This highly ambitious book analyzes architects' responses to the Holocaust and documents “the ways in which buildings built by and for Jews since 1945 have been imbued with Jewish significance by their creators and users” (6). Central to Rosenfeld's narrative is not the purpose of the buildings he discusses, but whether they articulate an innate language of architectural expression that was inspired by religious, cultural, and religious Jewish tradition.

The opening chapters present a survey of the history of Jews and architecture from the tabernacle to modernist synagogues in Germany of the 1920s. Historically, Jews excelled in the arts and sciences in Europe, though they turned toward architecture relatively late. Rosenfeld establishes a significant list of names of architects active after World War I, including Michel de Klerk in the Netherlands; Pierre Chareau in France; El Lissitsky and Moisei Ginzburg in the Soviet Union; Erich Mendelsohn in Germany; and, in the United States, European émigrés such as Albert Kahn, Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Marcel Breuer. Alas, as Rosenfeld repeatedly notes, these illustrious architects did little that could be construed as Jewish architecture. To Rosenfeld, the lack of Jewish architecture is partly a reflection of the highly assimilated or secularized identities of the architects. Even one of the most widely celebrated architects and a committed Zionist, Mendelsohn, whose clients during the 1920s were often Jewish, designed buildings that display “little evidence” that his “Jewishness shaped his architectural philosophy” (34), as Rosenfeld concedes with a degree of frustration. The numerical increase and achievements of Jewish architects notwithstanding, their constructed civic buildings, residences, and commercial structures testify to a growing success story of Jewish architects–but not to the evolution of Jewish architecture as such.

For the period after the Holocaust, Rosenfeld focuses mainly on America and Germany and traces the development of modernism. Paradoxically, non-Jewish modernist architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright produced the more celebrated synagogue structures in the immediate postwar period, such as Beth Sholom in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. Among the emigrant American Jewish architects, it is only with Louis Kahn that Rosenfeld is on firmer ground in his search for Jewish architecture. Many of Kahn's mostly unrealized designs parted ways with modernist universalism and its ahistoricism while elaborating on Jewish traditions and symbols. It is in truth only in the work of Peter Eisenman, Daniel Liebeskind, and Frank Gehry that Jewish sensibilities, architectural forms of expressions, and Holocaust awareness converge and become more clearly articulated. Heralded in a 1988 exhibition of “Deconstruction Architecture” that opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Eisenman, Libeskind, and Gehry left the legacy of modernist aesthetics behind to embrace new forms of expression and to confront the legacy of the Holocaust. Their architectural creations, such as Libeskinds's Jewish Museum and Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, as well as Frank Gehry's greater willingness to discuss the Holocaust, are assuredly important, but this is partly also a reflection of their architectural engagements in Germany.

This is a richly textured book. The overlapping investigations of Jewish architects and architecture do not so easily cohere in a single historical narrative. Rosenfeld is mindful of the thorny issue of defining Jewish identity and architecture. He addresses this in his introductory reflections: modernism's ahistoricism and the collaborative nature of architectural endeavors often stood in the way of “expressing a sense of Jewishness in architecture” (35). While Rosenfeld aptly cites David Biale's fluid, open, and contextual understanding of Jewish identities, he unfortunately strays from this insight when he characterizes some Jewish architects as possessing “a weak sense of Jewish identities” (33). Moreover, he argues that the meaning of buildings is not solely to be found in the architects' intention, but also in how they are used. Aligning the reading of texts with the creation of meaning in architecture, Rosenfeld stipulates that “ordinary people's responses to buildings help determine their overall significance” (7). Playing on the potentially complex and varied process of the production of meaning allows Rosenfeld to propose a wider historical-cultural interpretation. This theoretical insight is well taken and potentially opens possibilities for researching Jewish architecture. Yet, contrary to this contention, the book focuses almost entirely on the aims and blueprints of architects. In the end, this splendidly illustrated book conveys two trajectories that do not entirely cohere, but it nevertheless presents a compelling story of rebellious outsiders who critically voided the universalism of modernism in their architecture at the same time that they articulated a sense of their Jewishness and confronted the Holocaust. Yet, the lines of identity might be more difficult to draw as Jewish and non-Jewish commingled more than the narrative of this book is willing to show, when it concludes, with Aaron Betsky, that it took the Holocaust to create a Jewish architecture.