Fragile Spaces

This book consists of a range of essays covering the complex crises, tensions and dilemmas but also the positive potential in the meeting of Jews with Western culture. In numerous contexts and through the work of fascinating individuals and thinkers, the work examines some of the consequences of political, cultural and personal rupture, as well as the manifold ways in which various Jewish intellectuals, politicians (and occasionally spies!) sought to respond to these ruptures and carve out new, sometimes profound, sometimes fanciful, options of thought and action. It also delves critically into the attacks on liberal and Enlightenment humanism. In almost all the essays the fragility of things is palpably present and the book touches on some of the ironies, problematics and functions of responses to that condition. The work mirrors the author's ongoing fascination with the always fraught, fragile and creatively fecund confrontation of Jews (and others) with European modernity, its history, politics, culture and self-definition. In a time of increasing anxiety and feelings of fragility, this work may be helpful in understanding how people at an earlier (and sometimes contemporary) period sought to come to terms with a similar predicament

Fragile Spaces

This book consists of a range of essays covering the complex crises, tensions and dilemmas but also the positive potential in the meeting of Jews with Western culture. In numerous contexts and through the work of fascinating individuals and thinkers, the work examines some of the consequences of political, cultural and personal rupture, as well as the manifold ways in which various Jewish intellectuals, politicians (and occasionally spies!) sought to respond to these ruptures and carve out new, sometimes profound, sometimes fanciful, options of thought and action. It also delves critically into the attacks on liberal and Enlightenment humanism. In almost all the essays the fragility of things is palpably present and the book touches on some of the ironies, problematics and functions of responses to that condition. The work mirrors the author's ongoing fascination with the always fraught, fragile and creatively fecund confrontation of Jews (and others) with European modernity, its history, politics, culture and self-definition. In a time of increasing anxiety and feelings of fragility, this work may be helpful in understanding how people at an earlier (and sometimes contemporary) period sought to come to terms with a similar predicament

The German-Jewish Experience Revisited

This volume includes both historical treatments of differing German-Jewish understandings of their experience – their relations to their Judaism, general culture and to other Jews – and contemporary reflections and competing interpretations as to how to understand the overall experience of German Jewry

The Nietzsche legacy in Germany, 1890-1990

Countless attempts have been made to appropriate the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche for diverse cultural and political ends, but nowhere have these efforts been more sustained and of greater consequence than in Germany. Aschheim offers a magisterial chronicle of the philosopher's presence in German life and politics

Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust Beyond Memory,(History & Memory-Volume 9 No. 1/2)

Gavriel Rosenfeld is a contributing author, The Architects\u27 Debate: Architectural Discourse and the Memory of Nazism in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1977-1997 , pp. 189-225. Book description: History & Memory, Volume 9 , numbers 1 and 2 - more than a decade has passed since the Historians\u27 Debate erupted in Germany. The themes that were at the heart of that impassioned controversy continue to pulsate in historical thinking about the National Socialist era. As a result of the Historikerstreit, increased credence is being lent to the issues of historicization, national identity, historical consciousness, the \u27guilt question,\u27 and collective memory, which heretofore had been considered tangential in the historiographical context of the Nazi epoch. This special double issue reconsiders the central themes that surfaced as a result of the debate: the problematic of historical representation of the Third Reich and the Shoah as it passes from living memory; the place of personal and collective memories in historical narratives; and the uneasy question of who should/can/may write whose history/ies. Several of the articles in this volume which is dedicated to Saul Friedlander on this sixty-fifth birthday, will related to Friedlander\u27s rich oeuvre, which has probed many facets of this highly charges past.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/history-books/1016/thumbnail.jp