Spector, Scott. Modernism without Jews? German-Jewish Subjects and Histories. German Jewish Cultures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. xviii+177 pp. $25.00 (paper).

2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-290
Author(s):  
Matthew Creighton
Keyword(s):  
Indiana University ◽  
German Jewish

Vivian Liska, German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017. 203 pp.

2020 ◽  
pp. 271-274
Keyword(s):  
European Society ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
Personal Freedom ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
German Jewish

Through the good offices of the European Enlightenment and its ideals of tolerance and personal freedom, the walls of the ghetto, which had restricted the Jews not only to residential enclosures but also to cultural and spiritual seclusion, were torn down. As the denizens of the ghetto rushed to embrace the opportunities afforded them by their liberation from the degradation of enforced isolation, they adopted European secular culture. Despite the extraordinary exuberance they often displayed for their new culture, they did not enter modern European society, as had their Christian sponsors, “in a long process of ‘endogenous’ gestation and growth, but they rather plunged into it as the ghetto walls were being breached, with a bang, though not without prolonged whimpers.”...

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