Preface

Abstract

The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book for 2019, as every year, draws together work from an international group of scholars. Our contributors address a variety of subjects from a range of perspectives and with diverse methodologies, and the sum of these parts produces a high-quality snapshot of a dynamic and heterogeneous field of study. The first section, ‘Exile Photography’, is a collection of articles based on papers first presented at the 2016 conference on exile photography held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In their focus on the visual dimension of the Jewish past, in particular within Germany and pre-state Palestine, the articles complement those on German and Israeli film that appeared in our 2018 volume. Our second section likewise builds on work from a previous volume, with two pieces that constitute the completion of the 2017 section ‘German-Speaking Jews in Europe in the Immediate Post-War Period’. The essays in the third section explore issues of politics, culture, and intellectual life in Germany and Austria. The volume is rounded out by another in our series of memoirs; in this instance, a mathematician’s eulogy for his wife, a writer, offers a thumbnail portrait of their lives before and after National Socialism.