Paul Reitter’s latest book, Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture, was recently published in Bloomsbury Press. The collection showcases a rich sampling of Professor Reitter’s essays, which have appeared over the past decade and a half in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, and the Jewish Review of Books.

These essays focus on German-speaking Jewish intellectuals and their confrontations with and in German and Austrian society. Among the authors whom Professor Reitter treats are many of the most noted figures in the nineteenth and twentieth century: Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Gershom Sholem, Arthur Schniztler, Franz Kafka, Nelly Sachs, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Stafan Zweig, Otto Weininger, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, and Erich Auerbach. A separate section of essays discusses various issues surrounding the Holocaust.

The title essay contains a bit of Americana, highlighting a less known writer, Felix Salten, whose novel Bambi, which served as the model for the Disney animated classic film, has roots in the author’s Zionism of the 1920s.