Jews in Leipzig - The University of Texas at Austin

had less room to move in some periods—like 1967, when hostility against Israel in the
Socialist Block reached a peak—than in others, like the 1980s. 18 After 1989, we will see
briefly that—though a world has changed since the Weimar Republic—the crucial
determinant of the state and its form and intentions has come back in some important
ways to its starting point in 1933. Just as the different forms of the German state found
Jews valuable as rhetorical and symbolic devices in defining themselves, those German
states went far in determining the level of freedom of Jews to define themselves. Jews in
Leipzig today are free, more or less, to imagine what it means to be a Jew and a German,
to argue between native-born and foreign-born, Orthodox and Reform. This is a case
study in the importance of politics, the intent of the state, and the power of people to live
their lives in differing visions of different Germanies.
18 Geller emphasizing this ebb and flow of Jewish agency during the East German regime, but he attaches it
more to patronage politics by the most important Jewish leaders. This study focuses a bit less on
institutional give-and-take than Geller, looking more closely at efforts by individuals and groups to run
their own lives in the context of differing state forms.
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