- Summary
- "A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture examines Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine and argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory, precisely because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another. Creating archives was one means for Jews to take control of their history, especially after the Holocaust when efforts at archive restitution removed looted archives from the hands of perpetrators. Such efforts also raised complex questions of who could actually "own" this history. This book contends that twentieth-century Jewish archival efforts served as a proxy for wide-ranging struggles over the meaning and control of Jewish culture: Whether in Israel's claims to be a successor to European Jewry, the reality of American Jewry's rising prominence, or the question of the continued vitality of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust, gathering archives was a means to assert dominance over Jewish culture by making claims of ties to the past and constituting a kind of "birth certificate" or legitimization of communal life. A Time to Gather presents archive-making as a metaphor with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews' long diasporic history. In the end, a rising urgency of archival memory in Jewish life and the importance of history's traces meant archives were powerful but contested symbols of control of the past, present, and future"-- Provided by publisher.
- Series
- The Oxford series on history and archives
Oxford series on history and archives.
- Format
- Book
- Author/Creator
- Lustig, Jason, author.
- Published
- New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022]
- Locale
- Germany
United States
Palestine
Allemagne
États-Unis
Middle East
- Contents
-
Archival Totality in the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden
Ingathering the Exiles of the Past? Bringing Archives to Jerusalem
An Archive of Diaspora at the 'Jerusalem on the Ohio'
Making the Past into History: Jewish Archives and Postwar Germany
Digitization, Virtual Collections, and Total Archives in the Twenty-First Century.
- Notes
-
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Archival Totality in the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden -- Ingathering the Exiles of the Past? Bringing Archives to Jerusalem -- An Archive of Diaspora at the 'Jerusalem on the Ohio' -- Making the Past into History: Jewish Archives and Postwar Germany -- Digitization, Virtual Collections, and Total Archives in the Twenty-First Century.
