What Ifs of Jewish History

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is Professor of History at Fairfield University. His area of specialization is the history and memory of the Nazi era. He is the author of several books, including Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust (2011), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the category of visual arts, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge, 2005), Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments and the Legacy of the Third Reich (2000) and the co-edited work, Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (2008). Rosenfeld is a frequent contributor to the Forward newspaper and edits the blog, The Counterfactual History Review.

'The enduring value of counterfactual approaches emerges clearly from Gavriel Rosenfeld's ably constructed collection of perceptive and exciting essays. The volume is a major contribution to the method as well as to Jewish history.' Jeremy Black, University of Exeter, and author of Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures

• Introduction: counterfactual history and the Jewish imagination Gavriel D. Rosenfeld; 1. What if the Exodus had never happened? Steven Weitzman; 2. What if the temple of Jerusalem had not been destroyed by the Romans? René Bloch; 3. What if King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had not expelled the Jews of Spain in 1492? Jonathan Ray; 4. What if the 'ghetto' had never been constructed? Bernard Cooperman; 5. What if Spinoza had repented? Eugene Sheppard; 6. What if Russian Jewry had never been confined to the pale of Jewish settlement? Jeffrey Veidlinger; 7. What if a Christian state had been established in Modern Palestine? Derek Penslar; 8. What if the Jewish state had been established in East Africa? Adam Rovner; 9. What if Franz Kafka had immigrated to Palestine? Iris Bruce; 10. What if the Palestinian Arab elite had chosen compromise instead of boycott in confronting Zionism? Kenneth W. Stein; 11. What if Musa Alami and David Ben-Gurion had agreed on a Jewish-Arab state? David Myers; 12. What if the Weimar Republic had survived? Michael Brenner; 13. What if Adolf Hitler had been assassinated in 1939? Gavriel D. Rosenfeld; 14. What if the Nazis had won the battle of El Alamein? Jeffrey Herf; 15. What if the final solution had been completed? Dirk Rupnow; 16. What if the Holocaust had been averted? Jeffrey Gurock; Index.