the questions contributors examine are the meaning of this legacy in our time, what has happened to it in its American context, whether it has found a home in the United States or whether it remains in exile, and which elements of the legacy are worth preserving for the next generation. Two groups address this range of questions. The first is made up of Jews born in Germany but who reached their professional maturity in the United States. The second is made up primarily of American-born individuals whose Jewish parents had either fled Nazi Germany or who, as German Jews, survived the Holocaust. The Germany Jewish Legacy in America commemorates the end of one of the greatest communities in Jewish history and explores those elements of its greatness which may still be relevant in insuring a vibrant and productive Jewish community in a free and democratic American society.

Among the many narratives about the atrocities committed against Jews in the Holocaust, the story about the Jews who lived in the eye of the storm—the German Jews—has received little attention. Germans against Germans: The Fate of the Jews, 1938–1945, tells this story—how Germans declared war against other Germans, that is, against German Jews. Author Moshe Zimmermann explores questions of what made such a war possible? How could such a radical process of exclusion take place in a highly civilized, modern society? What were the societal mechanisms that paved the way for legal discrimination, isolation, deportation, and eventual extermination of the individuals who were previously part and parcel of German society? Germans against Germans demonstrates how the combination of antisemitism, racism, bureaucracy, cynicism, and imposed collaboration culminated in "the final solution."

Between the 1933 Nazi seizure of power and their 1941 prohibition on all Jewish emigration, around 90,000 German Jews moved to the United States. Using the texts and images from a personal archive, this Palgrave Pivot explores how these refugees made sense of that experience. For many German Jews, theirs was not just a story of flight and exile; it was also one chapter in a longer history of global movement, experienced less as an estrangement from Germanness, than a reiteration of the mobility central to it. Private photography allowed these families to position themselves in a context of fluctuating notions of Germaness, and resist the prescribed disentanglement of their Jewish and German identities. In opening a unique window onto refugees’ own sense of self as they moved across different geographical, political, and national environments, this book will appeal to readers interested in Jewish life and migration, visual culture, and the histories of National Socialism and the Holocaust.

This volume contains articles on Jewish life from 1920 to the present. Its entries include studies of the economy and migration in postwar America, the impact of Holocaust survivors on American Society and the reaction to gender stereotypes within American Culture.

Presents an illustrated A-Z reference containing more than 300 entries related to immigration to North America, including people, places, legislation, and more.