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Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity. Adi Nester. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2005.

Reviewed by Madison Schindele and Samuel Teeple

In her 2024 monograph Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity, Adi Nester offers a textually grounded analysis of the German-Jewish relationship as it emerged in music drama in the first half of the twentieth century. Nester focuses on musical settings of biblically-themed texts: Rudolf Borchardt’s poem Das Buch Joram and its oratorio realization by Paul Ben-Haim; Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron; Joseph Roth’s novel Hiob and Eric Zeisl’s opera of the same name. Throughout her discussions of these works, Nester pushes back against “the stagnant major-minor relation that has long served scholars in their definition of the German Jewish condition,” arguing that, even in the face of hardening racial logics, Jewish difference (what Nester calls the difference between German and Jew) actively unsettles any effort to categorize or contain it. [1] While this critical reorientation is not necessarily novel—since the 1990s, German Jewish Studies has increasingly recognized the fluid, entangled relationship between the categories of German and Jew—Unsettling Difference presents a convincing interpretation of this dynamic as expressed in musical texts, locating moments of role reversal, confusion, and ambiguation as aesthetic disruptions. [2]