By Jonathan M. Hess (NHC Fellow, 1999–00) In the analysis of the debates in Germany over Jews, Judaism and Jewish emancipation in the late 18th and 19th centuries, Jonathan M. Hess reconstructs a crucial chapter in the history of secular anti-Semitism. He examines not only the thinking of German intellectuals of the time but also … Continued
By Susannah Heschel (NHC Fellow, 1997–98) Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan and Christianity as a religion at war with Judaism. In 1939, these theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence … Continued
By Jack Goody (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) Jack Goody's new book explores the history of social anthropology as an emergent discipline in the interwar years. It focuses on key practitioners, such as Malinowski and Fortes, and explores how far ideological approaches adopted by social anthropologists were defined by the institutions in which they developed, particularly in … Continued
By Claudia Koonz (NHC Fellow, 1993–94) The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders. Claudia Koonz’s latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and … Continued
By Jonathan Freedman (NHC Fellow, 1994–95) From the beginning of modern intellectual history to the culture wars of the present day, the experience of assimilating Jews and the idiom of "culture" have been fundamentally intertwined with each other. Freedman's book begins by looking at images of the stereotypical Jew in the literary culture of nineteenth- … Continued
David Denby discusses hearing Herbert von Karajan conducting a performance of Mahler’s 9th Symphony—a moment which made him realize the power of music as a universal language.