Featured Topics: On Judaism

Stefan Zweig, one of the most successful German-language authors, came from a wealthy Jewish family in which, however, Jewish tradition played only a very small role. His correspondence from 1900...

The correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem spans from March 1933 to February 1940. The letters document the last period in Benjamin’s life: the problems of material existence,...

In 1948, the Shield of David – the Star of David – became the symbol of the newly founded State of Israel, the emblem on the Israeli national flag. That same year, Gershom Scholem retraces the astonishing career of this symbol in Jewish lore in an essay written in Hebrew. In 1963, he published a revised version of his essay in German in Judaica I. Shortly before his death...

With a ceremonial address entitled The Concept of God After Auschwitz, Hans Jonas gave thanks for having received the Faculty of Protestant-Theology at the University of Tübingen’s 1984...

For Paul Celan reading was always an experience as well: the books, journals, and daily newspapers he read were as much a source of his poems as personal encounters and political events. When a...

The camp commander announces the death sentence. At that very moment, the prisoner Mala Zimetbaum cuts her wrists with a razor blade. An SS man grabs her by the arm. Mala tears herself free,...

People have laughed and thought, told stories and been educated in Yiddish since the High Middle Ages. On the last pages of scholarly books we find recipes, spells and prayers. Copies of rhymed epics were circulated for communal recital. A bundle of documents from Cairo dating to 1382 testifies to the fact that Jewish people were quite familiar with German literature and adapted it in a...

Philipp Lenhard’s book is the first biography on Friedrich Pollock (1894 – 1970). It talks about the life of a man who played a defining role in German-Jewish intellectual history but...

Oliver Polak is a well known German-Jewish stand up comedian. In this autobiographical book he describes the recent rise of antisemitism in Europe from his own personal perspective. And it is not...

A summer travelling between Berlin, Chicago and Jerusalem. Like every year, fifteen-year-old Margarita spends her school holidays with her grandparents in the USA. But she would much rather go...

Gertrud Kolmar (1894–1943) is considered one of the most important German-language poets of the 20th century, yet to this day many of her works are largely unknown. During her lifetime, only three volumes of poetry were published from her extensive poetic oeuvre: Gedichte, Preußische Wappen and Die Frau und die Tiere. Gertrud Kolmar decided against...