Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (review)

Since World War II, architects of Jewish heritage have played a central role in the profession. Jews have overcome the field’s exclusive educational and patronage systems, and shaped architectural history: Louis I. Kahn has come to be seen as a savior of modern architecture partly because of his interest in Jewish mysticism; Daniel Libeskind’s meteoric rise is largely due to the complex ways he grapples with the legacy of the Holocaust; and Jewish museums and monuments, like James Ingo Freed’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe have been highly successful. An important chronicle of this phenomenon, Gavriel Rosenfeld’s Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust comprehensively surveys postwar Jewish architectural achievements, and examines the complex relationship between modern Jewish identity and the built environment.

Rosenfeld’s survey is all the more significant for scrutinizing the fundamental definition of “Jewish architecture.” He ruminates: “in the absence of a unifying style” (2), and without consistent “formal or aesthetic properties” (3), what signifies its collectivity? We can point to Jewish houses of worship, community centers, and sites of remembrance, or architects who overtly reference Jewish sources in their work, but what are the limits of codifying “Jewishness?” Building After Auschwitz may survey the roles that Jews play as creators and patrons of architecture, but Rosenfeld’s main contribution is to analyze issues central to Jewish culture, and in doing so, demonstrate that no singular form of Jewish architecture exists.

This point is clearly articulated with the book’s introductory example: the Second Congregational Church in Greenwich, Connecticut (1856–58), designed by Jewish immigrant Leopold Eidlitz. Rosenfeld situates this hybrid building, and all those he examines, within the larger context of the Jewish diaspora, and uses relatable personal accounts to introduce major themes. Appropriately, Jewish pluralism is a constant motif, and Jewish architects like Richard Neutra, Marcel Breuer, Gordon Bunshaft and others who gained recognition “at the price of denying their Jewishness” (113) attest to mid-century assimilationist tendencies. Despite this, Rosenfeld argues that these pioneering architects cannot help but manifest Jewish qualities endowed by a shared perspective “as outsiders because of their immigrant backgrounds.” (97) He suggests that their willingness to embrace modernism and “create new universal norms that would be welcoming to all” (97) can be attributed to the Jewish propensity to break with tradition and convention, a trait that makes all Jews particularly well suited for innovation regardless of their spiritual inclinations.

Rosenfeld’s analysis is most insightful when examining how the Holocaust challenged Jewish modernist optimism. He carefully explains the crises and theoretical implications of the genocide, which parallel Theodore Adorno’s initial rejection of “poetry after Auschwitz,” and later assertion that “tortured” victims have the right to express suffering. These polarities are particularly relevant in trends of suburban synagogue construction (especially buildings influenced by destroyed Polish wooden structures and others lacking any reference to the Shoah), postwar German reconstruction, Holocaust memorialization, and other important European buildings that overtly acknowledged or rejected manifestations of trauma. Rosenfeld’s analysis of “an entirely new genre of architecture, Holocaust museums” (258) that explicitly confront the legacy of the Holocaust, like those in Israel, Washington, D.C., New York, Michigan, and Illinois, deftly conveys the impact of the atrocities on Jewish architects. He also navigates an equally relevant dimension of postwar Jewish architecture: synagogues designed by non-Jewish masters, like Phillip Johnson and Frank Lloyd Wright. Their attempts to rehabilitate marred reputations after injudicious anti-Semitic behavior, and the therapeutic gestures of Jewish architects, are both indicative of an era when the world worked to come to terms with its destructive forces.

More recently, prominent Jewish architects like Frank Gehry, Stanley Tiger-man, Norman Jaffee, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind have embraced Jewish forms after a mid-life “Jewish Turn” from relative secularism...