Nils H. Roemer

A remarkable, in-depth study of Jewish history, culture, and memory in a historic and contemporary German city

The Story of Worms

German City, Jewish Memory

Gideon Reuveni

The Institute of Jewish Studies, founded in 1954 by the late Alexander Altmann, is dedicated to the promotion of all aspects of scholarship in Jewish Studies and related fields. Its programmes include public lectures, seminars, and annual conferences. All lectures and conferences are open to the general public. Jewish history has been extensively studied from social, political, religious, and intellectual perspectives, but the history of Jewish consumption and leisure has largely been ignored. The hitherto neglect of scholarship on Jewish consumer culture arises from the tendency within Jewish studies to chronicle the production of high culture and entrepreneurship. Yet consumerism played a central role in Jewish life. This volume is the first of its kind to deal with the topic of Jewish consumer culture. It gives new insights on Jewish belongings and longings and provides multiple readings of Jewish consumer culture as a vehicle of integration and identity in modern times

Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture

Thomas Adam

“ . . . travel as an exploration of ‘the other’ which becomes an exploration of the self . . . a confirmation of identity.”—from the Introduction, by Frank Trommler In an age when travel was more difficult but leisure was more available, those who journeyed across the Atlantic from the Old World to America or back created a wonderful literature about the divergent cultures and the fertile interactions among them. In travel diaries, journals, novels, journalistic reports, and guide books, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers recorded impressions and ruminations that not only offer opportunities for comparison and contrast but also shed light on the processes of modernization and the future that would emerge on both sides of the Atlantic. This latest offering from the important Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures series explores themes like urbanization, modernization, education, gender, Jewish identity, nationalism and internationalism, political and cultural values, and the experience of travel itself. Volume editors Thomas Adam and Nils Roemer have assembled a collection of varied studies that permit enlightened reflection on the ways in which travelers from the New and Old Worlds have observed, documented, understood, and negotiated their similarities and differences. The freshness and variety of the previously little-heard voices documented in Crossing the Atlantic will serve as an important reminder that an attentive interaction with “foreignness” has been and will continue to be one of the best paths to a more enlightened engagement with the familiar.

Nils H. Roemer

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