SOURCE: Rosen, Robert S. “Fleeing Tradition.” New Leader 61, no. 12 (5 June 1978): 19–20.

In the following review of Freud, Jews, and Other Germans, Rosen discusses Gay's treatment of anti-Semitism and assimilation among German-Jews.

Peter Gay acknowledges in the Preface of [Freud, Jews, and Other Germans] that these six essays, which begin just before the Wilhelminian Empire, are “deeply personal … a piece of autobiography, part of reckoning with my origins.” Since Gay was born around the middle of the Weimar period, however, the term “autobiography” is obviously not intended in any narrow, literal sense. The author will be encountered in these pages solely as a chronicler of men and events he strongly identifies with. His real father is mentioned only once, in passing. Nevertheless, it is truly the world of his fathers that we are introduced to here—German Jews of the late 19th and early 20th century, caught in the sweep...