AT THE START OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, the editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book invited the members of its advisory board to articulate their views on the future direction of research in the field of German-Jewish Studies. Many members, such as David Sorkin, posited the emergence of a new era of German-Jewish Studies, which for him was characterized by the end of “the émigré synthesis,” a period in which the intellectual agenda of the LBI was shaped by a generation of emigrants who “either had direct experience of German-Jewish life and culture prior to 1939 or else grew up with intimate family memories of them.” Founded in 1955, the Institute published its first Year Book the following year, beginning with a deeply ambivalent call for “rebirth” after the years of calamity in Nazi Germany. Its scholarly agenda was largely shaped by Jewish emigrants from Germany who took on the enormous “cultural task” of researching, archiving, and preserving the “history of German Jewry since the Emancipation,” whether through philosophy, religion, science, economics, or art (LBIYB, 1956, xi–xiii). This was largely a retrospective project of commemoration, preservation, and historicization of “the remnants of German Jewry” (LBIYB 1, ix). In fact, as Hannah Arendt argued in 1958, the study of German Jewry was now “altogether historical … a matter of the past.” But at the start of the new century, the Holocaust was no longer the singular Ur-event or raison d’être for the discipline of German-Jewish Studies, the Institute, or the scholarly work of its members.