Bambi's Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture

Paul Reitter

Jun. 2015 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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Paul Reitter has won acclaim as both a scholar and a public critic for his writing on German Jewish culture in the twentieth century.

Bambi's Jewish Roots brings together the best of Reitter's essayistic work, exploring the lives of well-known figures and revealing surprising new perspectives. These include how Felix Salten's Zionist commitments manifest themselves in his most famous work, the novel Bambi; what Gershom Scholem's diaries tell us about his development as a thinker and person; why German-Jewish writers hated Stefan Zweig so passionately; where myth-busting books about Franz Kafka have indulged in myth-building; how Freud's Moses and Monotheism offers a theory of Jewish self-hatred more than an explanation of anti-Semitism; and why Heinrich Heine felt aburning need to distance himself from his fellow liberal Jewish critic Ludwig Börne.

The works collected here, many of which were originally published in forums such as the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Harper's Magazine, and the Jewish Review of Books, have earned Reitter his reputation as a witty, erudite, and deeply illuminating critic.

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Paul Reitter is Professor in German Languages and Literatures and Director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State University, USA. The author of The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (2008), and On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (2012), he has contributed essays and reviews to Harper's Magazine and The Nation, and collaborated with Jonathan Franzen on The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus (2013). He recently co-edited Anti-Education, a new translation of Nietzsche's lectures on the German educational system, and The Rise of the Modern University, an anthology of sources having to do with the mission of the research university.