Cosmopolitanism and the Jews by Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman (review)

[...]it is Gelbin's and Gilman's objective to shed light on how the cosmopolitan as a concept over 250 years "turned into a global elite at the turn of the twenty-first century" (1). Through the close readings of multiple primary sources, the authors offer occasionally unexpected insight—from outsiders such as African American author W.E.B. Du Bois, then a graduate student in Berlin, who observed and described the minority complex of the Germans and applied it to the negative perception of the Jew as a cosmopolitan in his 1893 essay "The Present Condition of German Politics" (103). If cosmopolitanism is so present in today's multicultural societies—either these societies see themselves that way or do not—we might wonder whether this notion of cosmopolitanism, and the cosmopolitan as part of a "global elite" (1), ought to go beyond merely Jewish authors writing about cosmopolitanism. [...]would not a more universal approach be necessary to explain where contemporary Jewish cosmopolitanism differs for instance from a Turkish German author writing about cosmopolitanism?