Acknowledgments

Stuart Taberner

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/V008536/1].

I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the award of a fellowship to allow me to work on this book. Without this support, progress would have been much slower and I would not have been able to receive generous feedback from colleagues at conferences in the United States and UK, especially Katja Garloff, Agnes Mueller, and Helen Finch.

I am also grateful to the University of the Free State in South Africa, where I am a Research Fellow. Its support has also been vital in allowing me to travel to archives in Germany. I am delighted to have this association with South Africa, where I have been involved in public engagement and Holocaust education activities for many years, especially with the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Foundation. The JHGF does important work with all communities in South Africa, and indeed across the continent, on human rights and building resilience for democratic transformation.

The research presented here was completed in early 2024, following the vicious attack by Hamas on Israel of October 7, 2023, which killed more than 1,200 people, overwhelmingly Jews but also Arab citizens and migrant workers from around the world. Israel’s response was ferocious and, by mid-2024, had killed more than 40,000 Palestinian residents of Gaza. Around the world, understandable outrage and legitimate criticism have often been drowned out by antisemitic provocations, on the one hand, and anti-Muslim prejudice, on the other.

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The New German Jewish Literature

Stable URL:https://openaccess.boydellandbrewercms.com/?id=-290265

Open Access license

Posits a New German Jewish Literature that has surprising implications for today's German Jewish - and Jewish - identity, including solidarity with others, even after October 7, 2023.

Eighty years after the Holocaust, it is now possible to speak of a New German Jewish Literature. Emerging out of a community that, following the arrival of more than 200,000 people of Jewish ancestry from the former Soviet Union, is now vastly larger, increasingly diverse, and culturally vibrant, German Jewish writers are re-articulating what it means to be Jewish in the "land of the perpetrators." More generally, they are also rethinking Jewish values and Jewish solidarity against the backdrop of global events and trends such as the resurgence of antisemitism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and growing intolerance toward ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities.

Stuart Taberner's book provides the first comprehensive account of the tension between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism that characterizes this New German Jewish Literature. To what extent should Jewish identity be focused on the "Jewishness" of the Jewish experience, including the Holocaust? Or does "Jewish purpose" reside in expressing solidarity with persecuted minorities everywhere? Taberner argues that this new literature presents an aesthetically engaging and politically nuanced deliberation on Holocaust memory, on worldliness, and on solidarity - with sometimes surprising and radical implications for modern-day German Jewish and Jewish identity. He also examines authors' responses to the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, and speculates about the future of German Jewish writing.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Author

Stuart Taberner

PublisherCamden House

Print publication date Mar, 2025

Print ISBN 9781640141797

EISBN 9781805433835

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Acknowledgments

The New German Jewish Literature

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