Homes Away from Home Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg

"Drawing on a stunning array of sources, Sarah Wobick-Segev transports readers through the spaces and places of Jewish life in three European cities, showing the centrality of new sites of leisure and consumption to modern Jewish identities and sensibilities. A fresh and original contribution to several fields, Homes Away from Home challenges the once intractable divide between Eastern and Western European experiences, showing how Jews and Jewish communities responded to the opportunities and challenges of modernity."-Paul Lerner, University of Southern California "Sarah Wobick-Segev's brilliant combination of spatial history with how Jews felt about these spaces offers readers an entirely new lens through which to understand evolving Jewish identities in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe."-Marion Kaplan, New York University "Wobick-Segev explores the ways in which modern Jews slowly became members of European society while maintaining a Jewish identity. She focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Jews in France, Germany, and Russia, and her study is a welcome addition to the immense literature on Jewish assimilation. Working through both primary and secondary sources in German, French, and Yiddish, Wobick-Segev examines ways that Jewish communities met the twin challenges of the modern world: greater acceptance by society was accompanied-seemingly paradoxically-by increased hostility. She covers a lot of ground cogently and concisely. Recommended."-G.R. Sharfman, CHOICE "[A] pleasure to read. Engaging and well-written, Homes Away from Home draws from a wide array of archival source materials in different languages, shedding light on urban Jews forging modern identities and sensibilities. It is a welcome addition to the fields of Jewish Studies, urban and spatial history."-Saskia Coenen Snyder, H-France