The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a transformation of Jewish identity as the modes in which Jewishness was expressed moved from mandatory communal membership to voluntary association and individual choice. Sarah Wobick-Segev's Homes Away from Home is a welcome addition to the rich scholarship that analyzes how these changes took place and the multiple ways in which they were manifested. It was a moment, she writes, when “forms and structures of religious, familial, and communal authority were replaced by and subsumed under the needs and concerns of the individual” (2). These innovations took place, she notes, as consumer culture, capitalism, and leisure time transformed the ways that Europeans lived their lives.

In her first chapter, Wobick-Segev draws on Jürgen Habermas's famous characterization of the eighteenth-century coffeehouse as a site of Öffentlichkeit to show how European coffeehouses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued to serve as important spaces for Jews to integrate into European society while maintaining their own group cohesion. Coffeehouses allowed alienated Jewish refugees to seek comradery and fellowship with their townsmen in public spaces, and permitted the upwardly mobile to hobnob with the elites. Along similar lines, restaurants, theaters, hotels, and ballrooms also served as important sites of Jewish cultural expression, where visiting artists performed, political parties formed, and ordinary folk went to hear public lectures on the issues of the day.

The pull towards public spaces Wobick-Segev identifies in her first chapter is also revealed in her second chapter on love and marriage. She shows how weddings were moved out of the synagogue and into hotels and ballrooms, and marriages came about as young men and women met on their own initiative at restaurants, balls, and public events, rather than through behind-the-scenes arrangements by professional brokers. Once again, the new availability of leisure time and consumer culture transformed the ways that individual Jews saw themselves and formed their communities.

The third chapter, on youth, begins with the observation that many Jews believed “the key to solving the new Jewish question would be found in the Jewish youth and children of the day” (75). Wobick-Segev shows how summer camps and youth clubs replaced the ḥeder as the “main spaces of Jewish childhood” (77). In contrast to the ḥeder, the goal of the new summer camps and scouting associations was not to impart Judaic knowledge, but rather to facilitate Jewish comradery and fellowship, to develop healthy youth, and to create “spaces and practices that aimed to inspire Jewish youths to maintain a connection with some element of tradition, community, or Jewish culture” (86).

In her fourth chapter, Wobick-Segev shows how Jewish ritual and religion were individualized as part of the movement toward modernity. The bar mitzvah, for instance, she writes, “increasingly became a family affair in which religious meaning held secondary or little importance at all” (107) and was often “emptied of all religious meaning” (111). New rituals, like confirmations and baby namings, were developed in the hopes of continuing to make “the synagogue the focal point for Jewish celebration” (113), even as ritual observance and religious participation became more individualized. Similarly, the celebration of Jewish holidays moved from the synagogue into public spaces as Hanukah, Purim, and other holidays were celebrated with balls, gala dinners, and charity events.

In her final chapter, Wobick-Segev moves to the latter half of the twentieth century, looking at how some of the phenomena she describes earlier continued after the Shoah. With mixed success, Jewish leaders sought to rebuild their communities in the public spaces of the prewar era, reviving summer camps, lectures, and youth programs in the challenging environment of the postwar in order to reassert their Jewish identity.

Wobick-Segev chooses to make her argument in a comparative structure, focusing on three urban spaces: Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. This decision, she notes, “has provoked curiosity, surprise and even deep skepticism” (7). It is a skepticism well merited. Although the privileged few Jews who were given permission to reside in St. Petersburg before the Revolution modeled their expressions of Jewish identity on Western prototypes, the opportunities available in St. Petersburg—and even more so in postrevolutionary Leningrad—were very different from those available in western and central European capitals, as a result of which, whenever Wobick-Segev turns to St. Petersburg/Leningrad in her comparison, she is compelled to note the “profound difference” (167) in this “intellectual and rhetorical outpost” (85). Similarly, the specific challenges faced by Jews in Nazi-era Berlin are also unique to that time and place. Perhaps a more apt city to compare would have been Vienna or London, or—for the sake of bridging the European East and West—Odessa, Vilnius, or Minsk, all of which had vibrant Jewish communities seeking to express themselves publicly in new ways. One wonders, in fact, what the argument gains altogether through the comparative perspective. The important transformations Wobick-Segev so compellingly describes were pan-European urban phenomena. More importantly, perhaps, they were changes that—although by no means universal—affected a much larger segment of the population than just those residing in the major capitals. Even within the cities she chooses, her examples tend to come from the most elite strata of the population—the Poliakovs, the Rothschilds, Peter Gay, and Simon Dubnov. The small shtetlekh that dotted the Pale of Jewish Settlement also saw the same movements toward public spaces and individualized choice. By focusing solely on these three cities, Wobick-Segev actually understates the significance of the colossal metamorphosis she is describing.

One could also question the chronological frame of the book, which begins with the Hep Hep riots of 1819 and takes the reader through to the 1950s, with occasional references even to the twenty-first century Chabad-Lubavitch movement. The transformations these cities underwent as a result of two world wars, the collapse of imperial systems, and the curtailment of civil society under Nazism and Communism are too momentous to receive detailed discussion in a book of this length. A tighter time frame could have permitted more detailed analysis and allowed for the isolation of the specific impetuses that stimulated change.

By drawing our attention to the new urban locations in which Jews forged modern individualized identities within larger Jewish communities, Wobick-Segev has made a significant contribution and has greatly enriched our understanding of the ways that Jews have been able to refashion their collective identity and express themselves as individuals in the modern era. This is an important and lively book that should be of broad interest to scholars in Jewish studies and urban history.