Germans into Jews Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic [Hardcover]

Germans into Jewsturns to an often overlooked and misunderstood period of German and Jewish historythe years between the world wars. It has been assumed that the Jewish community in Germany was in decline during the Weimar Republic. But, Sharon Gillerman demonstrates that Weimar Jews sought to rejuvenate and reconfigure their community as a means both of strengthening the German nation and of creating a more expansive and autonomous Jewish entity within the German state. These ambitious projects to increase fertility, expand welfare, and strengthen the family transcended the ideological and religious divisions that have traditionally characterized Jewish communal life. Integrating Jewish history, German history, gender history, and social history, this book highlights the experimental and contingent nature of efforts by Weimar Jews to reassert a new Jewish particularism while simultaneously reinforcing their commitment to Germanness.

Sharon Gillerman is Associate Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles and adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California. [Gillerman's] detailed work does justice to its subject by unraveling the complexities of newly arising Jewish identities, their challenges, the debates in the Jewish community, and the contradictions, as well as options available to Weimar Jews. With this work, Gillerman has done justice to a crucial topic of German and Jewish history; her choice to focus on social welfare policy was a clever one. Gillerman's book uncovers in fascinating manner the extent to which the renaissance of Jewish cultures overlapped with equally decisive social welfare activities to rejuvenate the body of the Jewish community. Gillerman's sophisticated analysis of the 'Jewish social body' in Weimar Germany joins an increasing number of works that treat German history as it was (not as a stepping-stone to the collapse of liberalism and tl£#