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A seminal text in Jewish thought accessible to English readers for the first time. The diagnosis of Jewish self-hatred has become almost commonplace in contemporary cultural and political debates, but the concept’s origins are not widely appreciated. In its modern form, it received its earliest and fullest expression in Theodor Lessing’s 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß. Written on the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power, Lessing’s hotly contested work has been variously read as a defense of the Weimar Republic, a platform for anti-Weimar sentiments, an attack on psychoanalysis, an inspirational personal guide, and a Zionist broadside. “The truthful translation by Peter Appelbaum, in...
This study – the first full-length monograph in English on the subject – discusses the genesis of Theodor Lessing’s philosophy of history as mainly expressed in his books Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (1919 and 1927), as well as its philosophical implications.
This book explores the connections between Zionism and Life Philosophy, and argues that Life Philosophy represents a modern secularized version of gnostic dualism between God and world, and that this was a particular secular impulse that lay at the core of the Zionist political mission. Consisting of two main sections, the book first shows the manner in which Life Philosophy should be understood as a modern, secularized, gnostic theology, before concluding by discussing its political Zionist interpretation.
The ferocity of the Nazi attack upon the Jews took many by surprise. Volkov argues that a new look at both the nature of antisemitism and at the complexity of modern Jewish life in Germany is required in order to provide an explanation. While antisemitism had a number of functions in pre-Nazi German society, it most particularly served as a cultural code, a sign of belonging to a particular political and cultural milieu. Surprisingly, it only had a limited effect on the lives of the Jews themselves. By the end of the nineteenth century, their integration was well advanced. Many of them enjoyed prosperity, prestige, and the pleasures of metropolitan life. This book stresses the dialectical nature of assimilation, the lead of the Jews in the processes of modernization, and, finally, their continuous efforts to 'invent' a modern Judaism that would fit their new social and cultural position.
Brothers and Strangers traces the history of German Jewish attitudes, policies, and stereotypical images toward Eastern European Jews, demonstrating the ways in which the historic rupture between Eastern and Western Jewry developed as a function of modernism and its imperatives. By the 1880s, most German Jews had inherited and used such negative images to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to emphasize the contrast between modern “enlightened” Jewry and its “half-Asian” counterpart. Moreover, stereotypes of the ghetto and the Eastern Jew figured prominently in the growth and disposition of German anti-Semitism. Not everyone shared these negative preconceptions, however, and over the years a competing post-liberal image emerged of the Ostjude as cultural hero. Brothers and Strangers examines the genesis, development, and consequences of these changing forces in their often complex cultural, political, and intellectual contexts.
Einfühlsam, wortgewaltig und analytisch brillant: die Lebensgeschichte Theodor Lessings erzählt von Rainer Marwedel Der jüdische Philosoph Theodor Lessing wurde am 8. Februar 1872 in Hannover geboren, ein Jahr nach Gründung und Proklamation des Deutschen Kaiserreichs. Er starb am 30. August 1933 im Exil in Marienbad, ermordet von sudetendeutschen Anhängern der Nationalsozialisten. »Theodor Lessings Leben ist eine Einführung in die Katastrophengeschichte dieses Landes« – so fasst Marwedel das Ergebnis seiner Biographie eines auch heute noch unbequemen Zeitgenossen zusammen. Legenden über den »vollbärtigen Querkopf«, Vorurteile gegen den »Feuilletonisten« rückt er zurecht, ohn...
Tracing efforts to control unwanted sound--the noise of industry, city traffic, gramophones and radios, and aircraft--from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century.
This book introduces German Sound Studies using a transdisciplinary approach. It invites readers to auralize space by describing characteristically German soundscapes in the long twentieth century, including the noisy city of the early 1900s, the sounds of East and West Germany, and hip-hop soundscapes of the millennium.
A new intellectual history that looks at "Jewish self-hatred" Today, the term "Jewish self-hatred" often denotes a treasonous brand of Jewish self-loathing, and is frequently used as a smear, such as when it is applied to politically moderate Jews who are critical of Israel. In On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred, Paul Reitter demonstrates that the concept of Jewish self-hatred once had decidedly positive connotations. He traces the genesis of the term to Anton Kuh, a Viennese-Jewish journalist who coined it in the aftermath of World War I, and shows how the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing came, in 1930, to write a book that popularized "Jewish self-hatred." Reitter contends that,...