| General note | "Based on published primary and secondary materials and oral interviews with some eighty communal and organizational leaders, experts and scholars, this book both provides a comparative systematic account of the reconstruction of Jewish communal life in Germany and Vienna (representing 98% of Austrian Jewry) after 1945 as it developed over the next six decades, and explains the process of communal reconstruction, and its outcomes in the two countries. In particular, it focuses on the similarities and differences between the communities in regard to their political, social, institutional and identity developments, and their members' changing attitudes toward and relationship with the surrounding societies, and seeks to show how these developed in diverse national political circumstances and varying governmental policies. It will eventually prove that more influential than national politics were domestic Jewish development processes - especially changes in Jewish group identity, which shapes not only the Jewish community itself but also its view of the gentile world and its interaction with it at the national level. The comparative perspective is then broadened to reveal the key variables and their pattern of influence responsible for the developments of and within the European Jewry and European-Jewish organizations"--Provided by publisher. |
