Dreamland : Europeans and Jews in the aftermath of the Great War Cover Image

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Dreamland : Europeans and Jews in the aftermath of the Great War / Howard M. Sachar.

ISBN: 0375409149
Physical Description: xii, 385 p. : map ; 24 cm.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Sachar, Howard Morley, 1928-2018 (Author).

Summary:

From the dean of modem Jewish historians comes a panoramic examination of the experience of Europe's Jews in the aftermath of "the war to end all wars."

Dreamland traces the fissures that appeared all too quickly in those democracies born from the rubble of Europe's autocratic empires. Focusing his richly detailed narrative on European Jews -- whose minority status made them particularly sensitive to changes in the social order -- Howard Sachar spotlights charismatic Jewish leaders, from Hungarian Communist Bela Kun to Germany's Rosa Luxemburg, France's Socialist Prime Minister Leon Blum and Austria's Sigmund Freud. Sachar demonstrates how Jews all across Europe -- whether part of an assimilated and influential intelligentsia or members of marginalized Jewish communities -- effected and withstood the political and economic pressures of the 1920s and '30s, and how their experiences foretold significant democratic failures long before the Nazi rise to power.