"This volume is the definitive study of the state of Jewish life and culture in reunified Germany. As such it replaces all of the earlier volumes on the subject, and provides the sort of insight into a new community that does not ignore that community's continuities."-Sander Gilman, Weidenfeld Professor of European Comparative Literature, St. Anne's College

Germany today boasts the fastest growing population of Jews in Europe. The streets of Berlin abound with signs of a revival of Jewish culture, ranging from bagel shops to the sight of worshipers leaving synagogue on Saturday. With the new energy infused by Jewish immigration from Russia and changes in immigration and naturalization laws in general, Jeffrey M. Peck argues that we must now begin considering how Jews live in Germany rather than merely asking why they would choose to do so.

In Being Jewish in the New Germany, Peck explores the diversity of contemporary Jewish life and the complex struggles within the community-and among Germans in general-over history, responsibility, culture, and identity. He provides a glimpse of an emerging, if conflicted, multicultural country and examines how the development of the European Community, globalization, and the post-9/11 political climate play out in this context. With sensitive, yet critical, insight into the nation's political and social life, chapters explore issues such as the shifting ethnic/national makeup of the population, changes in political leadership, and the renaissance of Jewish art and literature. Peck also explores new forms of anti-Semitism and relations between Jews and Turks-the country's other prominent minority population.

In this surprising description of the rebirth of a community, Peck argues that there is, indeed, a vibrant and significant future for Jews in Germany. Written in clear and compelling language, this book will be of interest to the general public and scholars alike.

Jeffrey M. Peck is a professor in communication, culture, and technology at Georgetown University and a senior fellow in residence at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. He is the coauthor of Sojourners: The Return of German Jews and the Question of Identity and the coeditor of Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. A New Jewish Life in Germany: From "Why" to "How"
Chapter 2. Shadows of the Holocaust in Germany and the United States
Chapter 3. Russian Immigration and the Revitalization of German Jewry
Chapter 4. Representing Jews in Germany Today
Chapter 5. Jews and Turks: Discourses of the "Other"
Chapter 6. Creating a Continental Identity: Jews, Germans, Europe and the "New" Anti-Semitism
Chapter 7. The United States and Israel: Super-Powering German Jewish Identities
Chapter 8. Toward a New German Jewish Diaspora in an Age of Globalization
Notes
Bibliography
Index

FROM CHAPTER 1:

As is often the case with everyday moments that turn into ethnographic material, my visit to a Berlin bagel shop on a Saturday morning, the Jewish Sabbath, in the mid-nineties, was auspicious. My best friend, a tall, blue-eyed, blond German named Wolfgang, suggested we have breakfast in this new establishment. Knowing his penchant for Jewish specialties, I never expected to be exposed to a situation that even in its innocence gave me striking new insights into Jewish life in Germany since reunification. Even I, Berlin-Kenner (connoisseur of Berlin) that I am, was not only surprised to find that such a place existed, but that it was one of three, and this one next to my beloved Jewish bookstore, in the same building as the synagogue in the Joachimstalerstrasse. That the shop was open on the Sabbath did not surprise me, since it was probably owned by gentiles. As I was having my lox and bagel, I thought, "Yes, it's just like America" (even in its German incarnation with Kse [cheese], Tomaten [tomatoes], und Zwiebeln [onions]), confirming the owners' proud claim that comes with a smile. Somehow I had never thought that I would ever be asking for this Eastern European delicacy, so common in Ashkenazi-dominated America, here in Yekkeland (Yiddish for country of German Jews). I sat at the window, devoured my second bagel and lox, and watched the worshipers, mostly Russian Jews, leave Saturday morning services under the watchful eye of the security policeman who stands permanent guard at the synagogue, as is the case for all Jewish institutions in Germany.

I pondered the juxtapositions-the Jewish American and the German, the ostjdisch (Eastern European Jewish) and deutsch (German), weekend peace and potential violence, and finally, the sacred and the profane. I was prompted to question the meaning of these contrasting images, trivial in and of themselves, yet powerfully significant in their relationship to each other in this particular context at this particular moment. This is especially true when they represent the cultural slippage that often takes place in Germany today when Jewish life is being represented, even more than fifty years after the Holocaust. The overwhelming popularity of "Jewish restaurants," serving Jewish American or Israeli cuisine, and Eastern European Klezmer music presented as a German specialty testify to both the confusion and fascination with anything that seems "Jewish." In her recent book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (2002), Ruth Gruber chafes, in fact, at what appears to her as an almost exclusively imaginary Jewish life in Europe where so-called Jewish institutions and activities are directed and performed by non-Jews.1

In this present study I am interested rather in lived Jewish experience of Germany's resurgent community that makes even the notion of the "virtual" more complicated. The experiences I relate that might seem to confirm the virtuality of Jewish life in Germany, according to Gruber, might be interpreted, in fact, quite differently when seen from my present in 2004, almost ten years later, where the particularities of Jewish life in Germany are rapidly changing. While the term "virtual Jewry" implies for me, as I describe in my final chapter, a Jewish community created in cyberspace, more importantly, it also points to a central thesis of my book, namely that I welcome a notion of the virtual that makes room for "Jewish" discourses, images, and institutions even if they are not produced exclusively by "real Jews." And just as debates rage within culture and technology circles as to the authenticity or "reality" of virtual experience leading to provocative questions such as: Is Internet sex adultery? I cite here, perhaps equally controversial for traditional Jews, media studies scholar Mark Poster's question: "Can a CyberJew exist?" Although the Jewish community and Jewish identity are in flux-from the virtual to the real-there is no question that the presence of diverse ways of being Jewish contributes to the dynamic, if not sometimes problematic, status of the community. This question of lived experience, both "virtual" and "real," is one of the major thrusts of my approach and its discussion is more than a question of semantics. In other words, the perennial question of Who is a Jew? made more complex than ever before by incursions of the virtual, continues to belie simple definition.

