After the Atrocities of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s Assault on Gaza

Stuart Taberner

This book was completed between late 2023 and mid-2024, that is, just as Jews and non-Jews around the world were reacting to the indiscriminate massacre of around 1,200 Israelis by Hamas on October 7 and to Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza and the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians. The final section of the conclusion discusses how these shocking events might qualify—or amplify—some of the developments outlined in this book. How did German Jewish writers respond in the immediate aftermath of October 7, and what can we speculate about the future of German Jewish identity as a renewed embrace of—or retreat from—worldliness and solidarity with others?

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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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After the Atrocities of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s Assault on Gaza

The New German Jewish Literature

Chapter illustrations ()