Modernity and the 'Jewess': Introduction to a section of the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 2018

The articles collected in this section result from a symposium held at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London, on 20 October 2016. The theme, ‘Modernity and the “Jewess”’, reflects an interest in the perception and literary self-representation of Jewish women in early twentieth-century Germany and in exile, with a focus on their engagement with the rapid changes and the growing tensions, particularly in the political and social realms, that we subsume under the concept of modernity. In this introduction, I provide some context for this emphasis of enquiry by sketching the research field concerned with German-Jewish women’s writing in the early twentieth...