Modernism without Jews?: German-Jewish Subjects and Histories (German Jewish Cultures) Paperback – September 25, 2017 by Scott Spector (Indiana University Press)

The essays in this collection are virtuoso performances demonstrating how Scott Spector's radical textual method could be applied to a range of controversial intellectuals. There is, of course, a vast body of interpretation surrounding these figures, and it is a credit to Spector's erudition, originality and synthetic abilities that he nevertheless has something new to say about them. Scott Spector has been advocating for a subject-based understanding of German-Jewish modernity throughout his distinguished career. Nowhere else have Jews contributed so massively and consequentially to the general culture than in Germany. From Mendelssohn to Marx, from Freud to Einstein, Jewish contributions to secular German thought have been both wide-ranging in scope and profound in their impact. But how are these intellectual innovations contributions to European Jewish culture? How are they to be defined as Jewish? Scott Spector argues for a return to the actual subjects of German-Jewish history as a way to understand them and their worlds. By engaging deeply with the individual as well as with the literary or philosophical character of the text, Spector offers a fresh view of the presumed contradictions, uncertainties, and paradoxes that underlie the project of Jewish participation in culture. Spector forges a new definition of what modernist creativity means in our understanding of German-Jewish cultureThis book brings this work together and culminates in a new and compelling approach to this much-studied topic. 

Scott Spector is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan. He is author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle.