Customer Reviews

Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ruth Ellen Gruber is the acknowledged authority on Central Europe's Jewish renaissance since the fall of communism and this is her best work so far. Drawing on years of hands-on experience and passionate commitment to uncovering hidden stories, she explores the paradox that Jewish life and culture is vigorously alive in regions where actual numbers of Jews are comparatively few.
She examines everything from music to food, scholarship to jokes, culture to kitsch, and shows intimate knowledge of countless Jewish communities thriving throughout Eastern Europe. She describes how Jewishness in the region has triumphed over the twin traumas of the Holocaust and Communism to reconstitute a vibrant culture recognised and admired throughout the Jewish and non-Jewish world.
This is a great book, sensitive, scholarly and life-affirming, of interest to anyone who cares about roots, history and survival. I loved it.

A colleague of mine (also a professor) recommended this book to me, and I am glad that he did. This book is a first-rate portrayal of the complicated world of European philosemitism and strange attempts to re-create a lost Europan Jewish world. As a graduate student working on German-Jewish history, I lived for several years in Germany, and I witnessed this complicated and somewhat peculiar phenomenon first-hand. Gruber explains so well what I witnessed and have struggled to explain to others. In particular, I would recommend Part 1 to my students and to others wishing to find suitable course reading on this topic.

Ruth Ellen Gruber is an excellent writer. She sneaks up on you and manages to make a subject in which you think you have no interest absolutely fascinating-- and interesting! It takes much talent and erudition to do this and Gruber appears to have both in abundance. The subject of this book, at first glance, seems of minor importance, or probably even boring. Instead, Gruber draws you in and before you know it you can't put it down. For anyone even vaguely interested in Jewish culture, and/or modern European history, this book is a must read.