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Volume 8
New German Historical Perspectives
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Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History
Edited by Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup
340 pages, 7 illus., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-78533-553-2 $179.00/£132.00 / Hb / Published (June 2017)
ISBN 978-1-78920-512-1 $34.95/£27.95 / Pb / Published (August 2019)
eISBN 978-1-78533-554-9 eBook
Reviews
“The present volume bears the fruits of more than two decades of scholarship on Jewish space, and the long gestation period of this anthology is well worth the wait… Overall, this is a welcome addition to a flourishing field, indeed, the “spatial turn” in Jewish studies diagnosed in the late 1990s, is set to continue to enhance the work of historians, particularly those of us working in borderlands and who engage with the study of boundaries between population groups…thorough editorial work and a superbly crafted introduction.” • Modern Jewish Studies
“In their various ways, the contributions of the volume… offer rich food for thought… the volume advances the discussion of space and spatiality in German-Jewish history considerably, and in the best instances individual contributions successfully break down the barriers between German and non-German historiography, just as the editors hoped they would.” • German History
“The range of approaches and the sheer breadth of spaces and texts treated here—synagogues and cemeteries, German landscapes, Freud and his reception, philanthropy, urban ghettos, photography, and museums—provide a compelling and rich window into Jewish spaces in their historical context.” • Barbara Mann, Jewish Theological Seminary of America
“This collection makes a convincing case for the application of ‘space’ as an analytic category for the study of minorities in European society, affording new insights into the complexities and fluidities of intertwined and ‘entangled’ histories.” • Jonathan Skolnik, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Description
What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different eras and social contexts. Working from an expansive concept of “the spatial,” these contributions look not only at physical sites but at professional, political, institutional, and imaginative realms, as well as historical Jewish experiences of spacelessness. Together, they encompass spaces as varied as early modern print shops and Weimar cinema, always pointing to the complex intertwining of German and Jewish identity.
Simone Lässig is Director of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, and Professor of Modern History at Braunschweig University. She edits Publications of the German Historical Institute Series (Cambridge University Press), Studies in German History Series (Berghahn) and co-edits the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft.
Miriam Rürup is the Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg. She is part of the Editorial Board of the Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts (Mohr-Siebeck) and edits the Hamburger Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Juden. She also co-edits the journal WerkstattGeschichte and is the Jewish history editor for H-Soz-u-Kult. She is currently at work on a book on the history of statelessness and world citizenship after World War II.
Subject: Jewish StudiesHistory: 20th Century to PresentHistory: 18th/19th Century
Area: Germany
Contents
Of Related Interest
Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
Dilemmas and Responses
The Absent Jews
Kurt Forstreuter and the Historiography of Medieval Prussia
