“What a delight this book is! Unlike all those Companions and all those travel guides, here is a real companion with whom you want to journey: witty, conflicted, amused, amusing, insightful, smart. This book provides a wonderful sense of how place and stories go together—all touched with an elegant melancholy for a lost world and our part in making its memory still sing.”
— Simon Goldhill, author of Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Brontë's Grave
“Berlin for Jews is a marvelously readable book for people exactly like me, a Jew with misgivings about visiting Germany whose need to engage with an unspeakable history makes us ripe for guidance. But far beyond personal confession, this is a sort of intellectual Baedecker, a cultural history with a fascinating cast of characters out of a German past that included and honored its Jews. Barkan is not a revisionist; he is a patient (and passionate) interpreter whose starting point is his own skepticism and his openness to a host of contradictions and ironies.”
— Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After
“Barkan confides that he hasn't always been comfortable with his Jewishness, conducts a fascinating historical tour that shows his great affection for the city. It's no secret that Berlin has a rich Jewish past, but to see the Bayerisches Viertel through his eyes will help modern travelers who are interested.”
— Library Journal
“After 1945, can there be a ‘Berlin for Jews’? Can a Jew be a Germanophile? In his learned, deeply personal, culturally astute and thoroughly unclassifiable book, Barkan tackles these questions and others that many Jews of a certain age, education and temperament have also pondered.”
— Wall Street Journal
“Barkan, in his elatedly poetic, meticulously erudite and irresistibly personal chronicle of his rapprochement to and re-appropriation of Berlin for a Jewish, nay, for a historically and morally authentic 21st-century conscience, probes unflinchingly that . . . question: can we visit, love, be enchanted and intrigued by Berlin after Auschwitz? . . . His answer is as full of life and promise as every word of this eclectic, highly absorbing, seriously engaging book: we must create more life, history, memory ‘haunted, but also honored, by an indelible past.’”
— Bookanista
“The book is thus both travel guide and ‘Who’s Who.’ Barkan leads us on, or directs us to, various walking tours, and his facility as a travel writer is admirable. . . . The book is a pleasure as he shares his enormous capacity for enjoying life with us.”
— Jewish Currents
"Idiosyncratic. . . . The writing is often witty and engaging. . . . For readers visiting Berlin who would like to get a good sense of how pre-Holocaust Jews felt at home in the city and influenced its cultural life, this is a very good place to start."
— Publishers Weekly