In her book about Jewish visibility in Weimar Germany, Kerry Wallach engages in a project that makes visible what had previously remained invisible in scholarship on German Jews in the 1920s and 30s: the numerous racialized and gendered codes of passing as non-Jewish that Jews themselves negotiated and debated. Passing Illusions deftly reveals the tensions felt by many German Jews during the Weimar era—tensions between the desire to fit in to mainstream German society and thereby gain personal benefits, versus the desire to be part of a distinct cultural, ethnic, or religious community and express pride in this affiliation.

Wallach's work sets itself apart from other scholarly analyses in two key ways. First, the book counters other scholars and theorists of Jewish passing who contend that to pass is to betray one's community and thereby to irreparably separate oneself from that community. As Wallach convincingly argues, many Jews in Germany passed as non-Jewish in certain circumstances or in certain spaces, yet they also sought out the community as a refuge or even proudly displayed their Jewish identities in other contexts, be that by wearing the badge of a Jewish organization or by reading a Jewish newspaper in public. She writes in her introduction, “It became possible, even desirable, to perform Jewishness without effacing it, and to be recognizably Jewish without standing out from the crowd” (3). The broader implications of Wallach's intervention into the historiography on Jews in Weimar Germany is perhaps best articulated on the final page of the book, where she contends that her focus on “chances to be open about Jewishness in public” gives readers a necessarily more complex view of the Weimar Republic and shows them that it “was more than a brief period in which certain discriminatory measures anticipated far more extreme Nazi acts of persecutions and violence” (175). Without ignoring Jewish anxiety and vulnerability in Weimar Germany, Wallach takes great care to provide her readers with an array of examples of how Jews showed their awareness of that vulnerability and actively took steps to work through it and even combat it. When writing about the phenomenon of passing, she does not indulge in the discourse of Jewish self-hatred, but she does present Jews as fallible human beings who truly struggled with dominant ideas of race and “the visual grammar of Jewish difference” (28). Despite their resistance to racialized stereotyping, Jews in Weimar Germany “nevertheless relied heavily on similar forms of racial, ethnic, and cultural profiling” (29) and were sometimes caught in the faulty logic of such profiling. More often than not, the discourses on Jewishness analyzed in Wallach's book present Jewish identity as situational rather than essential.

Second, Wallach's book reveals and corrects a problematic gender bias in the existing scholarship on Jewish visibility and embodied difference by focusing on Jewish women. It makes visible Jewish women and their own subtle strategies of covering or revealing Jewishness, just as it calls attention to the myriad ways that women were at the time and still often are rendered invisible by members of their own community or by contemporary scholars. As Wallach rightly points out in her introduction, prominent scholars of gender and Jewishness, such as Daniel Boyarin and Sander Gilman, assume their subjects to be Jewish men. What Wallach's book demonstrates is that Jewish women were central figures in the multifaceted discourse on passing, for the desires and fears of the German Jewish community were often projected on them via their representations in the visual and print media of the time. Through her many examples, Wallach shows readers the myriad ways in which Jewish women—both historical figures and fictional characters—negotiated their own images and those projected on them. Taking these crucial interventions into account, it is clear that this book will have equal impact on German, Jewish, and gender studies. That said, I did find myself wanting a clearer, more focused discussion on Jewish gender relations and sexual mores in the context of Weimar Germany. Both the “New Woman” and the “modern woman” are mentioned multiple times, but the reader is left in the dark about key components of gendered structures within the Jewish community, such as the family, the division of labor, and views on alternative sexualities and reproductive issues. It seems, for instance, that modesty and respectability—traditional bourgeois values—were prized among Jews across denominational lines (106, 172), even in an era that was notorious for its sexual brazenness. A concise discussion that situates Jewish women within both the specific Jewish context and the broader German discourses on gender and sexuality at the time would have been most welcome.

Wallach's book is meticulously and exhaustively researched, both in terms of its representation of broad-ranging and in-depth archival research and in its engagement with different bodies of theoretical and scholarly literature. It transcends the fields of German Jewish studies and contributes to broader theoretical debates on queer and black passing. By making a convincing case for the potential importance of early twentieth-century Jewish passing to the discussion of other (e.g., sexualized, racialized) forms of passing, Wallach's book does important comparative work that serves as a model for interdisciplinary research and writing. Indeed, her monograph is interdisciplinary in two senses of the word: it employs historical, theoretical, and cultural methodologies to illuminate a particular historical context, a diverse community, and a complex set of texts and images, thereby demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of German Jewish studies itself; and it connects this field to other fields of inquiry (critical race studies; gender and sexuality studies) and bodies of literature (American novels on black passing). It is not surprising that, at the close of a book on the visibility of a minority culture in an era that saw the gradual rise of racialized nationalism, Wallach connects the history of Jews in Weimar Germany with the present day. With nationalist politics and anti-immigration sentiment on the rise in Europe and in power in the United States, we now see minority groups feeling especially vulnerable. Although Wallach's book reveals the potential pitfalls of codifying difference, her final point is that, in becoming savvy readers of subtle cultural codes used by minority populations, we cast a critical eye on the types of societies and cultures that make the covering of difference necessary in the first place.