Readers familiar with Steven Aschheim's scholarly opus will be grateful for this collection of essays on his central themes: Orientalism and Occidentalism, German-Jewish biography; the perverse logic of the Nazi regime; interactions of Jewish and Germany culture; the nature of liberal thought; and the complexities of assessing modern Jewish intellectual productivity. Superb pieces such as “The Bonfires of Berlin” (chapter nine) demonstrate that the 1933 book burnings took place in many university towns and seemed to astute observers a harbinger of things to come. “Theatricality, Identity and the Modern Jewish Experience” (chapter fourteen) shows how the overworked term “performative” can be used as a useful analytic tool. Readers unfamiliar with Aschheim's work will be struck by his sweeping reconstruction of the German-Jewish world that had its roots in the imperial period, came to fruition in the Weimar Republic, and that the Nazis destroyed. The editors of the Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History are to be commended for bringing Achheim's work together in this volume, whose critical apparatus might have been improved by more complete citations, consistent name spellings, and a more robust index.

Like many Israeli academicians, Hebrew University's Aschheim leans left. This comes through most explicitly when he draws lessons from his own upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa (p. 134), but also in his general expectations of liberal ideals and sympathy with progressive and postmodern criticisms of the same. Chapter four, “Bildung in Palestine” revisits the role of German Jews in Brit Shalom, a movement dedicated to a shared binational Jewish-Arab state with complete cultural and educational autonomy and minus political domination of either group. Aschheim captures its significance perfectly: “Although always a very small minority—Brit Shalom never had much more than a hundred members—their influence was palpable because many of the leading proponents of the bi-national idea were or became distinguished thinkers and scholars in their own right” (p. 40).

Addressing the fecundity of German Jews, “Toward a Phenomenology of the Jewish Intellectual: The German and French Cases Compared” (chapter thirteen), Aschheim revisits the phenomenon of the modern Jewish intellectual. He notes that for its relatively smaller size, French Jewry was hardly insignificant, providing major figures in the plastic arts, in music and stage, and in the social sciences. “French Jews,” writes Aschheim, “were remarkably prominent on the French cultural and intellectual scene” (p. 165). As Todd Endelman argued vigorously, the German model cannot stand for the modernization of European Jewry at large. Chapter fifteen, based on a lecture delivered on the second centenary of Gabriel Riesser's birth in 2006, continues the theme of particularity, highlighting Riesser's perceptive observations on Germany's national character. Aschheim also notes Riesser's combination of opposing opportunistic religious conversion while supporting intermarriage—a position more common than is often acknowledged (p. 187). I searched the notes of this chapter, in vain, for a recent biography of Riesser, which seems to me a desideratum. Shulamit Volkov's biography Walther Rathenau (Yale University Press, 2012) exemplifies the great value of such reassessments.

German Jews became “Icons Beyond Their Borders,” as Aschheim's second chapter rightly contends. Aschheim registers the scope of this legacy, often constructed without sufficient regard to those beyond the liberal mainstream (rural Jews, Orthodox Jews, Jews from traditional regions such as Posen, Ostjuden, etc.). Proponents of the German-Jewish tradition such as George Steiner, the Mosse brothers, and more popularly, Amos Elon, continue to celebrate the accomplishments of this Jewry. Just as vociferously, critics, often Zionist or Orthodox or both, have portrayed German Jewry as ultimately self-delusional, unaware of their precarious standing. Neither view, for Aschheim, does justice to the historical record. Aschheim acknowledges that “the study of German-Jewish culture has become something of a cottage industry” (p. 157). One may push this point further: the specific figures who receive biographical treatment in this book (chapters four-six summarize longer works on Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, and Viktor Klemperer) have generated cottage industries of their own. With the addition of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Leo Strauss, for diverse motives, one might claim enough scholarly energy has been expended.

Yet Aschheim's chapter of Scholem, one of this volume's highlights, reexamines the fuller autobiographical material now available on Scholem. Aschheim demonstrates that, like so many young German intellectuals who came to maturity after German unification, Scholem sought to transcend advocates of Geschichtsphilosophie via more radical thinkers, above all, Nietzsche. Radicalism, homosocial friendships, Jewishness: “Little wonder that it was Scholem's fellow Weimarians who were his true soul mates” (p. 70). With Klemperer, the publication of his GDR-era memoirs suggests a more sardonic observer than his celebrated Nazi-era memoirs would suggest. Aschheim gracefully portrays the literary scholar Klemperer, anti-Zionist and communist: conscious of his success, but anxious that the perversion of language he cataloged in the Nazi-era was being repeated in postwar East Germany. Aschheim's chapter on Arendt, focusing on her polarizing “talents,” does not break new ground, although his edited volume Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (2001) certainly did.

I suggest another direction for those interested in the intellectual history of German Jewry, following Aschheim's Brothers and Strangers (1982)—the interactions of German Jews with Ostjuden, especially those who earned doctorates and departed to the United States or pre-state Palestine. With some exceptions, scholarship remains focused on the German perspective; less attention has been lavished on the converse. Some of this has to do with language—there are more academics comfortable with German than Hebrew. Some of this has to do with a preference for studying the consciously heterodox and transgressive over the ostensibly Orthodox. Thus the scholarly literature on Joseph Soloveitchick or the Leibowitz siblings or any twentieth-century Hasidic figure, except A. J. Heschel, does not compare quantitatively or qualitatively with the scholarship on the figures dealt with here. This is a suggestion, not a criticism of Steven Aschheim, who remains an elegant and insightful student of Germany Jewry.