Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals—pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes disseminated for millennia to debase, dehumanize, and justify the persecution of Jews, Bestiarium Judaicum asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers tell animal stories?Focusing on the nonhuman-animal constructions of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, and Gertrud Kolmar, Jay Geller expands his earlier exam...

Theory, as it’s happened across the humanities, has often been coded as “Jewish.” This collection of essays seeks to move past explanations for this understanding that rely on the self-evident (the historical centrality of Jews to the rise of Critical Theory with the Frankfurt School) or stereotypical (psychoanalysis as the “Jewish Science”) in order to show how certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theory.In the range of violence and agency that attend the appellation “...

Kaum eine Familie spiegelt die Geschichte der deutschen Juden des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts in allen ihren Facetten, vom Glanz des Aufstiegs ins Bürgertum bis zur Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden so deutlich wie die der Scholems.Ihre Geschichte beginnt in Schlesien: Von dort zogen die Scholems Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts nach Berlin und eröffneten eine Druckerei, die es zu einigem Wohlstand brachten. Arthur und Betty Scholem hatten vier Söhne, die alle einen unterschie...

Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, 100,000 Jews live in Germany. Their community is diverse and vibrant, and their mere presence in Germany is symbolically important. In Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany, scholars of German-Jewish history, literature, film, television, and sociology illuminate important aspects of Jewish life in Germany from 1949 to the present day. In West Germany, the development of representative bodies and research institutions reflected a desire to set d...

The evocative and riveting stories of four brothers—Gershom the Zionist, Werner the Communist, Reinhold the nationalist, and Erich the liberal—weave together in The Scholems**, a biography of an eminent middle-class Jewish Berlin family and a social history of the Jews in Germany in the decades leading up to World War II.**Across four generations, Jay Howard Geller illuminates the transformation of traditional Jews into modern German citiz...