Goodbye to all that?

Jewish views of Europe after 1945

Irene E. Zwiep

pp. 224-234

in: Menno Spiering, Michael Wintle (eds), European identity and the second world war, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

Ever since the late 1980s, when the Jewish communities in Europe began to rise from their ashes and reinvent themselves, "Jewish Europe" has become a fashionable and productive topic. Recently, Israeli scholars have even begun to speak, with a tinge of worried envy, of contemporary European Judaism as he-ammud ha-shelishi, the "third pillar" of world Jewry, which is gradually reclaiming its position as a centre of Jewish life alongside the approved strongholds of Jewish continuity in Israel and the US. Authors such as Kertesz and Konrad, established filmmakers such as Lanzmann and Szabo, and scholars such as Dan Diner and even the Israeli-American historian Saul Friedländer are usually identified as the intellectual heralds of this collective resurrection.¹

Cited authors

Diner Dan