Jews make up the oldest cultural minority on the territory of today?s Switzerland, having a history that extends back to Antiquity. Jews were welcomed and persecuted in Switzerland, alternately, recruited and harassed, emancipated and controlled. Fifty objects, most of them from the collection of the Jewish Museum, tell of the relations between Jews and Non-Jews from Roman times to the present. What do tiny dice, a tea service, students? beer mugs, a Torah roll, the kipa with football motifs or inconspicuous objects tell us about the history of the Jews? The histories of the objects provide insight into Swiss history that becomes high in contrast when seen from the perspective of its most-discussed minority.

During the era of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe (from the 1880s until the First World War), Switzerland played an important role in absorbing immigrants. Though located at the periphery of the main migration routes, the federal state with its liberal policies on foreigners became a key destination for students, revolutionaries, and travelers. The micro-studies and more general papers of this volume approach the topic in its transnational, local, linguistic, gendered, and ideological dimensions and from various disciplinary angles. They interweave and facilitate a novel take on the transitory spatial history and the Lebenswelt of East European Jews in Switzerland. Topics of this volume range – among others – from the location of Switzerland on the map of East European Jewish politics (Bundism, Socialism, Yiddishism, Zionism), conflicting performative cultures of Jewish and Russian revolutionaries, the Swiss Lehr- and Wanderjahre of the Jewish public intellectual Meir Wiener, the impact of Geneva on the Zionist Hebrew writer Ben Ami, the Russian-Jewish students’ colonies in Berne and Zurich and questions of individuals' integration and acculturation.

On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers. The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions" were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate of millions of other victims of the Third Reich. Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of Hitler's rule.

This anthology features an eclectic mix of eighteen modern works by a selection of Switzerland's heterogeneous community of Jewish writers. Questions about Jewish identity and the legacy of the Holocaust remain current and controversial in Switzerland because of the country's now well-publicized economic involvement with Hitler's Germany and the scandal that erupted when the purported Holocaust memoir of Binjamin Wilkomirski was revealed to be a hoax. This collection includes an excerpt from a novel by Daniel Ganzfried, the journalist who exposed the Wilkomirski Affair; two chilling counterfactual accounts of a Nazi-occupied Switzerland by television scriptwriter Charles Lewinsky; an epistolary satire of contemporary Swiss and Jewish life by Sergue Hazanov, a Russian-Jewish immigrant; lyrical evocations of exile by Gabriele Markus; a memoir by renowned theatre director Luc Bondy; strikingly harsh portraits of contemporary European life from painter and performance artist Miriam Cahn; and a screenplay about the Holocaust and Jewish refugees in Switzerland by Swiss filmmaker Stina Werenfels. Surprising in its diversity and sometimes disturbing in its preoccupations, this anthology will make it hard to generalize about Jewish life in Switzerland or to think in polarities such as Switzerland and "the Jews."

Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888–1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this biography recovers Szalit’s life and presents a stunning collection of her art. Szalit was a sought-after artist. Highly regarded by art historians and critics of her day, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. She published her work in the mainstream German and Jewish press, and she ran in artists’ and queer circles in Weimar Berlin and in 1930s Paris. Szalit’s fascinating life demonstrates how women artists gained access to Jewish and avant-garde movements by experimenting with different media and genres. This engaging and deeply moving biography explores the life, work, and cultural contexts of an exceptional Jewish woman artist. Complementing studies such as Michael Brenner’s The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, this book brings Rahel Szalit into the larger conversation about Jewish artists, Expressionism, and modern art.

This collection of essays sheds light on the history of Switzerland during World War II, covering such topics as: trade; financial relations; gold; refugees; defence; and foreign relations. It also touches on official post-war measures to suppress Switzerland's involvement in the war.

What is there of Jewish interest to see in Bombay? In Casablanca? Where are the kosher restaurants in Seattle? How did the Jewish community in Hong Kong originate? The Jewish Traveler: Hadassah Magazine's Guide to the World's Jewish Communities and Sights provides this information and much more.

Im Judentum wurde der Lebensanfang mit einer Vielfalt religiöser Rituale gefeiert. Das Jüdische Museum in Basel bewahrt Objekte aus der Schweiz und aus den angrenzenden Regionen des Elsasses bis nach Süddeutschland und gibt Einblick in eine grösstenteils verlorene Welt von Glauben, Ängsten, Hoffnung und Fröhlichkeit. Darunter sind Amulette, die Mütter und Kinder schützen sollten, Wimpel, die die Knaben in der jüdischen Gemeinschaft verankerten, Kissen für die Beschneidung, Geburtenregister des Beschneiders («Mohel-Bücher») und Wiegen für das Hollekreisch-Fest. Wissenschaftliche Artikel von Tali Berner, Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Uri R. Kaufmann und Daniela Schmid sind mit Interviews mit Dinah Ehrenfreund-Michler, Aviv Szabs, Esra Weill und Elisabeth und Ralph Weingarten (-Guggenheim) ergänzt, die die Bräuche und das Leben aus einem persönlichen und professionellen Blick erläutern. In Judaism, the beginning of life was celebrated with a variety of religious rituals. The Jewish Museum in Basel preserves objects from Switzerland and the neighboring regions of Alsace to southern Germany and sheds light on a largely lost world of faith, fears, hope and happiness. Among them are amulets to protect mothers and children, pennants to anchor boys in the Jewish community, pillows for circumcision, birth registers of the circumciser («mohel books»), and cradles for the Hollekreisch festival. Scholarly articles by Tali Berner, Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Uri R. Kaufmann and Daniela Schmid are complemented by interviews with Dinah Ehrenfreund-Michler, Aviv Szabs, Esra Weill and Elisabeth and Ralph Weingarten (-Guggenheim), which tell stories about religion and life from personal and professional perspectives.