January 2026 Book Review
Review of Yascha Mounk, Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
By Rich Robinson
This book is by now twelve years old. But that does not mean it is no longer relevant. In fact, I deliberately chose to review this title because, after all, this is the LCJE International web site, and it is too easy as an American to be North America-focused. And of course, Germany is home to a substantial Jewish population, including Russians and Israelis. So, yes, this is still a timely book.
Yascha Mounk is a German-American political scientist. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. According to his web site, he is “known for his work on the crisis of democracy and the defense of philosophically liberal values.”[1]
Mounk begins with an introductory memoir of his family history: His grandparents, living in Poland, found themselves disillusioned by the failure of Communism to stem antisemitism, leading to the family’s removal to the U.S., Israel, Sweden, and Germany. Tragedies, failed marriages, a firstborn son’s death—all figure into this memoir of a family scattered far and wide across the globe. In the midst of this, Mounk became a German citizen because his mother Ala was one; she was one because her short-lived marriage to Christian Wilhelm entitled her to be one.
Then the heart of the book begins, and much of this is a reminiscence-informed look at history and politics. In Part I, “The Past Lingers,” Mounk confesses that, despite not having a strong Jewish identity, “even so, as I grew up, I came to feel more and more Jewish—and less and less German” (p. 27, Kindle edition). As he notes, there has been a resurgence of antisemitism in Germany in recent years. Yet many Germans were eager to go overboard in proving that they were not antisemitic, leading to awkwardness and feelings on the author’s part of estrangement from Germans. “It wasn’t violence or hatred that made me feel that I would never be a German. It was benevolence” (p. 31).
The rest of Part I is devoted to explaining how, in the immediate aftermath of WWII, there was in Germany “an eerie silence” (p. 30) about the recent Nazi past.
Part II— “The Tyranny of Good Intentions”—describes how, from the 1960s up through the 1980s, a new and younger generation “forced the country” to acknowledge its past. This, however, “had the perverse effect of making Germany’s Jews feel even more like outsiders” (p. 34).
Meanwhile, Part III, entitled “Ding Dong, the Jews Are Gone,” explains that from the 1990s on, some German resented the “obsession” Germany had with the past and called for a Schlussstrich, a “finish line” to the whole thing. On the one hand, writes Mounk, “I have real sympathy for young Germans who want to move beyond the hysterical philo-Semitism of their elders. In particular, their avowed desire to treat Jews the same as anybody else is commendable. . . . But many people my age are so determined to demonstrate that they won’t treat me any differently just because I’m a Jew that, all too often, they end up treating me very differently indeed” (pp. 36-37).
Part IV then talks about how many Germans have now concluded that the politicians of the previous generations were so keen to apologize for the Nazi past that they were “easily cowed into submission” (p. 37) by other nations and by minorities within Germany.
As Mounk puts it:
All of these different attitudes—the lingering anti-Semitism, the embarrassed philo-Semitism, and of course the growing resentment against Jews—combine to make me feel like a stranger in what should be my own country. Once, there was such a thing as a German Jew. Then the Holocaust happened. Today, there are Jews and then there are Germans (p. 38).
Moving between personal story, history, and politics makes for a lively read. There is nothing dry about this book. Twelve years on from publication, we know Germany has seen changes—the rise of far-right political factions; an influx of Israelis; and, it may be, an alteration in German political influence in some regards, given the war in Ukraine, President Donald Trump’s approach to Europe, and additional factors.
It is salutary to see Yascha Mounk’s evaluation of changes in German attitudes towards Jews and the “Nazi past” (an expression that becomes almost a stock phrase). In the midst of all this, he characterizes his own feelings about being Jewish-and-not-German. What does this mean for Jews living in Germany in 2026? What does it mean for Jewish evangelism in Germany? For the self-identity of Messianic Jews in Germany? Read this book and reflect on these questions.
[1] https://www.yaschamounk.com/about