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Philipp Nielsen, Jüdische Politik und Presse in der frühen Bundesrepublik, German History, Volume 33, Issue 1, March 2015, Pages 173–174, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghu079
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Extract
Andrea Sinn describes her book on the first two decades of Jewish politics after the Holocaust in West Germany as a contribution to the slowly growing field of post-1945 German-Jewish history. More specifically the goal of her book is to offer an account of the emergence of the two main Jewish institutions representing Jews in post-Holocaust West Germany: the Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland) and the Jüdische Allgemeine. The Central Council was founded in 1949 to give the various Jewish groups and communities a single voice in their dealings with both international Jewish organizations and the West German state. The newspaper started life as Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für die Nord-Rheinprovinz und Westfalen in 1946 and received its final (and current) name in 1949.
Sinn looks at these two institutions in the first two decades of post-1945 Jewish life in Germany through the lens of their leading, if not founding, figures: Karl Marx (no relation to the philosopher), the editor of the Jüdische Allgemeine; and Hendrik G. van Dam, secretary general of the Central Council. Both Marx and van Dam had survived the war in exile in Great Britain, and both returned as early as 1946 to the British Zone. Beginning with a sketch of their biographies pre-1945, Sinn describes in great detail how these two men shaped the organizational structure and the public appearance of the Jewish community(s) in West Germany.