Ever since the late 1980s, when the Jewish communities in Europe began to rise from their ashes and reinvent themselves, "Jewish Europe" has become a fashionable and productive topic. Recently, Israeli scholars have even begun to speak, with a tinge of worried envy, of contemporary European Judaism as he-ammud ha-shelishi, the "third pillar" of world Jewry, which is gradually reclaiming its position as a centre of Jewish life alongside the approved strongholds of Jewish continuity in Israel and the US. Authors such as Kertesz and Konrad, established filmmakers such as Lanzmann and Szabo, and scholars such as Dan Diner and even the Israeli-American historian Saul Friedländer are usually identified as the intellectual heralds of this collective resurrection.¹