What can American Jews learn from a vanished German-Jewish world?

That question will be at the heart of a public lecture with Professor Michah Gottlieb, Associate Professor of Jewish Thought at New York University.

Gottlieb will be speaking just hours before the beginning of Tisha B’Av, a holiday during which many Jews mourn the losses that have afflicted the people of Israel, especially the destruction of the Second Temple in 70CE. Tisha B’Av asks Jews to sit with the losses, not only the destruction of ancient Jerusalem, but the many ruptures, exiles, and broken worlds that have shaped Jewish history.

German-Jewish civilization is one of the casualties of this tragic history. Shattered by Nazism, German-Jewish civilization has all but disappeared from the European continent; nevertheless, its cultural legacy has endured. Indeed, many of the thorny questions we face in America today under the umbrella of “multiculturalism” were first confronted by the German-Jewish community in the years following the founding of the Wilhelmine state.

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Would Jews be able to fully integrate into the life of the German people without losing their authentic Jewishness?

Could sacred Jewish texts be studied in German universities without giving injury or offense?

Would the community have the will to combine its ancient traditions with new traditions and endorse and find a balance between tradition and change?

Professor Gottlieb will invite us to entertain the German-Jewish concept of Bildung, meaning education, virtue and self-cultivation, and encourage us this Tisha B’Av not only to remember the past, in its tragic aspect, but also to learn from it.

The talk will be held at Walnut Street Minyan in Newton on Wednesday, July 22. Register here.

Avi Bernstein-Nahar is the founder and president of The New Jewish Academy, a center for teacher training and human sciences research, chief education officer for 36 Learning Matters, and a visiting scholar in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University.

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