Let me relate another visit to Berlin. In 2003, drinking a hot chocolate and eating a croissant, I sit in an Italian caf a few blocks from the synagogue on Oranienburgerstrasse and around the corner from another bagel shop. Sitting on one of the four stools, I watch the people of various races, ethnicities, and religions go by the large picture window that allows the patrons to enjoy the variety that is now Berlin. It is not unusual to see a man with a kippah or a woman in a headscarf. Inside the warm and cozy caf, no larger than a spacious closet, the owner speaks with his wife in Italian, chats in Turkish with one of the regular customers, while other patrons communicate in French or English and a woman sits next to me nonchalantly reading an Israeli newspaper. Jews, as well as others who publicly demonstrate their difference in language, clothes, or symbols on the street, are no longer a strange appearance. Bagel shops, not necessarily Jewish ones, abound, as do other restaurants offering foreign cuisines in major cities like Berlin. What might have seemed "virtual" in the mid-1990s, be it Jewish or other, now represents, as in North America, a more common experience for Jews and non-Jews alike in a changing Germany.

While this caf, a bagel store or other Jewish establishments in this popular Hackesche Markt neighborhood bordering on traditionally Jewish areas might represent to a purist like Gruber the absence of or merely an imagined Jewry, I would rather see this new Jewish presence as a positive part of renewal and real experience for Jews and non-Jews alike. Almost a decade after the first scenario I recounted, Jewish life makes its presence known more broadly and more diversely as part of cosmopolitan Berlin where difference, while not always readily accepted, is contained in everyday life. For better, and sometimes recently for worse, Jewish life is lived in Germany and Berlin, and the differences in my own experience that I recount here mark significant changes in the Jewish and German landscape that make it possible to talk about a new Jewish life in Germany.

The question of definition and authenticity of a Jewish life in Germany covering almost fifteen years after reunification is complicated by many contrasts and contradictions that I have introduced above and also by the terms that describe the people who are the subject of this book. Being "German" and being "Jewish," separated identities that have a long history, especially since the Holocaust, are no longer mutually exclusive. Before the Second World War, most German Jews thought of themselves as Germans. They felt uncomfortable with their Eastern European brethren who congregated in the Scheunenviertel (barn quarter), an area near the famous Alexanderplatz, whose name became associated with the disdained Ostjuden. For many of the secular co-religionists, in their own words, Hitler turned them from Germans into Jews. After the war, the terminology separating Germans and Jews connoted the alienation and separation for those Jews remaining, most of whom were not "Germans" but displaced persons from Eastern Europe who came to be known by those ignominious initials as DPs. Then, it was simple: the Germans were the perpetrators and the Jews were the victims. As a postwar Jewish community took shape, albeit until recently very small, the term "Jews in Germany" became the dominant description of a people who were not fully comfortable or integrated into the society around them. My own prognosis looks toward a potentially new categorization, a "new" German Jewry that will represent a different status in both historical and contemporary terms.

Yet, all of the variations used to describe the population-"German Jewish," "Jew in Germany," "German of the Jewish faith," or even the favorite of well-meaning German politicians, "Jewish co-citizen"-connote the multiple ways of defining the relationships of Jews to Germans and of Jews who live in Germany to themselves and Jews living elsewhere. In other words, it is important to recognize that these varying terms show that Jewish identity is not static, but rather historical and dynamic. It is constantly being transformed by ever new positioning of one group to another, especially today in Germany's more heterogeneous society. However, the word "Jude" (Jew), which became so derogatory in the Third Reich, is still difficult for even liberal Germans to let cross their lips. To be a Jew in Germany today is still not "normal." As a prominent Berlin German Jew stated in 2003 as if to sum up succinctly the state of Jewish life in Germany today, "Anormality is normality."2

The conference on Jewish American German relations that had first brought me to Berlin was an encounter (and there are many of these meetings) that became more meaningful through these everyday, yet weighty, events in German culture. To be sure, anything that has to do with Jews in Germany is given special attention. In fact, it has even become trendy to be Jewish or to associate with anything Jewish. This attitude is certainly part of what has been called the "Jewish Renaissance," describing Berlin-Mitte (the center of the former East Berlin, the location of the most important sites), Oranienburgerstrasse with its "Jewish" restaurants, cafs, and renovated synagogue as museum and exhibition space. Jewish Americans trace the steps of old and new Jewish life with the popular Goldapple Guide to Jewish Berlin or a map called "Jewish Berlin." And now in the new millennium, as I already indicated, one can choose from a plethora of bagel shops that no longer seem so exotic, so specifically Jewish or American, nor quite the appropriate object of the ethnographic gaze. In Berlin, the controversial Holocaust Memorial designed by American architect Peter Eisenman and purposefully called "The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe" is under construction and set for opening in May 2005. Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum stands as an architectural masterpiece with its popular exhibition of "Two Millennia of Jewish Life in Germany." Cultural festivals and street fairs, television programs and exhibits fill in the picture of a growing Jewish life in Berlin in particular and in the rest of Germany generally. The Centrum Judaicum-Stiftung Neue Synagoge (Foundation for the New Synagogue) in the Oranienburgerstrasse (initiated in the late eighties immediately before the collapse of East Germany), the Ronald Lauder Foundation's Lehrhaus (learning center) for training Jewish teachers, Chabad Lubavitch, and the establishment of an office by the American Jewish Committee add an important institutional basis, one that is not coincidentally, at least in the latter examples, decidedly American. These institutions and the people they serve are indeed quite "real," concerned as they are with actual life experiences of Jews in Germany.