Living and Loving Jews in the German Present: Jewish Life Beyond the Past, and Beyond Antisemitism

Ina Schaum (2020). Being Jewish (and) in Love: Two and a Half Stories About Jews, Germans and Love. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich; 136 pages; ISBN: 978-3-95565-380-4; 19,90 Euro

Abstract: Most academic research on Jews in Germany addresses the past, culture, and religion. If the present is discussed, researchers mainly focus on antisemitism. Ina SCHAUM breaks this pattern. Her research needs to be located in a transdisciplinary framework. In her work, she introduces individual lives, and expressions of agency, indicating the divide between the diversity of Jews, and their experiences, and how they are perceived by non-Jews. Boldly, she uses case studies to depict what "doing being Jewish" means for young Jews in connection to their intimate love relationships. The outcome is refreshing; it does full justice to Jewish life-worlds in Germany. By way of presenting two young Jews in Germany in depth, SCHAUM lifts the lid on the underlying diversity of Germany's Jewish population. She contrasts constructions of Jews with real living Jews, revealing that Jewishness is but one aspect in their quest for love, and that the researcher of the bespoke Jew is indeed also an implicated subject. SCHAUM's work needs to be appreciated as a harbinger in the country where she is based. Informed by English-language anthropology and sociology, she pushes methodological boundaries, consistently questioning the line between researcher and researched from late 1960s onwards. Jews are her case study; yet her theoretical considerations and methodological reflections extend much further.

Key words: love; intimacy; couple relationships; emotions; Jews; Germany; biographical research; ethnography; reflexivity

"Being Jewish (and) in Love: Two and a Half Stories about Jews, Germans and Love" is a slim volume of just 136 pages. It is framed by a forward of Eva LEZZI, which is followed by an introduction ("Interlude"), and culminates in a meta-conclusion ("Failures and Hurts") that precedes the actual conclusion ("Between Going Astray and Inescapability"). The author, Ina SCHAUM, sketches out theory, methods, methodology, and data, in the form of poetic presentations of two of the interviews she conducted; and offers considerations concerning German/Jewish relations. Each chapter unfolds substantial power in terms of insights and in-depth analyses of the intimate love relationships of young Jews in present-day Germany. The topic is raw, questioning at a most personal level of envisioning and embodying being Jewish, alongside the continuing Jewish/non-Jewish post-Shoah divide. It is exactly this divide, this potential abyss, which SCHAUM carefully deconstructs. In this review essay I seek to contextualise the work of SCHAUM in the wider frame of the thematic and methodological areas she covers: the sociology and anthropology of Jews, emotions, intimate relationships, and love; and last, but not least, creative, qualitative research methods that aim to tackle slippery fieldwork areas, impossible to cover using classical, qualitative research methods, or to present by way of a streamlined, linear text. With Michel FOUCAULT (1969) in mind, in this essay I conduct an archaeology of knowledge, indicating that Jews are "bonnes à penser" [good to think with] (p.89) in the general sense of the argument of Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS (1963 [1962], p.89), and in the specific sense of Misha KLEIN (2014). LÉVI-STRAUSS's argument referred to thinking about animals as more than mere food. KLEIN applied this idea in her way as an anthropologist to studying Jews, observing that "they [Jews] offer a compelling case for examining core anthropological concepts" (2014, p.90). For SCHAUM's study, this hints at the charged question concerning the Jewish experience in post-1945 Germany, with regard to love, and intimacy, and what this compares to: What does her topic say about German society, which, obviously, includes living Jews? To play the devil's advocate: Are Jews in Germany really particular or distinct? And if so, in what way? And how might a non-Jewish, German researcher be implicated in these formulations? How does one nail down love, intimacy, and relationships? SCHAUM asks all of these questions, and does good to think with Jews—and more so, in questioning all she sees like the "wicked child" of the ritual meal, the Pessach [Passover] Seder, a figure that I will return to. [1]

