By Susan Neiman @ NYBooks.com, August 26, 2019

This essay is adapted from the author’s introduction to Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, published this week by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

I began my life as a white girl in the segregated South, and I’m likely to end it as a Jewish woman in Berlin. Lest you suppose I’m tracing an arc that strides the space from perpetrator to victim, let me complicate the story. The question of whether Jews should count as white people was not quite settled in the South where I was born. “There’s an old saying,” Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., who was Emmett Till’s cousin, told me. “If I was Catholic and I lived in the South, I’d be worried. If I was Jewish, I’d be packing up. If I was black, I’d be gone.”

When I was eight years old, my best friend solemnly declared she could no longer play with me. We had a lot in common: a preference for building tree houses over playing with Barbie dolls, a love of books involving games in the woods that often revolved around searching for a door to Narnia. Still, she ended our friendship after hearing that the Jews had killed Jesus [....]