In recent years, there has been an increase in published conference proceedings in Jewish and Genocide Studies. These publications differ strikingly in quality. Francis R. Nicosia and David Scrase's Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses ranks among this genre's stronger examples. The volume brings together the contributions of seven leading American, German, and Israeli experts in German-Jewish history to the 2006 Miller Symposium at the University of Vermont. Their essays focus on the intricate ways in which German Jewry responded to the Nazi onslaughts of the 1930s and 1940s. The contributions return to the much-explored role of the Jewish community's leadership and continue the more recent investigation of Jewish everyday life. Belonging to a series of new publications, such as Marion Kaplan's Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 and Miriam Rürup's forthcoming Alltag und Gesellschaft. Perspektiven deutsch-jüdischer Geschichte, the volume does more to add much-needed nuances to a complex field than novel approaches.

As Francis Nicosia stresses in the introduction, German Jews “went to extraordinary lengths to adapt” to the quickly changing worlds that left them with rapidly “diminishing options” (pp. 2, 8). Marion Kaplan explicates these adjustments along the lines of gender and age. Reiterating insights from her previous work, she details reversals in gender relations, especially the crucial new roles of Jewish women in public life that extended to confrontations with Nazi officials, and gendered interpretations of danger. More so than before, Kaplan shows the evolution of Jewish family life and conflicts between parents and children who were often more eager to flee than their mothers. Families faced the brunt of the Nazi onslaughts and experienced multiple agonies, culminating in breakups that sent many of its youngest members abroad (p. 37). Jürgen Matthäus continues the focus on everyday life by turning to a minority that pursued judicial proofs of ancestry to secure racial reclassifications in the hopes of escaping persecution. He examines cases from Berlin district courts and shows that close to half of the litigants, mostly Nazi-defined “Mischlinge,” were able to “improve” their status. Still, Matthäus regards these practices of “evasion by compliance” not so much as “a means of escape” as a “tool” of the Nazi state to render the implementation of its policies “more efficient” (pp. 56, 64).

By turning to the Judenhäuser that the Nazis established as the final dwellings before the occupants’ deportation, Konrad Kwiet analyzes another temporary reprieve, albeit one for the vast majority of German Jews. He argues that these dwellings were de facto ghettos that functioned without walls because the Gentile population readily participated in the exclusion of their Jewish neighbors (p. 118). Michael Brenner meanwhile traces the ghettoization theme in the realm of Jewish theater and scholarship.

A second set of essays investigates the leadership of organized Jewish life. Francis Nicosia discusses how Zionism became a “major force” in Jewish Berlin of the Nazi years. In line with his earlier works, Nicosia characterizes notions of a Nazi-Zionist “community of interest” as a misconception and demonstrates that Zionist leaders, just as their non-Zionist counterparts, suffered from periodic arrests and brutalities. Moreover, their main project to reeducate German Jewry ultimately failed due to the regime's incessant attacks. In his explorations of Jewish self-help at the leadership level, Avraham Barkai takes issue with this reading. Instead he argues that Nazi agencies extended “preferential treatment” to the Zionists (p. 79). Still, both authors list Jewish successes in social work and emigration, while making the case that “cooperation” with the Nazi state was unavoidable due to the Jews’ utter powerlessness. Beate Meyer, finally, pushes these examinations into the years of war and genocide by focusing on the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, the last and closely Nazi-supervised Jewish organization. In her readings of the three caesuras of 1939, 1941, and 1943, Meyer reveals how Jewish leaders managed to use their remaining room to maneuver to help by preventing, for example, the 1940 deportation of East Frisian Jews. Yet, she also demonstrates how the association's legalism and bureaucratic procedures proved a “pitifully helpless strategy” once the Nazi state shifted to a systematic genocide in 1941 (p. 166).

These essays reflect key trends and achievements in the recent scholarship along with some of its shortcomings. First, they sharply reveal the limited impact that gender analysis, despite its tremendous promise, has had on the field. Marian Kaplan remains the volume's sole practitioner. This is particularly striking, since several essays would directly benefit from this analysis. Were the judicial proofs of ancestry, for example, not distinctly gendered? Didn't the litigants repeatedly draw on gender stereotypes and roles to make their case? Second, most contributions have favored a Berlin-centric analysis. While Berlin-based Jewish institutions gained a dominant position, they are hardly representative of Jewish politico-cultural life in the country. Recent studies of smaller communities have revealed key differences and indicated that Berlin-based leaders took clues from their fellow Jews in the provinces. A return to a “Wasserkopf” Berlin, as Henry Wassermann once criticized, is in danger of adding old distortions. Lastly, many, including this volume's editors, have embraced Saul Friedländer's call for an “integrated” history of the Holocaust that does not isolate perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, but relates them to one another. While contributors who integrated the role of surrounding Gentile worlds, such as Kwiet, have produced intriguing analyses, other contributions such as Brenner's work could still benefit from this approach.

By adding a selection of primary sources, including lesser-known materials such as an illuminating 1937 survey of German Jewry by the American Jewish Committee, the editors have further increased the book's usefulness. In the end, the volume provides fascinating accounts of Jewish life under Nazism that demonstrate the need for complex analysis and that there are still questions to be answered.