Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947

Genius and Anxiety is a masterpiece but in a particular genre. In a sweeping survey of some one hundred years of Western culture, Lebrecht carefully details the stories and personalities of the Jewish figures who did so much to shape it. While written from a rather typical high culture liberal perspective, Lebrecht discusses artists, scientists and rabbis from all parts of the cultural, political and religious spectrums. The book is so well-written and gripping it is sure to be a classic in the already crowded field of Judaic literature.One will learn the biographies of well-known characters like Proust and how his Jewish ethnicity influenced A Remembrance of Times Past and lesser known characters such as Eliza Davis who did much to correct Dickens’ latent anti-semitism.That said, the book also has its limitations. Lebrecht focuses so much on the personalities and stories of the Jews who shaped Western culture that his description of their actual contributions is rather shallow. Nor is the enigma of why the Jews, as opposed to some other people, contributed so much to modernity well explained.The title of the book is about as much as the author chooses to probe this question. Jews throughout this era were outsiders in a constant state of anxiety about their place in society and even their personal safety. As such, they were in a unique position to criticize and transform Western civilization.Genius and Anxiety is an original book about an already well-discussed era of history. By focusing on the personalities and stories of the Jewish shakers of the modern West, Lebrecht has written a genuine masterpiece. But excitement over what he has achieved should be measured by the fact that there are questions and topics left not only unanswered but also unexplored. Lebrecht concludes the work with a coda that the perennial Jewish question remains unsolved. But I would add that Lebrecht’s book raises many Jewish questions that still perplex modernity.

Fascinating ideas and information focused on a specific era of time. Well worth reading, one at a time!

The beginning to the first few pages in Chapter one, I find it revealing, refreshing and absorbing to the contexts explained by the author. It makes a brilliant connection with the readers and takes readers in a 'live' ride of the circumstances. I am still reading and will update the review accordingly.Mihindu Rajaratne, Colombo, Sri Lanka

An important and expertly crafted book! It gets in and around people and events that we thought we knew, but not quite. Served up whole yet effortlessly, Lebrecht gives insights into a topic that is timeless, and for better and worse topical. The Jewish experience has uniquely enriched the world, and yet. Despite of that uniqueness, or because of it? The anxiety that the title references informs the identity of many Jews, but is framed by a thousands year history that has always set us apart. It’s a narrative that is real and relevant for Jews and non-Jews alike.

Genius % Anxiety, How Jews Changed the World, by Norman Albrecht is an interesting book. It mentions people, whom I didn't know, were Jewish. I highly recommend this book.

Good book

Wonderful historical review with intertesting stories about Jews who changed the world, but were also changed by the world. You may be surprised by the number of people who were so innovative in so many areas. Insights into their lives that you may have never known. Written in a very readable style. Highly recommend this book.

I learned a tremendous amount from reading this book. I thought that the histories of communism and Zionism were very interesting and well written. At times, however the book seemed to get bogged down with minute detail. There should be subdivision based on the name of the person being discussed , with the name of the person as the title for that piece of the text. With his way of introducing a new person, it was often confusing as to which person was being discussed.

This is a wonderful book that expanded my understanding of the post 1848 emancipation of Jews in Central Europe to the establishment of the Israeli State. Written from a Jewish perspective the book gives an exceptional insight into the drivers that contributed to the horrific anti-semitism of the 20th Century.The massive contribution of Jews to the flowering of culture in pre-War I Vienna, post 1848, is well described as the Jews respond to the reductions of the barriers to their full participation in Austrian society.The tragic failure of Central Europe to endorse and welcome either assimilation or acceptance is convincingly outlined, and make this a uniquely valuable contribution to understanding both the tragedies inflicted on the Jews, and also a sense of the Jewish intellectual heritage that helped drive the artistic and scientific over-achievement described in this book.

The book is chaptered by year rather than person. This makes it difficult to look up the particular contributions of, say, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Albert Einstein. Also, the book seems very much anti-communist, anti-socialist, even to the point of being outright, and hence intellectually untrustworthy, right-wing propaganda. The text comes very close to saying the science of these people is contained within, and may be read from the Tanakh (Bible). This is a big disappointment to me because I was looking forward to an academic argument around a link between genius and Judaism, or better still, a link between genius and the liability to (intemperate) panic. As it is, I am annoyed that I wasted £2.99 on it, and made suspicious of the support apparently given it in the publishing world.

This book is a must-read for everyone interested in the modern world. It is Eurocentric, as most of the Jews portrayed in it lived in Europe, or emigrated to North America from Europe. I knew Norman Lebrecht as a witty commentator on classical music and the loss of its relevance, but now I realise that he is a true polymath, as well informed about Einstein and Szilard, and Trotsky, as about Mendelssohn, Wagner and Schoenberg. I found the theological discussions fascinating, though he seems to have quite a soft spot for Orthodox Judaism, including Lubavitchers etc., whom he portrays as ecstatic rather than obscurantist. He is hilarious on Freud, and puts another well-deserved nail in that coffin. Just about every insight is generalisable to other minority groups.

The information and scholarship of this book are breathtaking. I would have given it the full five stars except that in its impressive litany of vignettes of the famous and less famous, it appears to offer little actual analysis of why the contribution of Jews was so distinctive and effective in this period. That said, it is a fine and informative read. It gets an extra star for a major and impressive achievement!

Well written and researched, very informative