The difference, the novelty, of SCHAUM's work becomes glaringly obvious when relating it to the very few publications in the broader areas of love, intimacy, relationships, Jews, Germany, post-1945. When does Jewish ethno-religious identity become salient, and how do Jews attempt to do being Jewish in intimate, friendship, and love relationships? Lynn RAPAPORT (1997) and Kurt GRÜNBERG (2000) elaborated from classical qualitative sociological, and from psychoanalytic perspectives, respectively, on the love relationships of the Second Generation (capitalised)¹⁾—that is, the children of Shoah survivors. Alina GROMOVA (2014) sought to understand the dating patterns of young, Russian-speaking Jews; she found herself cast as potential dating material, leading her to analyse her experience of being positioned by her research participants. SCHAUM ventures beyond these tropes, theoretically, methodologically and also in terms of her open focus: she does not single out a specific subgroup of Jews. By doing so, she underscores just how diverse Jews in Germany are. Survivors, and their descendants, who dominate public discourse, constitute but one group of the Jewish population. The same goes for the numerical majority, that is Jews with backgrounds in the Former Soviet Union (FSU); these too are but one subgroup. She follows up on undercurrents that did not find traction in these previous works, questioning the very categorisation into subgroups: Is there, in fact, a shared Jewish (love) experience? Furthermore, her methodological approach differs markedly (and fortunately) from previous research. SCHAUM integrates herself into her work, as a participant observer and a participant; she is part of the field. She is what the anthropologist Ruth BEHAR (1996) referred to as a "Vulnerable Observer". She was not shy in spilling the beans on her own hurt concerning a failed relationship with an Israeli Jew; she problematised the reactions of her (German, non-Jewish) grandparents to this relationship, and to her research work within the broad area of Jewish Studies. She delved into the area of sex in the field which still remains largely shrouded in silence. The edited volume "Sex, Sexuality and the Anthropologist" (MARKOWITZ & ASHKENAZI, 1999), might be more than twenty years old, but the topic itself—sex, relationships, and social researchers—remains fraught. [2]

In light of this, SCHAUM is a heiress to anthropologists like Dell HYMES (1972), who demanded candour from those who do fieldwork; Renato ROSALDO (1993 [1989]), who addressed his loss, mourning, fury, his utter desperation, following the death of his wife during fieldwork; Lisa M. TILLMANN-HEALY (2003), who went into the details of doing ethnography on friends; Judith OKELY (1984) who analysed anthropology "at home"; and Alisse WATERSTON and Barbara RYLKO-BAUER (2006), who coined the term "intimate ethnography" to describe how the analysis of the dialectic between an individual life and surrounding structures can shed light on the structures and manifestations of individual agency.²⁾ SCHAUM integrates some of these sources in the current book, which is based on her Masters' thesis. As she is continuing this line of work for her dissertation research, I am certain she will cast the net wider than in the work under review, or than I in this review essay. [3]

In terms of style, SCHAUM links with authors such as Gloria ANZALDÚA, who incorporated lyric-style writing into her "Borderlands/La Frontera" (1987), a highly personal text on mestiza identities which does not hesitate to delve into sexual mores. SCHAUM also connects to Smadar LAVIE (2012, 2014). Addressing Mizrahi single motherhood in Israel, LAVIE wrote against stigmatising identity politics in a very personal, embodied style, incorporating snippets of her own unedited fieldnotes, and her emotional turmoil. SCHAUM, too, includes the unsettling events and considerations of research, pondering on these in her analysis. [4]

This necessarily incomplete list of anthropologists is not intended to serve as praise of my own tribe of anthropologists, but rather seeks to highlight the novelty value of SCHAUM's approach within German academia, and to contextualise her pioneering work in a wider framework. German academia, by and large, still lacks these approaches. The anthropologists and sociologists who work in this fashion are few, and often, like SCHAUM, or myself, publish in English (KRANZ forthcoming a). To date, there is barely space for us within the German academy, and in particular within the realm of Jewish Studies. These are geared to the past, culture, and religion (KRANZ, 2019a). Scholars of the present, and of Jewish presences are typically not part of these structures. While the newly found love for Jews post-Shoah has been analysed as the philosemitic raison d'être of post-1945 (West) Germany (STERN, 1991), and Jewish history as an intergenerational project (SCHÜLER-SPRINGORUM, 2015), the motivations and more so biographies of the respective historians are only spoken about behind closed doors, if at all (ibid.). Such conduct, or the compliances with the candour as HYMES (1972) demanded nearly fifty years ago, has become somewhat normal for both anthropologists and ethnographically working sociologists.³⁾ This very conduct still seems outrageous for those who dominate Jewish Studies in Germany—aka historians. Even the author who addressed this issue, the historian Stephanie SCHÜLER-SPRINGORUM (2015), who presented intergenerativity as a driving force, and who outlined that women scholars who work within the area of Jewish history did not, as a rule, make it to the sanctum of general history, did not reveal any of her own stakes. Considering these dominant structures, SCHAUM's book is the braver; she does not shy away from her own implicatedness (sic). GROMOVA (2014), GRÜNBERG (2000), and RAPAPORT (1997)⁴⁾, who have worked in the past on love and the intimate relationships of Jews, did so from the canon of institutionalised Jewish Studies. Loving and living Jews, it seems, are too disruptive; researchers who candidly reflect on their own stakes add a further level of (much needed) disruption, as they lift the lid on the surreptitious investment of neutrality and professionalism, thus revealing hegemonic power structures and epistemologies of knowledge creation about—but often without—Jews. [5]

