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Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable—whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.
“… a rich, multilayered account that includes a variety of perspectives, experiences, and reactions to Germany by a diverse community of refugees.” • Studies In Contemporary Jewry
“This is a solid, comprehensive study of German-Jewish refugees in the United States, especially in Los Angeles and New York. It is probing and judicious.” • Michael A. Meyer, Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion
Anne C. Schenderlein is managing director of the Dahlem Humanities Center at Freie Universität Berlin. After receiving her doctorate in modern European history at the University of California, San Diego, she was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC from 2015 to 2019. She is co-editor, with Paul Lerner and Uwe Spiekermann, of Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Chapter 1. Background
Chapter 2. Americanization before 1941
Chapter 3. The Enemy Alien Classification, 1941–1944
Chapter 4. German Jewish Refugees in the U.S. Military
Chapter 5. German Jewish Refugees and the Discourse on Germany's Future, 1942–1945
Chapter 6. German Jewish Refugees and the West German Foreign Office in the 1950s and 1960s
Chapter 7. German Jewish Refugee Travel to Germany and West German Municipal Visitor Programs
Conclusion: Germany on Their Minds?
Index