Miron studies the Jewish press in three countries—Germany, France, and Hungary—to ascertain how Jews re-created their “home-making myths” and a usable past, and especially the history of emancipation, in the face of an aggressive antisemitism and their deteriorating political status (“the waning of emancipation”). Miron employs a comparative method to highlight the commonalities and differences between the three examples, devoting two chapters to each case study. He focuses on the Jewish press in the vernacular, which in France included the Yiddish press of eastern European immigrants.

Across Europe, yet especially in Germany, liberal integrationist thinkers had developed a view of linear historical progress centered on emancipation and the attendant processes of “assimilation” and integration. In the concluding years of the Weimar Republic, with the Nazis' stated intention of abrogating emancipation, all Jewish thinkers were forced to reassess their assumptions. Most liberals, Miron argues, reasserted their faith in the linear progressive view while some espoused a cyclical notion of the ebb and flow of history that could better accommodate setbacks. Most Zionists did not fully repudiate emancipation; they questioned some of its consequences, especially assimilation. The Orthodox, while remaining loyal to emancipation, criticized the widespread abandonment of religious tradition, seeing themselves as having struck the correct balance. Only a few radical thinkers advocated either a return to the “ghetto” (Joachim Prinz) or a reorientation of Jewish life around the idea of “tribe” (Stamm). Only one radical Neo-Orthodox thinker (Simon Schwab) repudiated Samson Raphael Hirsch's compromise between secular and religious culture (Torah im derekh erez) that had been the foundation of Neo-Orthodoxy.

After 1933 the various anniversaries the Jewish press celebrated (900th anniversary of the Worms synagogue, 1934; 150th anniversary of Mendelssohn's death, 1936; 80th anniversary of Heinrich Heine's death, 1936) serve Miron as an index to the creation of a “usable past.” With the Nazis' incremental dismantling of emancipation, Jewish writers increasingly articulated notions of a Jewish “fate” or tragedy consistent with a cyclical view of history. Some emphasized a return to “inner Jewish” values. Others took a longer view of emancipation, seeing it not as a product of the last century and a half, which the Nazis explicitly repudiated, but a millennial process that could reassert itself against contemporary trends. Still others, especially after Kristallnacht, focused on emigration as a constant feature of Jewish life, highlighting German Jews' mission in carrying their “western Judaism” (“Bildungsjudentum”) into a new diaspora.

In France, Jewish writers at first considered the threat to emancipation a largely German phenomenon to which France's revolutionary heritage made it immune. French Jewish writers additionally invoked the “union sacrée” of 1914 to enhance their sense of national belonging. French and Yiddish writers alike ignored the extent to which the French right wing contested the ideas of 1789. After the Anschluβ, Jewish thinkers could no longer dismiss these domestic developments, though some continued to espouse France's unique revolutionary legacy and to attribute Nazism to an essential German character. Yiddish writers in particular engaged in a transnational evaluation of the Jews' situation. As in Germany, some writers advocated a return to the ghetto, embraced a cyclical view of history, or idealized earlier periods of French Jewish history to demonstrate that emancipation transcended the revolutionary heritage.

Jews in Hungary confronted the actual erosion of emancipation (First Jewish Law, June 28, 1938) prior to the war. Writers emphasized the Jews' rootedness in Hungarian culture and especially stressed the medieval period, which linked them to the Catholic conservative right, the predominant political force and bulwark against Nazism in interwar Hungary. Jews, alongside Protestants and Catholics, rallied to the figure of King Stephen as a tolerant Christian alternative to Nazi paganism. After the “Second Jewish Law” (May 4, 1939), all Jewish writers began a critical reassessment of emancipation and its consequences, in particular distinguishing between positive and negative assimilation. From the outbreak of the war until the Nazi occupation (1939–1944), writers across the spectrum continued to stress the “uniqueness” of Hungary and Hungarian Jewish emancipation, convinced that they would escape the Jews' fate elsewhere in Europe. Neolog writers resorted to an ebb and flow version of emancipation that was better suited to their recent experience in allowing for setbacks and opposition. Even those thinkers most critical of nineteenth-century emancipation remained steadfast in their commitment to a new emancipation on the basis either of a renewed commitment to Judaism (neologs) or to Jews as a national minority (Zionists), positions that were in fact remarkably close.

Miron's comparison of the three countries, in which he recognizes national variations on a transnational discourse and experience, is innovative, welcome, and grounded in impressively wide erudition. Yet by concentrating on the Jewish press and using the inherited ideological categories of liberal-integrationism, Zionism, and Orthodoxy, he produces disappointingly predictable results. Do these ideological categories truly do justice to the spectrum of Jewish intellectual life? Does a focus on the communal press that rabbis, seminary historians, and community or party activists dominated actually provide access to a representative range of responses let alone the most innovative or bold thinking? Miron's defense of representativeness (pp. 15–16)—that in a time of crisis, combined with censorship and an inward turn, the Jewish press became increasingly representative—is not fully persuasive. One suspects that the study's very design militated against new insights. Finally, the English translation is verbose, awkward, and frequently ungrammatical.