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

The term "Jewish architecture," Gavriel D. Rosenfeld explains, has been traditionally seen as a contradiction. Jewish history was, over the course of its many stages, tied to the concept of nomadism, and because dwelling was denied the Jews, so was the development of an overarching architectural style. Rosenfeld's historical appraisal, the first of his eleven chapters, succinctly surveys Jewish architecture from its beginnings through the nineteenth century, a long history that reached a watershed during and after World War II, when the facts of Hitler's war made it problematic for Jewish architects to overlook their identities. This constitutes the starting point for the preponderance of Rosenfeld's reflections. What kind of Jewish building was possible after the Holocaust, or, specifically: where can we learn to see the impact of the Holocaust and its devastation in modern architecture?

Among Rosenfeld's examinations of Jewish modernists is a particularly interesting discussion of Erich Mendelsohn's 1949 contribution to the competition to design a Holocaust Memorial in New York's Riverside Park. The plaza, depicted in one of the book's numerous illustrations, would have featured a large meditative public space, and a monument to the Ten Commandments that dialogues with Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park. The Jewish American architect Percival Goodman participated in the competition as well, and his attempt includes a severe-looking modernist menorah that branches out, looming above the space of the memorial. The competition itself came to naught; no memorial was built, and Rosenfeld's details about why the competition and project were doomed illuminate aspects of a major turning point in the establishment of postwar Jewish architectural identity. Rosenfeld, at this point, also discusses the abundant Jewish symbolism in Frank Lloyd Wright's Beth Sholom Congregation synagogue, examining both Wright's own problematic history of antisemitism and the failure of modernist synagogues—because they shied away from openly engaging with history—to grapple with the concept of violence against the Jews.

Jewish themes, by which Rosenfeld means conscious engagements with the facts of Jewish history, eventually came to be more frequently integrated into modern architecture, but only in fits and starts. He summarizes that this slowness had to do with the ostensibly universal principles of modernism, the conflicted Jewish identity of many Jewish architects, and the larger postwar crisis of American Jewish identity. In this respect, Rosenfeld's profile of Louis Kahn is particularly interesting. Kahn's achievements, according to Rosenfeld, are not in doubt, but the relationship between his designs and his Jewish background remains less clear. Kahn had some mystical tendencies and perhaps an interest in the Kabbalah, and he also experienced antisemitism right after the war, including having been turned away from the American Academy of Rome for reasons of antisemitism. Rosenfeld here highlights how, for a decade beginning in the early 1960s, Kahn began to undertake Jewish projects including the construction of several synagogues and a Holocaust memorial. His 1968 entry for the memorial competition is striking and ahead of its time. It featured six cubes constructed out of glass, and the play of light and shadow anticipates the valleys of long shadows cast by Peter Eisenman's much later Berlin memorial.

Subsequent chapters document the escalation of Holocaust consciousness in architecture. Rosenfeld turns his attention to deconstruction, referred to here and in other quarters as "deconstructivism," exploring work by Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind. Eisenman took some cues from Jacques Derrida, specifically notions of trace and erasure, and his designs arguably began to show an inflection by Jewish themes in the late 1970s. When faced with Rosenfeld's examples, one could always ask, "How Jewish is it, really?" Yet in context—set alongside the works of other Jewish architects—his case for a canon becomes compelling. Commonalities come into sharp relief when Eisenman is set side by side with Frank Gehry, who was born Frank Owen Goldberg...