Reviewed by: Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany by Kerry Wallach Jill S. Smith Kerry Wallach. Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. 276 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000370 In her book about Jewish visibility in Weimar Germany, Kerry Wallach engages in a project that makes visible what had previously remained invisible in scholarship on German Jews in the 1920s and 30s: the numerous racialized and gendered codes of passing as non-Jewish that Jews themselves negotiated and debated. Passing Illusions deftly reveals the tensions felt by many German Jews during the Weimar era—tensions between the desire to fit in to mainstream German society and thereby gain personal benefits, versus the desire to be part of a distinct cultural, ethnic, or religious community and express pride in this affiliation. Wallach's work sets itself apart from other scholarly analyses in two key ways. First, the book counters other scholars and theorists of Jewish passing who contend that to pass is to betray one's community and thereby to irreparably separate oneself from that community. As Wallach convincingly argues, many Jews in Germany passed as non-Jewish in certain circumstances or in certain spaces, yet they also sought out the community as a refuge or even proudly displayed their Jewish identities in other contexts, be that by wearing the badge of a Jewish organization or by reading a Jewish newspaper in public. She writes in her introduction, "It became possible, even desirable, to perform Jewishness without effacing it, and to be recognizably Jewish without standing out from the crowd" (3). The broader implications of Wallach's intervention into the historiography on Jews in Weimar Germany is perhaps best articulated on the final page of the book, where she contends that her focus on "chances to be open about Jewishness in public" gives readers a necessarily more complex view of the Weimar Republic and shows them that it "was more than a brief period in which certain discriminatory measures anticipated far more extreme Nazi acts of persecutions and violence" (175). Without ignoring Jewish anxiety and vulnerability in Weimar Germany, Wallach takes great care to provide her readers with an array of examples of how Jews showed their awareness of that vulnerability and actively took steps to work through it and even combat it. When writing about the phenomenon of passing, she does not indulge in the discourse of Jewish self-hatred, but she does present Jews as fallible human beings who truly struggled with dominant ideas of race and "the visual grammar of Jewish difference" (28). Despite their resistance to racialized stereotyping, Jews in Weimar Germany "nevertheless relied heavily on similar forms of [End Page 256] racial, ethnic, and cultural profiling" (29) and were sometimes caught in the faulty logic of such profiling. More often than not, the discourses on Jewishness analyzed in Wallach's book present Jewish identity as situational rather than essential. Second, Wallach's book reveals and corrects a problematic gender bias in the existing scholarship on Jewish visibility and embodied difference by focusing on Jewish women. It makes visible Jewish women and their own subtle strategies of covering or revealing Jewishness, just as it calls attention to the myriad ways that women were at the time and still often are rendered invisible by members of their own community or by contemporary scholars. As Wallach rightly points out in her introduction, prominent scholars of gender and Jewishness, such as Daniel Boyarin and Sander Gilman, assume their subjects to be Jewish men. What Wallach's book demonstrates is that Jewish women were central figures in the multifaceted discourse on passing, for the desires and fears of the German Jewish community were often projected on them via their representations in the visual and print media of the time. Through her many examples, Wallach shows readers the myriad ways in which Jewish women—both historical figures and fictional characters—negotiated their own images and those projected on them. Taking these crucial interventions into account, it is clear that this book will have equal impact on German, Jewish, and gender studies. That said, I did find myself wanting a clearer, more focused discussion on...
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Jul 3, 2019
Erin Must + 1
Open Access