The Global Context

For these reasons, any if not all the issues that dominate the discussion in Germany can also be considered to be local inflections of global debates across the diaspora, between the diaspora and Israel, and between Jews and non-Jews. Three themes that recur throughout recent texts evidence these intersections: who counts as Jewish?; Israel and its treatment of Palestinians; and the relationship between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism.

As described above, members of the established community often doubted whether “the Russians” had a genuine attachment to Judaism. This was based on the newcomers’ seeming ignorance of Jewish practice but also on the fact that the evidence of Jewish ancestry that they were required to show by the German state in many cases did not conform to Jewish law.5The German state has often been instrumental in defining Jewish identity since 1945. See Bodemann, “The State.” In the Soviet Union, Jewish ethnicity could be transmitted through either the father or the mother,6Shneer, “The Third Way,” 112. and the German authorities were even more expansive, “including also half- and sometimes quarter-­Jews,” Remennick notes. “On the other hand,” she continues, “the Central Jewish Council of Germany and the local communities adopted a much more stringent religious definition, accepting in its ranks only those born of a Jewish mother.”7Remennick, “Idealists,” 31. Kessler estimates that by this definition as many as half the new arrivals did not count.8Kessler, “Homo Sovieticus,” 135. Again, as Weiss and Gorelik write, this was a major source of “tension between the Soviet-Jewish immigrants and the established Jewish communities in Germany, whose self-definition and identity is based on religious values.”9Weiss and Gorelik, “The Russian-Jewish Immigration,” 386. Gorelik’s 2005 short story “‘Herr Grinblum, Sie sind kein Jude!’” (Mr. Grinblum, you are not a Jew!) plays on the irony that in the Soviet Union a Jewish patronymic would often mean discrimination, while for the Jewish community in Germany, having only a Jewish father was not sufficient.

Yet there were plenty of Jews already in Germany whose Jewishness did not fulfill strict halachic criteria. In large part, this has to do with the way the Holocaust had disrupted Jewish genealogies across Europe. It also has to do, however, with the long history of marrying-out and conversion out of Judaism. Exogamy is viewed differently by the various branches of Judaism, with Orthodox communities generally excluding those who chose non-Jewish spouses, but even Reform and Liberal Jews sometimes worry that the practice will lead to the gradual disappearance of Judaism. In Germany specifically, where marrying-out had become common before the Holocaust,10See Lowenstein, “Jewish Intermarriage” and Voigtländer and Voth, “Married to Intolerance.” the dominance of Orthodox Judaism following the reestablishment of the community and the sensitivities associated with the Jewish presence in the land of the perpetrators combine to make the topic even more controversial. In 2021, Maxim Biller attacked the poet, stage performer, curator, and activist Max Czollek for having “appropriated” a Jewish identity based “only” on having a single Jewish grandfather.11See Bodemann, “Die Causa Max Czollek.” Biller even compared Czollek to Benjamin Wilkomirski, the Swiss writer who had faked Jewish origins and a Holocaust biography.12See Eskin, A Life in Pieces. Indeed, it was more likely the appropriation of Jewish suffering, as he saw it, that actually concerned Biller than any strict halachic definition. Czollek has become known for his mobilization of a Jewish biography—his grandfather was in exile in Shanghai—to side with marginalized minorities today. In July 2023, the journalist Fabian Wolff, who had built a career on criticizing Israel, admitted that he was not in fact Jewish. This revelation caused anxious reflection on the “special status” accorded to Jews in public discourse, and on who may speak as a Jew, and for Jews.13See Nutt, “Der Identitätsschwindel des Fabian Wolff.”

Protagonists who do not fulfill halachic criteria are common in contemporary novels, in fact, often evidently incorporating their authors’ own ambivalent status. Eva Menasse’s Vienna (2005), for example, tells the story of her Catholic and Jewish family,14See Hamidouche, “The New Austrian Family Novel.” and in Mirna Funk’s Winternähe (Near winter; 2015) Lola expresses the same anxiety about her identity as a Vaterjüdin (Jew by patrilineal descent)—and about what it means to belong to both the victim and the perpetrator collective—as Funk does in newspaper articles.15See for example, Funk, “Am Ende.” Among Soviet-born writers, the protagonists of Kat Kaufmann’s Superposition (2015) and Dmitrij Kapitelman’s Das Lächeln meines unsichtbaren Vaters (The smile of my invisible father; 2016) both suffer from the knowledge that, as Vaterjuden, they don’t quite count.

Funk’s Lola and Kapitelman’s Dmitrij travel to Israel to discover the Jewish identity that they feel they lack. Like Mascha in the Soviet-born writer Olga Grjasnowa’s Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians love birch trees; 2012), they soon become witnesses to Palestinian suffering inflicted by the Jewish state, however. In the face of a sustained campaign of rocket attacks by Hamas and rising antisemitism in Europe, Lola’s sympathy is largely with Israel—though she later quits the country and travels to Thailand—whereas Dmitrij and Mascha find Israeli ethnic-nationalism difficult to reconcile with what they take to be the fundamental message of the Holocaust, that is, the requirement to express solidarity with all victims. For Lola, loyalty to Israel as the refuge for Jews everywhere is paramount, even if she is ultimately disillusioned. For Dmitrij and Mascha, in contrast, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is a betrayal of universalistic Jewish values and indeed Holocaust memory.

