Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XXXVII, XXXVIII (review)

102 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 the historian is left feeling uneasy with his interpretation, and, one might add, so are his readers. Friedlander's prescription is that the historian be aware of his limitations in this case and that he not attempt to impose a spurious narrative line. Better a story that is interrupted by self-doubt and rival lines of inquiry than one that rings untrue. Anyone who has written or taught about the Holocaust recognizes immediately Fri~dlander's point, and one is grateful for his raising it. But a question that hangs over his concerns pertains to the uniqueness of the events. We are not able to enter into the minds of the Nazi killers, but then are we able to enter into the minds of the Stalinists who left millions of Soviet farmers to starve to death or of the Khmer Rouge who shot people wearing glasses because glasses were a sign of their bourgeois status? Is Friedlander, therefore, raising doubts about the interpretation only of the Shoah, or can his unease be extended to the explanation of some other instances of ideologically driven mass murder? This is an issue that Friedlander has yet to address. Robert Melson Department of Political Science Purdue University Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XXXVII, XXXVIII. London: Secker and Warburg, 1992, 1993. 685, 558 pp. £27.00. For almost four decades the Leo Baeck Institute, with centers in Jerusalem, London, and New York, has dedicated itself to the study of Jewish life and culture in German-speaking countries and to the preservation of the German-Jewish heritage. During that period its yearbooks, which are edited and published in London, have been the foremost forum for older and younger scholars working in that extensive field. The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book was founded by the late Robert Weltsch, who served as its editor from 1956 to 1978, and he was succeeded by Arnold Paucker, whose term as co-editor and editor extended from 1970 to 1992. With the appearance of Year Book XXXVII Paucker announces his welldeserved retirement, and the new editor, John Grenville, and co-editor, Julius Carlebach, now aided by an international board of advisors, have indicated that they are "the last editors of the Year Book whose childhood was spent in National Socialist Germany." Now that most of the"founding fathers," those with first-hand experience and knowledge of GermanJewish life, have disappeared from the scene, a new generation of scholars Book Reviews 103 with an ecumenical orientation is carrying on a venerable tradition, and the new editors reflect that "the Year Book is written today by Gentiles and Jews, by Germans and Jews, by secular and Orthodox Jews, by Catholics, Quakers, and Methodists. " The themes stated on the jacket of the 1992 Year Book, "Enlightenment and Emancipation, Anti-Semitism, War and Resistance," represent an understatement, for there also are, among other important contributions, valuable essays on "The u.S. and the Jewish Question in Austria" (Bruce Pauley) and "Jews and Exiles in British Cinema" (Kevin Gough·Yates). A special section contains papers on the period of Emancipation that were presented at the 1990 meeting of German historians in Bochum, along with Herbert Strauss's cogent commentary on the contributions of Arno Herzig, Michael Graetz, Werner Mosse, and Wolfgang Benz. Another section, on "Jewish Identity and Anti-Semitism," contains essays by such noted younger scholars as Robert Wistrich, Jehuda Reinharz, and Steven Aschheim. There is also a fascinatingly offbeat article byJohn Efros entitled "The Kaftanjude and the Kaffeehausjude: Two Models ofJewish Identity. " Dealing with psychopathological evidence of Jewish "otherness," Efros describes a phenomenon variously addressed by such Jewish and nonJewish psychiatrists as Emil Kraepelin, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Moritz Benedikt, Rafael Becker, and Hermann Oppenheim. Volume XXXVIII states as its theme "Emancipation, Persecution, Emigration." Among its 16 essays may be mentioned Michael Gehler's account of the "Kristallnacht" in Innsbruck and Alan Steinweis's study of Hans Hinkel, the Nazi supervisor of Jewish cultural activities in Germany between 1933 and 1941. There are also valuable bibliographic essays on Ashkenazic Jews Ooseph Davis), archives pertaining to Jewish history located in the former German Democratic Republic (Elisabeth BrachmannTeubner...