Jews in Germany after the Holocaust

Interviews with Jews born in post-Holocaust Germany address questions of collective memory and ethnicity.

A pathbreaking study, based on extensive interviews, which examines the place of Holocaust memory in the identity and sociocultural adjustment of Jews born and raised in Germany since the Holocaust. Lynn Rapaport considers modern Jewish identity and how collective memory affects ethnicity.What is it like to be Jewish and to be born and raised in Germany after the Holocaust? Based on remarkably candid interviews with nearly one hundred German Jews, Lynn Rapaport's book reveals a rare understanding of how the memory of the Holocaust shapes Jews' everyday lives. As their views of non-Jewish Germans and of themselves, their political integration into German society, and their friendships and relationships with Germans are subtly uncovered, the obstacles to readjustment when sociocultural memory is still present are better understood. This is also a book about Jewish identity in the midst of modernity. It shows how the boundaries of ethnicity are not marked by how religious Jews are, or their absorption of traditional culture, but by the moral distinctions rooted in Holocaust memory that Jews draw between themselves and other Germans. Jews in Germany after the Holocaust has won an award for being the best book in the sociology of religion from the American Sociological Association.