Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T20:59:42.356Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

German-Jewish Studies in the Digital Age: Remarks on Discipline, Method, and Media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2023

Get access

Summary

Digital media technologies have given rise to new forms of scholarly production, communication, output, and publication, which are transforming the fundamental critical methodologies, knowledge formations, publication platforms, and institutional structures that gave rise to and supported German-Jewish Studies as a discipline. In this article, I discuss the media in which German-Jewish Studies will be carried out in the future and analyze the impact of new information technologies. With reference to key watershed moments in the history of German-Jewish Studies, I argue that attention to media specificity has long been a fundamental part of this dynamic field and that, in fact, new forms of literacy, sociability, and scholarly authorities can be traced throughout the history of Jewish hermeneutics.

AT THE START OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, the editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book invited the members of its advisory board to articulate their views on the future direction of research in the field of German-Jewish Studies. Many members, such as David Sorkin, posited the emergence of a new era of German-Jewish Studies, which for him was characterized by the end of “the émigré synthesis,” a period in which the intellectual agenda of the LBI was shaped by a generation of emigrants who “either had direct experience of German-Jewish life and culture prior to 1939 or else grew up with intimate family memories of them.” Founded in 1955, the Institute published its first Year Book the following year, beginning with a deeply ambivalent call for “rebirth” after the years of calamity in Nazi Germany. Its scholarly agenda was largely shaped by Jewish emigrants from Germany who took on the enormous “cultural task” of researching, archiving, and preserving the “history of German Jewry since the Emancipation,” whether through philosophy, religion, science, economics, or art (LBIYB, 1956, xi–xiii). This was largely a retrospective project of commemoration, preservation, and historicization of “the remnants of German Jewry” (LBIYB 1, ix). In fact, as Hannah Arendt argued in 1958, the study of German Jewry was now “altogether historical … a matter of the past.” But at the start of the new century, the Holocaust was no longer the singular Ur-event or raison d’être for the discipline of German-Jewish Studies, the Institute, or the scholarly work of its members.

Type
Chapter
Information
Nexus 1
Essays in German Jewish Studies
, pp. 7 - 26
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×