Jews in Germany after the Holocaust: Memory, Identity, and Jewish-German Relations. byLynn RapaportReview by: Maud S. MandelSocial Forces, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Jun., 1999), pp. 1670-1671Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3005914 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 00:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.28 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:12:42 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

1670 / Social Forces 77:4, June 1999

one; life is with people. They call for a focus on ethnicity and an identification and involvement with Israel and with the organized Jewish community.

Jews in Germany after the Holocaust: Memory, Identity, and Jewish-German Relations. By Lynn Rapaport. Cambridge University Press, 1997. 325 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $22.95.

Reviewer: MAUD S. MANDEL, Brown University

As a subset of the growing field of Holocaust studies, scholars have recently begun to consider how the persecutions of World War II have influenced current notions of Jewish ethnic, national, and religious identification. Such questions are particularly salient in Europe, where the genocidal process unfolded and where contemporary Jewish populations often live amidst the children of perpetrators. Lynn Rapaport's study of Jews born and raised in Germany after World War II is a testament to the fruitful direction of such research. By interviewing nearly one hundred Frankfurt Jews born to survivors, she argues that collective memories of the Holocaust have determined the symbolic and moral boundaries through which contemporary German Jews understand themselves and their non-Jewish neighbors. For her respondents, the memory of the Holocaust has "poisoned" the cultural reservoir of anything German. By constructing a binary relationship between themselves and other Germans based on these memories, Jews have defined themselves as pure, honest, socially conscious and sensitive, while viewing non- Jews as corrupt, aggressive, authoritarian, and unquestioningly obedient. This moral hierarchy, according to Rapaport, allows Jews in Germany to maintain ethnic boundaries between themselves and the surrounding population.

Given such views, one might well ask how Jews in Germany come to terms with their own national status? Here Rapaport is at her best, showing how those she interviewed both maintain cultural distinctions between themselves and non- Jews while simultaneously participating in the surrounding social and political framework. In a fascinating chapter, Rapaport describes how, despite their legal status as German citizens, few Jews view themselves as German. While Jews vote in elections at about the same rate as non-Jews, few, for example, serve in the army despite a law that requires ten months of active duty from all men. A "gentleman's agreement" exempts Jews as a concession to those who suffered during World War II, and most take advantage of this option. Others refuse to carry a German passport as a public symbol of their distinctiveness. And if respondents generally maintain a legal relationship to Germany through their citizenship, they distinguish between membership in the body politic and membership in the "nation." Rapaport

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.28 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:12:42 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews / 1671 is quick to point out the paradoxes in this self-conception. For example, while Jews may view themselves as a group apart, they stili socialize with and marry non- Jews. Even here, however, she emphasizes the importance of collective memory in determining friendships and spousal choice. Moreover, although intermarriage rates are high, indicating a significant level of Jewish integration, such unions, Rapaport argues, do not produce ethnic assimilation. Rather, the Jewish member of the union remains ethnically distinct, interpreting his or her own identity through the same 'lens as that of nonintermarried Jews. Arguing here against current structural theories on intermarriage, Rapaport suggests that such unions are not a measure of assimilation or an agent producing it; rather those who intermarry maintain the ethnic boundaries within which they were raised while still forming close unions with those outside their own group.

Here as elsewhere in this complex study, Rapaport engages with current literature on ethnicity. Studies of group cohesiveness and survival, she argues, have relied too heavily on a priori categories such as birth, death, and intermarriage rates, as well as on normative and symbolic behaviors such as synagogue attendance and memberships in Jewish organizations. Rather, research on ethnicity should focus on cultural categories and self-definitions. As she writes: " [T]he second-generation Jews I interviewed are unquestionably Jewish. They are Jewish because they create and maintain transcendent meaning systems, and adhere to the code of behavior, norms, and values that hold sway in the Jewish community." In other words, ethnic identity is not an objective category that can be quantified but a cultural construct created and maintained by the individuals who comprise that group.

If Rapaport's analysis leaves some important questions unanswered regarding the long term impact of intermarriage (particularly on the second generation), the significance of other factors in shaping boundaries between Jews and non-Jews (connection to Israel, for example), and the fading memory of the Holocaust as the second-generation passes to the third, she nevertheless fruitfully extends discussions of the impact of the Holocaust on European Jews and raises provocative questions regarding the sociological study of ethnicity.

Islam, Gender, and Social Change. Edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito. Oxford University Press, 1998. 259 pp.

Reviewer: JANE I. SMITH, Hartford Seminary

The questions of rights and roles of women in the contemporary Islamic world is of great interest to western students and scholars of Islam, and high on the agenda of matters to be discussed within the respective Islamic societies themselves. Muslim thinkers, writers, and political leaders have declared repeatedly that few if any issues

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.28 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 00:12:42 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions