The article takes up George L. Mosse’s question how important liberal education in German Jewry since the Enlightenment has been. Mosse’s dispute with Gershom Scholem is discussed as part of the inner Jewish debate over the Jewish educational path into German culture. It is explored why Reform rabbis around 1900 deemed religiously indifferent liberalism a danger to educated Jews and why the self-image of the German university – education through research – has been so attractive to Jews. Finally, the article asks how a liberal and religiously indifferent society also in the present should respond to the values of religious people.

This article examines the literary transformation of Nelly Sachs during her first seven years of exile in Sweden. It argues that her literary transformation went through three phases. During the first phase,“naïve exile,” she tried to have her previous poetry and prose from her Berlin period translated into Swedish. In the second phase, “silence, knowledge, gathering traces,” she understood the consequences of the Holocaust and altered her way of writing. The poetry of the third phase, in which she transformed into the poet we know today, is marked by “surviving and witnessing.” She saw writing as necessary to survival and tried to bear witness to what happened for those who were murdered in a literary form.

In this essay the author examine words and concepts in the postwar lyric poetry of German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) that are drawn from geometry, the branch of mathematics concerned with the study of spatial objects and their relationships. Sachs viewed language and texts as a space in which we can exist. Her postwar poetry is governed largely by a crisis of orientation, related both to the Shoah and to the Diaspora, which she confronts by attempting to find stability through points, lines, and shapes, and even concepts like Pythagoras’s “harmony of the spheres.” These are not merely superficial uses of common terms; because she views language as a space, and because she also makes reference to geometry itself, I argue that geometry is a foundation of her poetics. In fact, even her preferred mode of composition, the cycle, can be understood geometrically.

This paper analyses the socio-historical context of a transnational dialogue on social work between Germany and Mandatory Palestine during the first half of the 20th century. Against the backdrop of the story of Dr Mirjam Hoffert, the article reveals the unique, complex, and contradictory translation of the Jewish-German approach toward social work into the social context of Mandatory Palestine. Although Hoffert and other protagonists faced many challenges in Germany, the complex mission of establishing a new (female) profession in the Yishuv confronted them with new and different conflicts and struggles that they ultimately resolved.