This recent podcast by USC professor Saskia Coenen Snyder, shows how architecture tells a story about the national experiences of European Jews.
In Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Harvard University Press, 2013), Saskia Coenen Snyder, Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, uses buildings
to tell a story;
specifically, a story about how the construction and architecture of nineteenth-century
European synagogues shed light on the different national experiences of modern European
Jews.
By looking at synagogues in four important European centers: London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin, Snyder explores Jewish space as a marker of acculturation but not full acceptance.