Stained Glass
by Flora Cassen
240
A poignant blend of memoir and history, Stained Glass explores Jewish identity in post-Holocaust Europe, confronting the persistence of antisemitism across generations and continents. In Stained Glass, Flora Cassen traces a Jewish life shaped by family and history, moving between medieval Europe and the present to connect lived experience with the longer arc of Jewish history. Drawing on her upbringing in Antwerp’s Jewish community and her grandparents’ escape from Nazi-occupied Europe to the Belgian Congo, Cassen writes from within a past in which powerlessness rubbed shoulders with power. From her later life in the United States, she considers Jewish life in Europe as a mirror that reflects enduring questions about vulnerability and belonging. Stained Glass asks what it means to leave Europe behind and to encounter in American Jewish life a vitality that is strikingly beautiful yet never fully settled.
Flora Cassen
Flora Cassen is the Lavine Family Director of the Brandeis Center for Jewish Studies and the Director of the Sarnat Center for the Study of Anti-Jewishness at Brandeis University. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Originally from Antwerp, Belgium, Cassen earned her B.A. in History and Law from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, her M.A. in Comparative History from Brandeis, and her PhD in Hebrew and Judaic studies from New York University. Her writing has been published in Haaretz, The Forward, Slate, Aeon, Sources, and Smithsonian Magazine
View Author ProfileReviews of Stained Glass
No published reviews yet
Our contributor reviews for this title will appear here soon.