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The modern German-Jewish experience through the rise of Nazism in 1933 was characterized by an explosion of cultural and intellectual creativity. Yet well after that history has ended, the influence of Weimar German-Jewish intellectuals has become ever greater. Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Leo Strauss have become household names and possess a continuing resonance. \"Beyond the Border\" seeks to explain this phenomenon and analyze how the German-Jewish legacy has continuingly permeated wider modes of Western thought and sensibility, and why these Émigrés occupy an increasingly iconic place in contemporary society. Steven Aschheim traces the odyssey of a fascinating group of German-speaking Zionists--among them Martin Buber and Hans Kohn--who recognized the moral dilemmas of Jewish settlement in pre-Israel Palestine and sought a binationalist solution to the Arab-Israel conflict. He explores how German-Jewish Émigré historians like Fritz Stern and George Mosse created a new kind of cultural history written against the background of their exile from Nazi Germany and in implicit tension with postwar German social historians. And finally, he examines the reasons behind the remarkable contemporary canonization of these Weimar intellectuals--from Arendt to Strauss--within Western academic and cultural life. Beyond the Border is about more than the physical act of departure. It also points to the pioneering ways these Émigrés questioned normative cognitive boundaries and have continued to play a vital role in addressing the predicaments that engage and perplex us today.

Zionism was inspired as a movement--one driven by the search for a homeland for the stateless and persecuted Jewish people. Yet it trampled the rights of the Arabs in Palestine. Today it has become so controversial that it defies understanding and trumps reasoned public debate. So argues prominent British writer Jacqueline Rose, who uses her political and psychoanalytic skills in this book to take an unprecedented look at Zionism--one of the most powerful ideologies of modern times. Rose enters the inner world of the movement and asks a new set of questions. How did Zionism take shape as an identity? And why does it seem so immutable? Analyzing the messianic fervor of Zionism, she argues that it colors Israel's most profound self-image to this day. Rose also explores the message of dissidents, who, while believing themselves the true Zionists, warned at the outset against the dangers of statehood for the Jewish people. She suggests that these dissidents were prescient in their recognition of the legitimate claims of the Palestinian Arabs. In fact, she writes, their thinking holds the knowledge the Jewish state needs today in order to transform itself. In perhaps the most provocative part of her analysis, Rose proposes that the link between the Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish state, so often used to justify Israel's policies, needs to be rethought in terms of the shame felt by the first leaders of the nation toward their own European history. For anyone concerned with the conflict in Israel-Palestine, this timely book offers a unique understanding of Zionism as an unavoidable psychic and historical force.