Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature along with appointments in art and archaeology, English, and classics. His books include The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture.
"Berlin for Jews is a marvelously readable book for people exactly
like me, a Jew with misgivings about visiting Germany whose need to
engage with an unspeakable history makes us ripe for guidance. But
far beyond personal confession, this is a sort of intellectual
Baedecker, a cultural history with a fascinating cast of characters
out of a German past that included and honored its Jews. Barkan is
not a revisionist; he is a patient (and passionate) interpreter
whose starting point is his own skepticism and his openness to a
host of contradictions and ironies."
--Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After
"After 1945, can there be a 'Berlin for Jews'? Can a Jew be a
Germanophile? In his learned, deeply personal, culturally astute
and thoroughly unclassifiable book, Barkan tackles these questions
and others that many Jews of a certain age, education and
temperament have also pondered."
-- "Wall Street Journal"
"Barkan confides that he hasn't always been comfortable with his
Jewishness, conducts a fascinating historical tour that shows his
great affection for the city. It's no secret that Berlin has a rich
Jewish past, but to see the Bayerisches Viertel through his eyes
will help modern travelers who are interested."
-- "Library Journal"
"Barkan, in his elatedly poetic, meticulously erudite and
irresistibly personal chronicle of his rapprochement to and
re-appropriation of Berlin for a Jewish, nay, for a historically
and morally authentic 21st-century conscience, probes unflinchingly
that . . . question: can we visit, love, be enchanted and intrigued
by Berlin after Auschwitz? . . . His answer is as full of life and
promise as every word of this eclectic, highly absorbing, seriously
engaging book: we must create more life, history, memory 'haunted,
but also honored, by an indelible past.'"
-- "Bookanista"
"The book is thus both travel guide and 'Who's Who.' Barkan leads
us on, or directs us to, various walking tours, and his facility as
a travel writer is admirable. . . . The book is a pleasure as he
shares his enormous capacity for enjoying life with us."
-- "Jewish Currents"
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