Berlin for Jews

What a delight this book is! Unlike all those Companions and all those travel guides, here is a real companion with whom you want to journey: witty, conflicted, amused, amusing, insightful, smart. This book provides a wonderful sense of how place and stories go together all touched with an elegant melancholy for a lost world and our part in making its memory still sing. --Simon Goldhill, author of Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Bronte's Grave What a delight this book is! Unlike all those Companions and all those travel guides, here is a real companion with whom you want to journey: witty, conflicted, amused, amusing, insightful, smart. This book provides a wonderful sense of how place and stories go together--all touched with an elegant melancholy for a lost world and our part in making its memory still sing. --Simon Goldhill, author of Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Bronte's Grave Berlin for Jews is a marvelously readable book for people exactly like me, a Jew with misgivings about visiting Germany whose need to engage with an unspeakable history makes us ripe for guidance. But far beyond personal confession, this is a sort of intellectual Baedecker, a cultural history with a fascinating cast of characters out of a German past that included and honored its Jews. Barkan is not a revisionist; he is a patient (and passionate) interpreter whose starting point is his own skepticism and his openness to a host of contradictions and ironies. --Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After Berlin for Jews is a marvelously readable book for people exactly like me, a Jew with misgivings about visiting Germany whose need to engage with an unspeakable history makes us ripe for guidance. But far beyond personal confession, this is a sort of intellectual Baedecker, a cultural history with a fascinating cast of characters out of a German past that included and honored its Jews.Barkan is not a revisionist; he is a patient (and passionate) interpreter whose starting point is his own skepticism and his openness to a host of contradictions and ironies. --Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After Berlin for Jews is a marvelously readable book for people exactly like me, a Jew with misgivings about visiting Germany whose need to engage with an unspeakable history makes us ripe for guidance. But far beyond personal confession, this is a sort of intellectual Baedecker, a cultural history with a fascinating cast of characters out of a German past that included and honored its Jews.Barkan is not a revisionist; he is a patient (and passionate) interpreter whose starting point is his own skepticism and his openness to a host of contradictions and ironies. --Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After