Neither SCHAUM nor the two interview partners she presents in this book fit this pattern. Fortunately, neither does LEZZI, who authored the foreword. LEZZI, herself a brilliant and marginalised scholar-cum-author, has conducted literary research on love relations and Jewish/non-Jewish intermarriage. Her book, tellingly called "Liebe ist meine Religion!" [Love is my religion!] (2013), evidences the power of love, a driving force that social researchers often avoid because love is difficult to conceptualise. SCHAUM is aware of this issue and sets out the complexities that she seeks to explore and analyse in her introduction, called "Heavy Lightness". She reflects on the fact that while intimate love relationships constitute a normal part of life, they are rarely subjected to scientific inquiry. I second her claim. Commonly, relationships are analysed in terms of social structures by (quantitative) sociologists (RODRÍGUEZ-GARCIA, 2015), and in particular relationships that cross religious or ethnic boundaries are analysed for their viability (KALMIJN, DE GRAAF & JANSSEN, 2005). A more recent trope engages with the commercialisation of love (ILLOUZ, 1997, 2012). Anthropologists continue to look at transnational kinship systems across international borders (KHWON, 2015); and again, border- or boundary-crossing lovers are of specific interest (DJURDJEVIC & GIRONI, 2016; ODASSO, 2019). It is at this junction where love can become political (BERLANT, 2011). Legal scholars indicate an even stronger focus on structures and bureaucratic processes (HACKER, 2017), revealing an interest in things falling apart (TRIGER, 2012), the refusal of one or the other of the relevant nation states to allow for the union of lovers (MASRI, 2013), or different residence statuses within one family (GUMBERG- MUÑOZ, 2017). Psychologists offer insights through a vast literature on therapeutic means (GREENMAN, WIEBE & JOHNSON, 2019). Nevertheless, love remains a thing modelled in different ways, but still remains hard for them to grasp (FEHR, 2013). [6]

Looking at these attempts as a background beyond "Being Jewish (and) in Love", SCHAUM found herself a proper task, so to say. Her introduction bears witness to this realisation. She enters the terrain by reflecting on her own personal relationships, at the same time broaching the issue of ethics that inevitably arise when researching intimate lives—more when researching a small minority, as a researcher who belongs to the majority. She postulates that the Jewish minority is subject to projections (KRANZ, 2018a), and/or fetishisation (KRANZ, 2018b; RAU, 2016). Subsequently, she interrogates the structures of knowledge creation and representation, issues that scholars within Jewish Studies might touch upon, only to swiftly change topic in many cases.⁵⁾ SCHAUM, here does the opposite; touchingly, respectfully, humanely, as she attends to her research topic and to her respondents, asking them as many questions as she asks herself. Appropriately, she introduces a vast range of theories concerning relationships, love, and intimacy in the theory chapter, "Crafting My Eyes". Besides some of the expected theorists like Zygmunt BAUMAN (2003), Anthony GIDDENS (1992), and Eva ILLOUZ (1997, 2008, 2012), she digs out the sources of the equally important but (at least in Germany) lesser known Sara AHMED (1998, 2004, 2008, 2010), who published prolifically in this area, and Lauren BERLANT (2011). The theory chapter does not lose the velocity of the introduction; if anything, it can be hard to follow at times thanks to the plethora of sources and approaches discussed. This is not to say that this is bad: it underscores the complexity of the issue, and also the problems manifest within the broad research area of love, relationships, dating, and intimacy (regardless of the aspect of "Jewishness"). The final part of the chapter interjects the on-going anomaly of Jewish/non-Jewish relationships in Germany. These need to be cut through in order to get back to her core topics: dating, love, relationships, and intimacy. "Exposed Methodology", the next chapter, follows suit. Here, SCHAUM introduces her methodological considerations and outlines the methods she uses. While remaining anchored in biographical research, her interviews are interactive, and her analysis is dialogical and intersectional. Again, SCHAUM draws on established scholars in the area of biographical research, including Ursula APITZSCH and Lena INOWLOCKI (2000), Catherine Kohler RIESSMAN (2008), and Gabriele ROSENTHAL (1994, 2005). But she digs deeper, drawing attention to the issue of "faking friendship", introduced by Jean DUNCOMBE and Julie JESSOP (2002), and interaction dynamics, analysed by Phil C. LANGER (2009). [7]

