BOOKS! We want to highlight two new open access books that should be of interest to our readers. Since they are open access, they can both be freely accessed online.
Virtual and Real-Life Spaces of Jewish Europe in the 21st Century
Edited by: Maja Hultman and Joachim Schlör
Published by: DeGruyter Brill 2025
This volume grew out of the presentations at a conference held in 2022 in Gothenburg, Sweden. JHE’s Ruth Ellen Gruber gave a keynote at the conference and has one of the introductory essays, titled: “Life after Life: Shifting Virtualities (and Realities) 20 Years after Virtually Jewish.”
About the book:
The first decades of the 21st century have presented numerous challenges for European Jewry: far-right movements and a rise of antisemitism, a global pandemic, and a war on European soil. At the same time, heritage sites commemorating the Jewish past and the use of digital platforms to create new forms of communication and cultural co-construction are growing. Using a variety of spaces – heritage sites, museums, digital practices, urban topography, and communal activities – as case studies, this collective volume analyses whether they might serve as a reminder that despite moments of crisis, Jewish life in Europe persists.
The spatial analysis offered by the volume uses the concept of “virtuality” as a starting point, thereby engaging anew with spatial concepts laid out by scholars in the 1990s. Now, 30 years later, prompted by today’s political, social, and cultural European landscape, as well as the increasing role of digitization, the authors discuss the meaning of “virtuality” and how it relates to notions of “authenticity” and “reality” in Jewish culture and in Jewish/non-Jewish relations. As such, the book provides a fresh take on and a new way forward for the conceptualizations and applications of “space”, which together offer particularly useful avenues to access power relations, identity (re-)constructions, and performative aspects of the European Jewish experience.
Click here to access the book and download the chapters
Architecture of Memory: Exploring (Post-) Jewish Spaces in Eastern Europe
By Natalia Romik
UCLPress Series: Design Research in Architecture
Architecture of Memory explores architectural disappearance, urban remembrance and functional change amid social upheaval. Using archival, architectural and artistic methods, Natalia Romik investigates the spectral architecture of former shtetls – predominantly Jewish towns in Central and Eastern Europe before the Second World War. After the war, these towns were repopulated by people of other nationalities, who reused former Jewish properties. Today, traces of the Jewish populations have nearly vanished from urban reality and public discourse. Romik’s work seeks to discover new ways to develop abandoned shtetl architecture, focusing on Jewish heritage sites like synagogue ruins and ritual baths.
Through an interdisciplinary approach that merges architectural design, contemporary art and Jewish studies, Romik’s experimental research addresses the complex social issues of former shtetls by combining theoretical discussions with artistic performances and architectural interventions. The book documents projects ranging from subtle, mirror-clad interventions – such as the Nomadic Shtetl Archive, JAD, and Hurdy-Gurdy – to practical renovations that transform derelict synagogues and Jewish pre-burial houses into historical museums and cultural centres. These efforts confront the ‘present absence’ of these towns by merging theoretical discourse with archival research, artistic performances and architectural interventions, aimed at investigating the lost Jewish communities’ spectral architecture.