This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Between Religion and Ethnicity: Twentieth-Century Jewish Émigrés and the Shaping of Postwar Culture" that was published in Religions

Annotation The European Jewish EmigrEs from Nazi Germany and Europe have emerged in the last two decades as a major interdisciplinary research field. They made important theoretical contributions to twentieth-century philosophy and scholarship and helped shape postwar national and international cultures, in Europe and the U.S. This special issue explores the nexus of Jewish religion, ethnicity, and culture in the EmigrEs' life and scholarship. Mostly secular, often paying little attention to their own Jewishness, the EmigrEs display in full the complex relationship between Judaism and Jewish identity. They provide scholars with opportunities for deciphering the Jewish dimension in the making of postwar cultures and for rethinking the meaning of "Jewish" for a group denying the significance of religion and ethnicity - their own first and foremost. The issue grew out of an April 2011 conference at the National Humanities Center in memory of Lilian Furst (1931-2009), former UNC professor of comparative literature, an Austrian EmigrE to Britain and the U.S. whose work exemplified the role of religion, ethnicity and culture in the making of contemporary scholarship

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable—whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.

After the Shoah, Jewish survivors actively took control of their destiny. Despite catastrophic and hostile circumstances, they built networks and communities, fought for justice, and documented Nazi crimes. The essays, illustrations, and portraits of people and places contained in this volume are informed by a pan-European perspective. The book accompanies the first special exhibition at the re-opened Jewish Museum in Frankfurt.

This book challenges a common historical narrative, which portrays medieval Jews as moneylenders who filled an essential economic role in Europe. Where Volume I traced the development of the narrative in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and refuted it with an in-depth study of English Jewry, Volume II explores the significance of dissolving the Jewish narrative for European history. It extends the study from England to northern France, the Mediterranean, and central Europe and deploys the methodologies of legal, cultural, and religious history alongside economic history. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of key topics, such as the Christian usury campaign, the commercial revolution, and gift economy / profit economy, to demonstrate how the revision of Jewish history leads to new insights in European history.

Accommodates both the cosmopolitan narrative of the Jewish diaspora with traditional Jews and their culture.

Intellectual biography of Holocaust historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz. From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915–1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz’s rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz’s life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life.