It is at this point that she introduces a style of representation, referred to as poetic, and ventures into transdisciplinary fields. Laurel RICHARDSON and Elizabeth Adams ST. PIERRE (2011) have questioned the linear writing-up process of a spoken interview, suggesting that it forced a dynamic narrative into a specific pre-scripted shape. Monica PRENDERGAST (2009) engaged with this suppressed dynamic, proposing that the social researcher write up interviews like poems—to honour the performance of the speaker, and (one might add) to remain truer to the source than in a linear, textual presentation that cannot and that does not replicate how individuals speak (speech, after all, being only one element of communication). This means that SCHAUM presents the interviews in situ, with unfinished sentences, mid-sentence changes, narratives of love as work in progress; she does indeed honour the speaker, the performer, the interlocutor, the interaction partner. Subsequently, SCHAUM moves on to tackle emotions in research. Paradoxically, these are less commonly debated in output on relations, love, and intimacy than one might assume. The forerunner, Arlie Russel HOCHSCHILD (1979, 1983) marginalised her own emotions in her initial, ground-breaking work on emotional labour—she addressed them in her later work, in particular in her output focussing on the prevailing gender inequality of feminised emotional labour. Writing emotionally heavy research is an issue that SCHAUM tackles by way of the works of BEHAR (1996) and other feminist anthropologists. Here, again, I have to applaud SCHAUM for breaking new ground in the German situation. [8]

Aubrey's and Jesaja's stories constitute the chapter that pertains to the interview data—two of the interviews conducted by SCHAUM. Beyond the actual interviews, SCHAUM depicts the run-up to the interviews, the course of the dialogical interaction, and the relationship with the interview partners. She proposes that interviews are documents of interaction (ANGROSINO, 1989). Besides the rich theoretical and methodological applications, she unravels some complexities of the small but highly diverse Jewish population. To date, public discourse of Jews and Germany is dominated by survivors and their descendants, which are seen as the somewhat "original" Jews of Germany. Jews from the former Soviet Union are defined principally by their status as immigrants, and must contend with the suspicion that they are more attracted to German welfare than to Judaism. Israelis only count trivially, by virtue of having left the only Jewish state, and even then as an often essentialised Israeliness. While all of these categories do have some rhetorical validity, there is more to be said about Jewish identity constructions. Mixed Jews hardly feature, for example KRANZ (forthcoming b) and WOHL-VON HASELBERG (2015); while conversion is a known, it remains under-researched (STEINER, 2015). SCHAUM's data reveal that the underlying, individual identity constructions may not fit with any of these assumed categories that dominate German discourse. She does fine work by dismantling these, even though this occurs incidentally and as a side-line, by way of the Jews she encountered in her research. [9]

The two interview partners introduced by SCHAUM are aliased as Aubrey and Jesaja. Aubrey self-identifies as female, Jesaja as male; their biographical benchmarks give insights into the diversity of the Jewish population that can be traced positivistically. SCHAUM begins with Aubrey, whose mother had German Jewish parents, while Aubrey herself comes from an English-speaking country. At times the German/Jewish divide is fraught for her, and in such circumstances she discloses that she is a Jew as a means of resolving the situation. Yet, in terms of relationships, Jewish/non-Jewish as opposed to German/Jewish is the decisive parameter for her. She is keenly aware that her mother is not in favour of a non-Jewish partner/husband/father of grandchildren to be; but she aches for a fulfilling relationship with a non-Jewish man, who we can charitably describe as having commitment issues (at the best of times). While Jewish/non-Jewish is a parameter that comes up in regard to "their future", and more so in relation to the future children she imagines, it is his unwillingness to commit to her which causes her anguish. Aubrey wants to be loved by this man; she wants stability, as her ponderings about potential mixed children indicate. Yet, these children are symbolic of the potential future of a love that might end unrequited. In the course of her story, Aubrey assumes and mourns versions of what the social psychologists Hazel Rose MARKUS and Paula NURIUS (1986) conceptualised as "Possible Selves". In the interview situation, Aubrey seeks insights into heterosexual relationships from another female, from SCHAUM, whom she tries to push into the role of a therapist: Aubrey seeks understanding and advice. While the interviewer can offer the former, she cannot offer the later, leading SCHAUM to wonder if she has raised misleading expectations, whether her inability to live up to offering therapeutic means led to Aubrey dropping off the grid after the interview. Aubrey sought understanding for her relationship problems—less so with regard to the Jewish aspects of her identity. [10]

