In reading popular films of the Weimar Republic as candid commentaries on Jewish acculturation, Ofer Ashkenzi provides an alternative context for a re-evaluation of the infamous 'German-Jewish symbiosis' before the rise of Nazism, as well as a new framework for the understanding of the German 'national' film in the years leading to Hitler's regime.

The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish “outsiders” to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness – as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text – these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.

Challenges the notion that Weimar Jews sought to be invisible or indistinguishable from other Germans by "passing" as non-Jews

In the past decades the “German-Jewish phenomenon” (Derrida) has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various fields: Jewish studies, intellectual history, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, critical theory. In all its complex dimensions, the post-enlightenment German-Jewish experience is overwhelmingly regarded as the most quintessential and charged meeting of Jews with the project of modernity. Perhaps for this reason, from the eighteenth century through to our own time it has been the object of intense reflection, of clashing interpretations and appropriations. In both micro and macro case-studies, this volume engages the multiple perspectives as advocated by manifold interested actors, and analyzes their uses, biases and ideological functions over time in different cultural, disciplinary and national contexts. 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.

New essays examining the differences and commonalities between late Weimar-era and early Nazi-era German cinema against a backdrop of the crises of that time.

Today many Germans remain nostalgic about "classic" film comedies created during the 1930s, viewing them as a part of the Nazi era that was not tainted with antisemitism. In Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany, Valerie Weinstein scrutinizes these comic productions and demonstrates that film comedy, despite its innocent appearance, was a critical component in the effort to separate "Jews" from "Germans" physically, economically, and artistically. Weinstein highlights how the German propaganda ministry used directives, pre- and post-production censorship, financial incentives, and influence over film critics and their judgments to replace Jewish "wit" with a slower, simpler, and more direct German "humor" that affirmed values that the Nazis associated with the Aryan race. Through contextualized analyses of historical documents and individual films, Weinstein reveals how humor, coded hints and traces, absences, and substitutes in Third Reich film comedy helped spectators imagine an abstract "Jewishness" and a "German" identity and community free from the former. As resurgent populist nationalism and overt racism continue to grow around the world today, Weinstein's study helps us rethink racism and prejudice in popular culture and reconceptualize the relationships between film humor, national identity, and race.

What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different eras and social contexts. Working from an expansive concept of “the spatial,” these contributions look not only at physical sites but at professional, political, institutional, and imaginative realms, as well as historical Jewish experiences of spacelessness. Together, they encompass spaces as varied as early modern print shops and Weimar cinema, always pointing to the complex intertwining of German and Jewish identity.

Winner of Randy Shilts Award In the half century before the Nazis rose to power, Berlin became the undisputed gay capital of the world. Activists and medical professionals made it a city of firsts—the first gay journal, the first homosexual rights organization, the first Institute for Sexual Science, the first sex reassignment surgeries—exploring and educating themselves and the rest of the world about new ways of understanding the human condition. In this fascinating examination of how the uninhibited urban culture of Berlin helped create our categories of sexual orientation and gender identity, Robert Beachy guides readers through the past events and developments that continue to shape and influence our thinking about sex and gender to this day.

As German Jews emigrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and as exiles from Nazi Germany, they carried the traditions, culture, and particular prejudices of their home with them. At the same time, Germany—and Berlin in particular—attracted both secular and religious Jewish scholars from eastern Europe. They engaged in vital intellectual exchange with German Jewry, although their cultural and religious practices differed greatly, and they absorbed many cultural practices that they brought back to Warsaw or took with them to New York and Tel Aviv. After the Holocaust, German Jews and non-German Jews educated in Germany were forced to reevaluate their essential relationship with Germany and Germanness as well as their notions of Jewish life outside of Germany. Among the first volumes to focus on German-Jewish transnationalism, this interdisciplinary collection spans the fields of history, literature, film, theater, architecture, philosophy, and theology as it examines the lives of significant emigrants. The individuals whose stories are reevaluated include German Jews Ernst Lubitsch, David Einhorn, and Gershom Scholem, the architect Fritz Nathan and filmmaker Helmar Lerski; and eastern European Jews David Bergelson, Der Nister, Jacob Katz, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Abraham Joshua Heschel—figures not normally associated with Germany. Three-Way Street addresses the gap in the scholarly literature as it opens up critical ways of approaching Jewish culture not only in Germany, but also in other locations, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.