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The Week in Germany: Politics

January 20, 2006

Scholarly insights into "Being Jewish in the New Germany"

Author and scholar Jeffrey M. Peck Thursday presented a new book that examines the development of Jewish life in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall and unification.

With a focus on the thriving Jewish community in Berlin, "Being Jewish in the New Germany" addresses the dramatic changes in Germany's Jewish community, the third-largest in Europe and one of the fastest growing in the world.

Published this month by Rutgers University Press, the book moves beyond questions of the Holocaust's lasting influence on Germans to investigate the why and how of Jewish immigration to Germany.

Not content to just list the successes of the revitalization of German Jewry in numbers, Peck looks particularly at the Russian Jews who have immigrated to Germany as well as the exhibitions, museums, and festivals that have become popular mainstays of Berlin cultural life.

Peck's multi-disciplinary approach includes analyses of major German-Jewish writers such as Vladimir Kaminer and Maxim Biller, whose voices have become prominent in public discourse.

The author also addresses comparisons between the 110,000-member Jewish community with the nearly 4 million-person Turkish community, Germany's largest minority group.

Although his analysis celebrates the re-emergence of a culture that had once been all but wiped out in the country, he also warns of the new anti-Semitism cropping up throughout Europe.

A scholar at the American Institute of Contemporary German Studies, Peck has been researching Jewish life in Germany since shortly before unification.

As a Jewish American who spends much of his time lecturing on Jews in Germany, he is often confronted with people incredulous about his work and his investment in the country where the Holocaust was perpetrated. But it is his personal investment in his work and his own questions of identity that encouraged him to write such a book in the first place, Peck says.

Links:

Jewish Life in Germany (from Germany.info)

American Institute for Contemporary German Studies

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