Seventy-six years after the fall of the Third Reich, the Jewish community in Germany remains significantly smaller than its numbers prior to the Holocaust—Jews make up approximately 98,000 people out of a total population of 82 million. The surviving remnant continued their lives in immediate postwar Germany, and they continued along various paths in the Bonn Republic, the German Democratic Republic, and ultimately in the reunified Germany, where the community continues to grow in numbers and diversity. Yet it is worth noting that this essay collection was published during a crucial moment of social and political transition—a topic from which the editors do not shy away.

As Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany makes quite clear, the contemporary situation for Jews in Germany is a complicated juxtaposition of experiences: on the one hand, Jews hold prominent positions in German public life, in politics and beyond; yet on the other hand, Jewish institutions are still guarded by armed police, everyday acts of antisemitism are becoming more common, and right-wing populism is on the rise throughout the globe. The book's editors, Jay Howard Geller and Michael Meng, note in their introduction, “What seems to be increasingly evident, however, is that significant numbers of German citizens—like their counterparts in other countries in Western and Eastern Europe—seem to be moving in a nationalistic direction that might weaken German commitments to acceptance of and acts of solidarity with religious-cultural minorities such as Jews, among other minority groups living in contemporary Germany” (5). Contextualizing the impact of today's deep societal divides proves a crucial interpretative structure for this collection of essays. It establishes not only the importance of looking back and examining how the German Jewish community rebuilt in the land of the perpetrators after genocide, but it also provides wider insights into the long-term impacts of coming to terms with the past in post-conflict societies. The volume is accessible to experts and will prove instructive for graduate students and advanced undergraduates alike.

In particular, Geller and Meng's collection provides important contributions to studies of post-1949 German Jewry in two key arenas: its chronological focus, which incorporates the 1990s and 2000s within the scope of postwar history, and its embrace of multiple academic disciplines, including literature studies, film and television studies, sociology, and history. The editors quite helpfully managed to arrange the essays both chronologically and thematically, building from broader themes—such as Geller's chapter on the politics of representation and Andrea A. Sinn's illuminating chapter on internal community politics that further complicated the political and moral efforts of restitution—to more specific geographic and individual examples—such as Miriam Rürup's focus on re-migrant histories in Hamburg or Tobias Freimüller's study on the community in Frankfurt am Main.

Such an organization also helps illuminate the ways in which both new and familiar questions are being reframed and reconsidered in more recent decades. Joseph Cronin's scholarship on Russian-speaking Jewish immigration to Germany in the first decade and a half after the fall of the Soviet Union takes a more contemporary view of what, by that time, was a century-old question: How do East European Jews fit into these preconceived notions of German Jewry? Of course, as before, the deeper question has multiple layers, including what it means to be German, what it means to be a German Jew, what it means to be Jewish in Germany, what it means to be Russian-speaking in post–Cold War Germany, and a broader examination of what responsibility Germany had, and has, for taking in persecuted Jews at the turn of the century.

Likewise, Jason Lustig's chapter titled “Bernhard Brilling and the Reconstruction of Jewish Archives in Postwar Germany” offers interesting insights into Jewish cultural reconstruction in what was, before catastrophe, the home of the Wissenschaft des Judenthums. Lustig's chapter opens with an intriguing, and tense, image: Brilling, a German-born historian and archivist, left Tel Aviv for Germany in the mid-1950s Germany, with the hopes of starting an archive for German Jewry in Germany. Brilling attempted to not only rebuild his own life, but he also attempted to reestablish a rooted and collective communal past—or, as he himself stated, he sought a “‘demand for cultural reparations’” (59). Brilling, as Lustig points out, largely failed in his efforts, torn between an Israeli stance that “Jewish life in Germany was at its end” (59) and a German stance “generally unwilling to openly compete with the Israelis” (49). According to Lustig, “His [Brilling's] inability to achieve these goals in his lifetime demonstrates the limits of the immediate postwar years, when so many Jewish leaders around the world (including some in Germany) believed that the chapter of Jewish life and culture in that bloodstained land had more or less come to its conclusion” (49–50). And yet, a generation or two later, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, Lustig's vision became reality. Jewish life, alongside the field of Jewish studies, is again finding a home in today's Germany.

In the collection's final chapter, Irit Dekel considers the transnational phenomenon of diaspora, particularly a loosely defined contemporary German Jewry, focusing on the theme of “[young] Israelis in Berlin” in the mid-2010s. Dekel's chapter is an intriguing way to close the collection: with a much-watched, arguably disproportionately overreported Jewish return to Berlin. As pointed out, the Israeli and German media extensively covered what was largely interpreted as the re-migration of descendants of Holocaust survivors. Whereas the German media presented a secular group of creatives and intellectuals drawn to the promises of all that Berlin's cosmopolitan culture has to offer, the Israeli media focused on themes of liberation and economic inequalities as the motive behind the migratory move. Dekel lays out the complex “both sides” argument. From the Israeli perspective, it becomes easy to see the migration to Berlin (and not, importantly, it should be stressed—a migration to “Germany”) as a statement against inequalities in Israel; from the German perspective, it takes on the quality of assuaging multi-generational German genocidal guilt. Dekel outlines three modes of liberation at play here: emancipation, undoing Zionism, and lamentation and loss (225). By the conclusion, Dekel asks the reader to use this example of “Israelis in Berlin” to think about power, about the struggle over defining the “Other,” and about the boundaries of belonging (241–42). Such an ending provides a provocative framework for understanding the past of German Jewry as well as moving into the future.

Unlike many other post-genocidal societies, the German example is generally notable for its relative lack of perpetrators having to live side by side with, and thus avoiding the mundane daily experience of confronting, their victims. This collection shows that this personal experience is, of course, quite different from the federally mandated experience of governmental decrees, such as reparations or official diplomatic recognition. In the German example, the situation becomes complicated by the impact of divided postwar societies and Cold War politics. Now, as Geller and Meng highlight, is perhaps the moment that truly tests the bounds of Germany's post-genocidal reconciliation—and it is a moment that illustrates both the complicated legacy of the steps forward and the steps backward in this process. Rebuilding Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust—as opposed to commemorating Jewish death—remains a work in progress.