This book offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the lives and experiences of some 280,000 Jewish “displaced persons” (DPs) who ended up in the British and American zones of occupation in post-1945 Germany. Rather than portraying DPs simply as traumatized victims or as pawns of Zionist manipulations, the author highlights the agency of DPs in remaking their lives after the Holocaust. Feinstein casts the subjects of her study as a “savvy bunch” who were “not easily manipulated” (p. 301), as “remarkably strong willed” with “clear ideas about their own self-interest.” (p. 307). By drawing on Jewish traditions and, eventually, on Zionist politics, the author concludes, Jewish DPs “forged a common identity as survivors of great catastrophe” and successfully “transformed themselves from the victims of Nazism to the survivors of the Holocaust” (pp. 307-08). The author develops this thesis on the basis of a broad array of sources drawn from German, American, and Jewish/Israeli archives. In particular, she makes extensive use of a remarkable and still underused resource, namely survivor testimonies that are collected in the Visual History Archive of the University of Southern California.

Feinstein analyzes the activities of DPs on the territory of their former perpetrators across a wide variety of fields and with much empathy. Facing resentment and, at times, even open hostility from ordinary Germans, DPs could not always count on the support of American occupation officials, who began to see Germans not as defeated enemies but as allies in the Cold War. Nevertheless, DPs managed to assert their agency in commemorating the dead, for example, by demanding that Jewish victims be exhumed and reburied (at times also with the forced assistance of ordinary Germans) or by forming “mourning academies” that brought together survivors of one particular locality in eastern Europe. The goal of these commemorative activities was to forge a shared memory community in which all DPs—despite their often very divergent wartime experiences—would be able to participate.

Following the work of Atina Grossman, the author also places particular emphasis on gender and reproduction as highly significant sites for the DPs' self-assertion. The ideal of the “new Zionist man,” the “partisan girl,” or the restoration of the “Jewish mother” provided alternative gender identities that were central to the DPs' refashioning of a post-Holocaust identity. Reproduction, in particular, served as a form of biological revenge for Nazi genocide while also asserting hope for the future. Feinstein also documents the special significance that DP officials assigned to the care of child survivors. Specific homes allowed orphaned children to narrate their wartime experiences while also (re)socializing them into Jewish tradition.

The final two chapters highlight the importance of Jewish rituals as well as of Zionist politics for the formation of the DPs' collective identity. Particularly interesting in this respect is the author's analysis of plays and musical theater as a site of connecting Holocaust memories to a vision of life in Palestine. The decision of about sixty percent of DPs to emigrate to Palestine was therefore not the result of Zionist manipulation, as some Israeli new historians have charged, nor did it simply result from the lack of alternative options. With Zeev Mankowitz, Feinstein rather sees these decisions as an expression of the DPs' “almost intuitive Zionism” (p. 259). Even the decision not to emigrate to Palestine often derived, according to her, from intensely personal motives and should not be read as an indication of indifference toward or even rejection of Zionism.

This book succeeds in documenting the wide variety of ways in which Jewish DPs employed Jewish traditions to assign new meaning to their lives after the Holocaust. In particular, the author demonstrates the significance of ostensibly private acts—religious rites, reproduction, child rearing—for the recreation of public and collective identities. Yet the successes of these efforts at creating a common and shared identity for DPs are often more asserted than proven. In particular, it is not entirely clear to what extent the large majority of “infiltrees” (i.e., approximately 200,000 Jews who had survived the war in Soviet exile) were able to identify with a narrative that was shaped predominantly by Holocaust survivors with direct experience of the ghettos and the camps. The creation of collective memories always entails the privileging of some experiences over others, and the book does not tell us enough about symbolic and personal costs that this process might have entailed as well. The analysis might also have benefited from a broader comparative perspective since the disavowal of a passive victim identity in favor of a more heroic and active identity as survivors was not specific to Jewish DPs but constituted a common phenomenon across commemorative cultures in postwar Europe. Finally, the analysis is often informed by a somewhat presentist concept of trauma that retroactively diagnoses DPs with “post-traumatic stress disorder” and evaluates DP activities based on current psychotherapeutic wisdom. Yet the author's own emphasis on the DPs' efforts to reject their identities as victims underlines the need to historicize the concept of trauma itself rather than projecting it back onto historical subjects.

These objections notwithstanding, the book offers a compelling “history of everyday life” in the DP camps. The book will represent an important point of reference for any further study of Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany. It succeeds in demonstrating the remarkable ability of survivors to mobilize Jewish traditions to give positive (and often Zionist) meaning to their experiences of unspeakable suffering. In this attempt to restore the agency of DPs, however, the book leaves little room for those survivors unwilling or unable to subscribe to this redemptive resolution of irretrievable loss and suffering. It inadvertently leaves us with a rather uniform and, perhaps too optimistic, picture of post-Holocaust life.