The Berlin Jewish community was both the pioneer in intellectual modernization and the first to experience a crisis of modernity. This original and imaginative book connects intellectual and political transformation with the social structures and daily activities of the Jewish community. Steven M. Lowenstein has used extraordinarily rich documentation about the life of Berlin Jewry in the period and assembled a collective biography of the entire community of Berlin Jews. He has examined tax lists, subscription lists, genealogical records, and address lists as well as kosher meat accounts to...

Here, in one compact volume, is an illuminating survey of Jewish folkways on five continents. Filled with fascinating facts and keen insights, The Jewish Cultural Tapestry is a richly woven fabric that vividly captures the diversity of Jewish life.
All traditional Jews are bound together by the common thread of the Torah and the Talmud, notes author Steven Lowenstein, but this thread takes on a different coloration in different parts of the world as Jewish tradition and local non-Jewish customs intertwine. Lowenstein describes these widely varying regional Jewish cultures with needlepoint...

A comprehensive historical survey of the Jewish presence in Central Europe from the seventeenth century to the Holocaust, German-Jewish History in Modern Times is a four-volume collective project by a team of leading scholars, offering a vivid portrait of Jewish history. The series is sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute, established in 1955 in Jerusalem, London, and New York for the purpose of advancing scholarship on the Jews in German-speaking lands. Renewal and Destruction, 1918-1945 comprises the final volume and focuses on a period of intense change for European Jewry,...

Using organizational bulletins, surveys, interviews, and personal observations and anecdotes, Lowenstein paints a picture of a unique lifestyle now in the process of merging into American Jewry and disappearing.