"This profound and poetic book is impossible to summarize--you have to read it. By turns detective mystery, literary meditation, personal memoir, and recreation of lost worlds, it pursues the figure of the Wandering Jew. Starting with the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew , Yair Mintzker takes us forward to twentieth-century Israel and backward to sixteenth-century Germany. What we learn is not just a whole new way of seeing German culture and its vein of antisemitism; Mintzker shows us how the Wanderer can be reworked as a figure for identity itself, both Jewish and German. A rare, mind-opening book, it is also deeply hopeful."-- Lyndal Roper, author of Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War "With arresting prose and razor-sharp analysis, Mintzker unravels the surprising origins of the legend of the Wandering Jew and traces its reception in history and literature. A tour de force of historical reasoning, this short, brilliant book reads like a dazzling intellectual detective story even as it makes a profound comment about our time. I couldn't put it down.

" --Helmut Walser Smith, author of Germany: A Nation in Its Time "In I, Wandering Jew , Yair Mintzker weaves a panorama of Jewish history and culture across five centuries, spanning Reformation Germany, nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and contemporary Israel. This slim, beautifully written book--part historical inquiry, part literary criticism, and part autobiography--is greater than the sum of its parts. Mintzker has created a profound meditation on Jewish destiny over time." --Elisheva Carlebach, coauthor of A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe.