Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 238–240 RUTH ELLEN GRUBER. Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xiii Ⳮ 304. Surely one of the greatest surprises in Jewish life of the past decade or so is the efflorescence in reunified Germany, postcommunist Eastern bloc nations, and elsewhere on the European continent of an unprecedented kind of Jewish culture. Cities and towns where Jewish life had thrived until its brutal destruction a little more than half a century ago now host klezmer festivals, Yiddish language classes, and Jewish walking tours; vandalized cemeteries are being repaired, and synagogue buildings that had been converted into schools, recreation centers, or warehouses after the Holocaust are being ‘‘restored’’ as museums or memorials of Jewish heritage. These are not, however, examples of the renewal of Jewish community life as it is generally understood—although Jewish communities are also being reestablished and revitalized in many of these places. Much of the most visible Jewish cultural activity in Europe today takes place without the involvement of actual Jews. This is not a matter of Jews’ exclusion or resistance, but rather the consequence of a new kind of Jewish culture that does not require Jews for its realization. Here Jews figure not as cultural agents but as symbolic figures; indeed, their absence, not their presence, is key. This astonishing and challenging development is the subject of Ruth Gruber’s engaging book, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe . Gruber is a seasoned travel writer, the author of guides to Europe for the Jewish traveler and of a 1996 report on Jewish landmarks in Europe for the American Jewish Committee. In this current volume she not only draws on her established talent for offering readers vivid descriptions of people, places, and events; she also raises thoughtfully provocative questions about these curious and often unsettling phenomena. Gruber employs the concept of ‘‘virtual Jewishness’’ to distinguish the various tourist productions, as well as the larger interest in ‘‘things Jewish ,’’ that she describes taking place in Germany, Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Poland, from actual Jewish life in these places, whether before or after World War II. She is careful neither to celebrate nor to condemn these phenomena but strives instead to appreciate fully their discomforting, contradictory nature: On one hand, these cultural practices evince a new interest in Europe’s Jewish past, often in conjunction with a sincere desire to redress the grave wrongs visited upon European GRUBER, VIRTUALLY JEWISH—SHANDLER 239 Jewry under both fascism and communism. On the other hand, the disparity between these virtual Jewish practices and actual Jewish life, past or present, cannot be overlooked—nor can one ignore the discrepancies between Europe’s new cultural philo-Semitism and the anti-Semitism of its past (as well as its present). Indeed, Gruber’s approach, while nuanced, is not dispassionate. She views the various practices of Europe’s virtual Jewish culture from the vantage of an American Jew whose ultimate concern is its implications for Jews living in Europe and elsewhere. At the same time, however, much of the activity that Gruber examines is driven by the intellectual, spiritual, political, and social agendas of various non-Jewish Europeans who, in their engagement with ‘‘things Jewish,’’ are discovering their own pasts and exploring their own sense of self. The phenomena Gruber studies can also be seen as part of the overall dynamics of Holocaust remembrance, which has been gradually shifting from the recollections of survivors and others who directly experienced the war to memory practices informed by various types of representation. This is perhaps epitomized by the Schindler’s List walking tour, a popular attraction for visitors to Cracow’s Kazimierz district (itself a remarkably challenging tourist production, fabricated on the site of the heart of the city’s prewar Jewish community) since the release of Steven Spielberg’s enormously popular film. Taking tourists to sites where the events depicted in the film took place (including the Cracow ghetto, Oskar Schindler ’s enamelware factory, and the labor camp at Płaszów...