Long awaited, Sharon Gillerman's important contribution to the field of Jewish culture studies is as vital and engaging as readers had anticipated. Rooted in her 1996 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) dissertation written under Saul Friedlander and Steve Zipperstein, but much expanded, this deep and well-thought-out study of the institutions concerned with reconstitution of the “Jewish body” after World War I adds a wealth of detail to earlier works on the history of “healthy Jews” such as Todd Samuel Presner's Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration Footnote ¹ and Mitchell B. Hart's The Healthy Jew. Footnote ² Gillerman's approach is generally that of women's history looking at the meanings and constitution of the family but with a clear eye toward the specific complexity of these questions for Jewish institutional history in the Weimar Republic.

It is the family, its definition, and its constitution that obsesses not only Jews during the long turn of the century. The perception that the Jews (however defined and in whatever context the terms is used) were “dying out” is a fear found among the French, Germans, English, and, we must also add, Americans of the period. (Each of these categories, as with the Jews, is always defined against some other group that is non-French, non-German, non-English, non-American that seems to be reproducing just fine, thank you.) This question is first raised in the popular German-language medical literature in 1894 when the philo-Semitic publishing house of J. Schabelitz in Zurich published a pamphlet titled “The Decline of Israel” by a “Physiologist.” The widely circulated fin-de-siècle view that the Jews were in danger of vanishing was best known through the writing of Felix Theilhaber in 1911. Theilhaber's work on the “decline of the Jews” (its title a prefiguration of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West of 1918) presented the demographic case for the disappearance of the Western Jew in greatest detail. The anxiety about real or imagined Jewish infertility, its relationship to intermarriage, and the concomitant evolution of a Jewish population policy in Germany (and its obsession with the sick and too fecund body of the Eastern Jew) is paralleled by Gillerman to the expansion of Jewish welfare as an institutional project during this period. It is in the 1920s that the institutional structures dealing with the family as the source of a healthy Jewish body are fully in place.

It is with figures such as the Austrian Bertha Pappenheim (Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer's “Anna O”) that this shift from concern to action takes place. It is with Pappenheim, about whom there is much now written, but little as well contextualized as this book, that anxiety about illness, immorality, and decline for the Jews in Germany as the result of Eastern Jews entering into Germany is institutionalized. The very idea of “social work” as a modern profession (in analogy to Florence Nightingales' “creation” of nursing as a modern professional) has its roots in these concerns about sick and corrupt Jews, their families, and their bodies. The irony is that this anxiety repeats itself again and again. Recall sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report on the African American family for the Office of Policy Planning and Research of the U.S. Department of Labor, and project this back half a century to German Jews looking east at the Ostjuden.

Such post-World War II concerns mirror in complex way the concerns of Gillerman's world. The topic of Jewish war orphans, rarely explored in the Weimar setting, is brilliantly outlined by Gillerman as one of the core means by which the “New Jewish Nation” would shape and reshape the imagined new Jew for both the German Zionist project and for the reconstitution of a German Jewish identity. Susan Kleinman and Chana Moshenska's classic essay, “Class as a Factor in the Social Adaptation of the Kindertransport Kinder” (Shofar 23 [2004]: 28–40) looks at an analogous case in 1939. Gillerman's work provides much of the background for this in the 1920s.

“Youth” is thus in complex ways at the core of Gillerman's book. The obsession with childhood also began in the 1890s with everything from the creation of juvenile justice and the invention of adolescence in the United States to Dorothy Burlingham, Eva Rosenfeld, and Anna Freud's exclusive psychoanalytic school in Vienna and their creation in 1937 of the Jackson Nursery for the very poor of that city. Anna Freud's concretization of this in the very idea of the “best interest of the child” is shown by Gillerman to have a substantial presence in the 1920s in German Jewish institutions and their vision of the healthy Jewish child and the future Jewish adult.

Gillerman's work is a powerful addition to the literature on the historical sociology of the Jewish body in the German-speaking world. It bodes well for her next project on the East European Jewish strongman, Zishe Breitbart, and the ultra-healthy Jewish body in the same world.