Jesaja is the descendant of Jews of choice, that is to say converts. His maternal grandmother converted to Judaism with her toddler daughter at the beginning of the 1960s. The story that is assumed to be the typical Jewish story—the divide between Jews and non-Jews created by way of Nazi policy, and its application in the everyday—does not apply to Jesaja as no member of his family was a Jew at that point in time. Jesaja's narrative reveals the salience of his Jewish identity, and the wish to pass Jewishness on to his—potential—children. As with Aubrey, his mother is the compass, set to seek out a Jewish girlfriend-wife-mother of his children. His girlfriend at the time of the interview is Jewish; she puts pressure on him to move to where she lives, arguing that if he does not do so, there would be no future for the two of them. At this juncture SCHAUM admits that her Israeli ex-boyfriend did the same to her, and that she did not like it. Interviewer and interviewee discover that the imposition on their spatial agency connects them. While SCHAUM's relationship failed, Jesaja's is still hanging in the air, and he is indecisive as to whether and how to continue. Interestingly, he applies this behaviour to SCHAUM as well; the drink date they had agreed upon never took place. Maybe, accidentally, SCHAUM stumbled across a key characteristic of Jesaja that has nothing to do with any Jewish/non-Jewish divide: indecisiveness. Perhaps it this gender juncture that needs more exploring. Going by my own observations of relationships, there is something to the suggested pattern of the demand of women for commitment, and men being less committal. While exemptions exist, maybe these oddities—which Aubrey and Jesaja confirm—and gendered patterns of relationships, love and intimacy, are worth exploring in follow up work. [11]

While both stories contain numerous elements known from previous studies on (Jewish) endogamous and exogamous relations, SCHAUM adds a different layer. Marriage patterns—partnership is a relatively new phenomenon—have been of central interest to Jewish demography and community studies for some time. Historically, the agenda covered the personalities that married out (BERMAN, 1968), and how to manage intermarried families—particularly the off-spring. More recent research has sought to understand the identity configurations of peripheral Jews (PERLMAN, 2006), the notion of Jewishness of intermarried couples (THOMPSON, 2013), the history of intermarriage of Jewish women (McGINITY, 2009), notions of fatherhood of intermarried Jewish men (McGINITY, 2014), and the marriages of Jews to specific non-Jews, as in the case study "JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America's Newest Jews" (KIM & LEAVITT, 2016). Yet, these studies need to be understood in the context of Jewish community studies in the United States, which is home to a very significant Jewish population. Similar research does not exist on German Jewry. Individual experiences with relationships, and in particular "things that don't become official"—as Jesaja put it—are a novel area in the United States and also in Germany. As it turns out, both interview partners strive, in theory, to secure a Jewish partner; but more than this, strive for a relationship that makes them happy, evidencing the individualisation of love relationships, removed from demands of the kinship system. While SCHAUM does not focus on the issues I raise here—kinship, community, demography—they are there, and they are striking. Following her agenda, SCHAUM seeks to understand "doing being Jewish" and "doing being German". Unsurprisingly she finds that there is an inherited world to be dealt with, although this inherited world is more diverse than the labels "Jewish" and "German" might lead one to assume. [12]

SCHAUM does not lose her velocity in the conclusion either. Returning to the shores of methodology, theories, and attempts to understand intimate love relationships, SCHAUM concludes her book with the chapter "Failures and Hurts". This is an interesting conclusion, indicating as it does that things are not over, neither for the researcher nor for her research participants. Each of them is on a quest; for a relationship, or to work out a relationship, or to apply existing or new theories and methods to interpret the raw data that is—literally—all around us. SCHAUM keeps on asking questions, hence my use of the figure of the wicked child. The wicked child who asks at the Seder for Pessach "Why do we do what we do?", thus questioning Jewish ritual and the Seder itself. It is worth noting that Seder means order in modern Hebrew. SCHAUM does this too; she questions orders in general, and more so normativising orders, Jews, herself, love, relationships, intimacy, commitment and how these intersect—or not—with "doing being Jewish". And she also questions the nexus of researcher and researched, hierarchies, and issues of (re)presentation in academic and scientific writing. Above all, SCHAUM questions structures, even if she does not use the term "structural analysis" to frame her endeavour. [13]