In these and other recent novels, the global context is the discomfort that many Jews in the diaspora now experience in relation to Israel’s political shift to the right, its harsh treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank (and discrimination against Israeli Arabs), and its encouragement of Jewish settlement in areas designated for a future Palestinian state, including the displacement of Palestinian residents.16See Schoeps, “Contemporary Philosophical and Ethical Fights.” In the United States, what Steven Rosenthal calls “the waning of the American Jewish love affair with Israel” had already begun in late 1990s and early 2000s,17See Rosenthal, Irreconcilable Differences. in large part because of the Palestinian issue,18See Waxman, Trouble in the Tribe. whereas the different European context meant that most Jews there were still broadly pro-Israel, fearful for its security, unconvinced by their governments’ support, and alive to any potential resurgence of antisemitism in countries with long histories of persecution and, today, large Muslim populations.19See Shain and Brisman, “Diaspora.” More recently, however, sentiments have shifted in Europe too; not only on account of the treatment of Palestinians but also because of successive Israeli governments’ perceived lack of engagement with issues that are vital to younger Jews in the diaspora especially. These include the different affiliations of Jewish belief and practice, conversion, and the broader issue of “who is a Jew?”20See Eytan, “Complexity.” At the same time, across the diaspora, Jews are sensitive to criticism of Israel, fearing that it all too often betrays antisemitism.21See Schoeps, “Anti-semitism.” In Germany specifically, Jewish anxieties have increased since the summer of 2015 following the arrival of refugees from predominantly Muslim countries across North Africa and the Middle East.22See Brenner, “A New German Jewry,” especially 426. Similarly, the surge in anti-Jewish incidents in response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza in October 2023—itself a response to the massacres of more than 1,200 Israelis by Hamas earlier that month—has also caused great trepidation.

More generally, many Jews in both Europe and the United States may now perceive a conflict between their understanding of Jewishness as a cosmopolitan identity and what they see as the Israeli state’s ethno-nationalism. This is essentially an expression of the tension between Jewish universalism and Jewish particularism that has long shaped Jewish thought and culture.23See Lundgren, Particularism and Universalism and Hughes, Rethinking Jewish Philosophy. Before the Holocaust, this discussion was especially energetic in the German-speaking countries, including Moses Mendelssohn and the Jewish Enlightenment; the emergence of Reform Judaism; the historicizing study of Jewish texts pioneered by the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism); Herzl’s Zionist 1896 tract Der Judenstaat (The Jewish state); and Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Gerschom Scholem on Jewish history, theology, mysticism, and scripture. On the one side, therefore, there is an idealistic, even idealized vision of diasporic existence as the source of Jewish values, including openness to the world, acting as a bridge between cultures, and the belief in equality for all. This position is espoused by prominent thinkers such as Alan Wolfe in the United States24See Wolfe, At Home in Exile. and Micha Brumlik in Germany.25See Brumlik, Kritik des Zionismus. On the other side, there is a pragmatic determination to pursue Jewish interests, even if this means disregarding the rights of others.26See, for example, Gordis, We Stand Divided. The contrast between the two standpoints also relates to different interpretations of the Nazi genocide. For some, the Holocaust is an injunction to defend the dignity, human rights, and lives of all.27See Sznaider, Jewish Memory. (Reference is sometimes made to Hannah Arendt’s dictum that the Holocaust was a “crime against Humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people”.)28Cited in Sznaider, Jewish Memory, 119. See Sznaider, “Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Cosmopolitanism” and Michman, “Particularist and Universalist Interpretations.” For others, in contrast, the genocide imposes an unavoidable obligation to put the security of Jews above any other concerns.29See Patt, Israel and the Holocaust. Following the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s assault on Gaza, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Jews around the world are being forced to consider their Jewish identity and attachment to Israel even more intensively, of course.

For many Jews in North America and Europe today, expressing opposition to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is not only a matter of asserting an authentic—cosmopolitan—Jewish identity, however. It also reflects a more profound belief that Jewishness should be good for something, that is, that Jews are imbued with a special obligation to make the world a better place. This is often expressed with reference to the concept of tikkun olam30See Krasner, “The Place of Tikkun Olam.” (“to repair the world”) that originated in classical rabbinical literature and which, especially since the Jewish Enlightenment (haskalah), has come to imply Jews’ responsibility to seek to right injustice.31See Birnbaum and Cohen, eds., Tikkun Olam. Tikkun olam is often cited as a reason for the disproportionate involvement of Jews in progressive causes, from the mass movements for economic and political equality of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to civil rights campaigns in the 1960s, to agitating on behalf of refugees today. As discussed in later chapters, tikkun olam is one dimension, or manifestation, of what British historian Adam Sutcliffe terms “Jewish purpose.”32Sutcliffe, What Are Jews For?