Festschriften are a time-honored genre of academic writing that pay tribute to an academic teacher and scholar of some prominence whose work has shaped and reshaped the studies of students, colleagues, and even entire fields. Given the conventions of this genre, such publications can be eclectic, with a range of only loosely connected contributions by scholars belonging to different cohorts and academic communities. While adhering to many of these conventions, this volume in honor of Dan Diner—professor at Hebrew University and former director of the Simon Dubnow Institute at Leipzig University—stands out for its coherent and rigorous approaches to the practice of Jewish history. The Festschrift presents Jewish history as a field that not only offers a particularly illuminating window on the modern period, but that also constitutes a veritable “paradigm of modernity” (9). This is a direct reflection not only of the strength of Diner's work but also of the eighteen scholars and mostly former Diner students who contributed to the volume. The compilation marks Diner's seventieth birthday in 2016 and is the third Festschrift in his honor.

Editors Arndt Engelhardt, Lutz Fiedler, Elisabeth Gallas, Natasha Gordinsky, and Philipp Graf organized the volume under the keywords of law, politics, representations, knowledge, and history. This approach allows them to grasp the broader dimension of Jewish history and life from the early modern period to the present day from different perspectives and through various disciplinary lenses. Their goal was to offer an integrated perspective on Jewish (and more general) history, one in which the particular perspectives of Jewish historical experiences of knowledge, space, and time shed light on universal themes. This approach directly mirrors Diner's past work, especially in Leipzig, and responds to his call for connecting Jewish history with the historical enterprise as a whole by employing knowledge of Jewish experiences to grasp better the dynamics of modern European life in general.

The editors solicited and assembled contributions from a range of Diner's younger students and collaborators, who often rely here on cross-disciplinary and transnational readings. Some draw heavily on the authors’ dissertations, such as Judith Ciminski in her careful analysis of the “Jewish war statistics” (jüdische Kriegsstatistik) compiled by several German-Jewish organizations during World War I and by the Prussian War Ministry's infamous 1916 “Jew count” (Judenzählung). Others write on topics more removed from their major academic projects, including David Jünger in his contribution on European Jewry and the 1878 Berlin Congress. All the essays are nevertheless substantial studies based on solid research that even extend to literary analysis and translation studies. For example, Mohamed A. H. Ahmed skillfully analyzes the challenges that two Iraqi-Jewish authors faced when translating Arabic cultural patterns into modern Hebrew. In the Festschrift’s sole English-language essay, Ahmed demonstrates how Shimon Ballas and Eli Amir relied on translation strategies such as “glossing” and the “translation of a translation” to make their Hebrew-language novels accessible to Israelis not sufficiently acquainted with Arabic culture (235). He shows how the lexical proximity of Hebrew and Iraqi Arabic, the authors’ mother tongue, posed translation obstacles. In revealing the difficulties of finding equivalent meanings for phrases that are non-translatable, Ahmed also demonstrates the difficulties of Iraqi-Jewish immigrant author-translators and their struggles over belonging in Israeli society.

Turning to European-Jewish and general European cultural and philosophical histories, Anna Pollmann's chapter on the relationship between Günther Anders's work and postmodern thought uses a (failed) recent attempt by the publishers of Tumult—a self-styled “consensus-corrupting” Austrian and German literary journal—to include Anders's texts from the time of his exile in the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Acknowledging a few superficial similarities (e.g., the rejection of an optimistic view of human progress), Pollmann's close readings reveal the Breslau-born Jewish philosopher to have been a cultural pessimist fully grounded in the foundational narratives of modernity—even if Anders's specific experience of persecution and exile had left him with a distinct sense of loss, particularly in his approach to history.

The Festschrift’s strength is only increased by a forty-nine-page list of Diner's publications, which compiles five decades of his writings, from early sketches in a student newspaper in the West German state of Hesse in 1964, to his 2015 study of Israel and the so-called German Question. The list also includes Diner's often combative 1970s contributions on Zionism, the German left, and Palestine to links. Sozialistische Zeitung (sic), a publication of the non-dogmatic left and the Offenbach-based Sozialistisches Büro, and to Pflasterstrand, one of the left-wing alternative city magazines in Frankfurt am Main. This not only allows readers to grasp the evolution of Diner's substantial output on these topics, but also testifies to his continual engagement with current political issues.

For all the accomplishments of this Festschrift, there are nevertheless some shortcomings. The organization of the contributions under five keywords sometimes seems slightly arbitrary. For instance, Robert Zwargs’s illuminating piece on the remarkable impact of Critical Theory on the American academic landscape after World War II, which he examines through the lens of Aby Warburg's notion of Nachleben, could have convincingly been subsumed under the rubric knowledge instead of history. A stronger editorial hand (e.g., in the form of introductions to the five main sections) might have mitigated this deficiency. Furthermore, some of the contributions do not fully achieve the editors’ promise that the volume provides “new perspectives.” For example, Jan Gerber's findings in an otherwise solid explorations of Karl Marx's discovery of the category of class offer less of a new insight and partially date back to the scholarly rediscovery of Marx's humanistic early writings. Such shortcomings hardly weaken the volume as a whole. The prolific scholarship of the “Leipzig School,” a phrase that many scholars have admiringly (and others somewhat bitingly) used to refer to those trained at the Simon Dubnow Center, has been impressive. In light of Diner's immensely stimulating studies, as well as the exceptional integration by scholars trained in Leipzig of research-based endeavors with sophisticated theoretical approaches, one hopes to see future volumes on the continually evolving field of Jewish history and studies.