Boldly, SCHAUM deals with personal and private issues, trains of thought not yet finished, and argues for a sociology that hurts, to rephrase BEHAR (1996). Fortunately, SCHAUM has been awarded a PhD fellowship to continue the work begun with her Masters' thesis, which asks more questions than it can answer to date. The paramount question might be whether "Jewish" and "German" are really the categories one needs to look at, or if Jews and Germans are "good to think with" (KLEIN, 2014, p.90; LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1963 [1962], p.89)—and in a very general way. Her research to date allows for this conclusion: comparability and particularism can and should be intersected. Continuing this line of thought, one might ask how Jews compare to other minorities in Germany. Do they compare to other ethnic or ethno-religious groups in terms of their management of an ethnic boundary (BARTH, 1969; HYLLAND ERIKSEN & JAKOUBEK, 2019)? Do they compare to minorities which do not look favourably at interpartnership/intermarriage, for example the Sinti and Roma, and Yesids, all ethnicities who suffered genocide? Moving away from the study of ethnicities or ethno-religious groups, one might also wonder if a random sample of, say, young urban dwellers in any of the German cities might create a viable research pool, and how far social class is—or is not—more dominant than ethnicity/ethno-religion in the quest for love. And one might ask how gender, which runs as an undercurrent of the narratives of Aubrey, Jesaja, and SCHAUM, finds expression in love relations and acts of intimacy. These issues are key to follow up, in order to understand Jews, but also to understand the anomalies of Jews living in Germany—and of course to think in a wider frame of things. The debates about antisemitism in Germany that have been raging since 2015 reveal that anomalies in the German/Jewish relationship persist. Still, is Jewishness really the parameter that matters to Jews in the quest of love, given just how diverse Jews in Germany are? At all events, the questions are multiple, and SCHAUM is spot on in her introduction: We know surprisingly little of intimate love relationships, regardless of whether the subjects are Jews or non-Jews, and even though they are integral parts of our lives. That makes her research, brave, bold, honest, and challenging, the more urgent to be continued. [14]

2) Barbara RYLKO-BAUER (2014) and Alisse WATERSTON (2014, 2019) continued their work along these lines. <back>

3) See the FQS issues on "Subjectivity and Reflexivity in Qualitative Research" (MRUCK, ROTH & BREUER, 2002; ROTH, BREUER & MRUCK, 2003). The majority of the contributions is in English, however, emphasising the concerns raised in this essay. <back>

4) GRÜNBERG and RAPAPORT worked on the Second Generation (capitalised), that is the German-raised children of Holocaust survivors. These formed the majority of their biological generation in Germany. The third generation (not capitalised) is more heterogeneous, due to migration, and Third Generations (German-raised grandchildren of survivors) constitute a numerical minority within this age cohort, even if they dominate public discourse due to a specific memorial culture. For an in-depth discussion of the issue of "generation" among Jews in Germany see KRANZ (2019b). <back>

5) "Falsche Juden" [Fake Jews] by Nike THURN (2015) constitutes a notable exception. THURN analysed how some non-Jews came to be assumed as being Jews by way of specific qualities that are constructed as Jewish. While she was not part of the academy, the output of Alexandra SENFFT (2007, 2016) also constituted another exception with her biographically infused, brutally honest writing. Most publications either do not contain any details about the author, or, as in the case of Juliane WETZEL (2020), invest in arguing the scientific neutrality of academics. <back>

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Dani KRANZ is a DAAD exchange professor, working as an academic anthropologist at Ben Gurion University, Israel, and as an applied academic and director of Two Foxes Consulting, Germany and Israel. Trained in anthropology, social psychology and history, her thematic expertise covers migration, integration, ethnicity, law, state/stateliness, political life, organisations as well as memory politics. She has been conducting long-term fieldwork in Europe and the Middle East. in her current academic project, she focusses on the genesis of moral economies in Germany. In her applied line of work, she is a consultant to the High Commissioner of the German government for Jewish life and in the fight against antisemitism, a member of the Council for Migration (Rat für Migration), and consults with and a range of other foundations, museums, and NGOs.

Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Ben Gurion University
Beer Sheva, Israel

Kranz, Dani (2021). Review Essay: Living and Loving Jews in the German Present: Jewish Life Beyond the Past, and Beyond Antisemitism [14 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 22(1), Art. 3, http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-22.1.3620.

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS)

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