The reprofessionalization of Jewish social work after the Shoah would have been unthinkable without the support of international Jewish organizations and, above all, the new state of Israel. This is because the frame of reference among professionals in Germany simply failed to adequately address the needs and problems of the Jewish community. In this context, the quali- fication of Jewish youth became an existential necessity for the whole Jewish community in the 1960s, and early actors in the pedagogical field (e.g., Ber- thold Simonsohn) tried to transfer their practical knowledge into the German discourse on the academization of social work.

He did not seek, but he found: at the beginning of the 20th century the Orientalist Karl Süßheim spent several years in the Ottoman Empire establishing himself professionally. In the process, the young man from a liberal Jewish family in Nuremberg encountered established religious communities unfamiliar to him given his religiously indifferent milieu in the German Empire. Süßheim’s diary tells a unique story of his (re)discovery of Judaism. Via his exploration of Islam, he found a firm Jewish faith, which he retained for the rest of his life.

This essay utilizes issues of the monthly journal of the American organization Hashomer Hatzair from 1934 to 1939 to review and analyse several themes. These include the internal discussions regarding Zionist and chalutzic youth in the United States, their attitude towards fascism in the context of National Socialist Germany, the rising antisemitism in the United States, and the political and social upheavals that followed the stock market crash of 1929. The assumption is that the ideas of chalutzic-Zionist youth movements spread transnationally and developed in a particular way in the United States. Such aspects in the articles by members of Hashomer Hatzair, as well as the larger research context of Zionist youth movements of the 1930s in the United States in general, are topics that need further historical research.

The present study deals with the reception of the US rabbi and Israeli right- wing politician Meir Kahane in the Federal Republic of Germany and in the GDR. It evaluates relevant press publications of West and East German provenance. In the West German press, Kahane’s activity at the head of the Jewish Defense League of the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s received a rather balanced treatment while his political career in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s was perceived as the rise of fascism in the Jewish state. In the early 1970s, the antisemitic image of Kahane, taken from Soviet propaganda, was widespread in the GDR press and remained in circulation in the 1980s.