We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History, 15) - Softcover

Diner, Hasia R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814721222 ISBN 13: 9780814721223

Publisher: NYU Press, 2010

Synopsis

Winner of the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies
Recipient of the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Humanities-Intellectual & Cultural History
It has become an accepted truth: after World War II, American Jews chose to be silent about the mass murder of millions of their European brothers and sisters at the hands of the Nazis.
In this compelling work, Hasia R. Diner shows the assumption of silence to be categorically false. Uncovering a rich and incredibly varied trove of remembrances—in song, literature, liturgy, public display, political activism, and hundreds of other forms—We Remember with Reverence and Love shows that publicly memorializing those who died in the Holocaust arose from a deep and powerful element of Jewish life in postwar America. Not only does she marshal enough evidence to dismantle the idea of American Jewish “forgetfulness,” she brings to life the moving and manifold ways that this widely diverse group paid tribute to the tragedy.
Diner also offers a compelling new perspective on the 1960s and its potent legacy, by revealing how our typical understanding of the postwar years emerged from the cauldron of cultural divisions and campus battles a generation later. The student activists and “new Jews” of the 1960s who, in rebelling against the American Jewish world they had grown up in “a world of remarkable affluence and broadening cultural possibilities” created a flawed portrait of what their parents had, or rather, had not, done in the postwar years. This distorted legacy has been transformed by two generations of scholars, writers, rabbis, and Jewish community leaders into a taken-for-granted truth.

About this title

About the Author:

Hasia Diner is Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. She is the author of the award-winning We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (NYU Press, 2009).

Review:

"Diner hurls a passionate, well-delineated attack on the conventional view that postwar Jews and survivors wanted to forget the Holocaust rather than memorialize the tragedy. . . . A work of towering research and conviction that will surely enliven academic debates for years to come." (Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review)

"Diner refutes the conventional wisdom that the American Jewish community ignored, or actively resisted, discussing the Holocaust until the 1960s. She makes a convincing case that in the post-1945 era American Jews, through their communal and religious institutions, assiduously grappled with the question of how to understand and commemorate the Holocaust. . . . An important contribution to American Jewish historiography." (Library Journal)

"In the last hundred pages of her book, Diner turns to other factors that led to more widespread memorialization of Holocaust victims and discusses the evolution of Holocaust commemoration in the United States. She commands enormous knowledge and her observations are astute." (Holocaust and Genocide Studies)

"Diner persuasively and methodically demonstrates that American Jews established a strong interest in the genocide of European Jewry as early as the waning months of the war." (American Jewish Archives Journal)

"A lively and controversial book, it is sure to spark debate and conversation for years to come." (Jewish Book World)

"Fundamentally challenges the now widespread view that before the 1960s American Jewry showed little interest in the Holocaust. With a wealth of fascinating documentation, We Remember with Reverence and Love provides a moving account of the early efforts in the U.S. to document, commemorate, and memorialize the tragic fate of the Jews during the Second World War." (Antony Polonsky,Brandeis University)

"Uncovers a rich and varied trove of remembrances in song, literature, liturgy, public display, and hundreds of other forms." (New Jersey Jewish News)

"The book details how, nationwide, Jews in those years memorialized the victims, documented the catastrophe, mobilized for survivors, sought justice from Germany, and used the Holocaust both to advance a political agenda and to build a Jewish future in America." (Forward)

"A powerful book worthy of its important subject. Diner revises our understanding of the critical postwar decades when American Jews incorporated bitter memories of the murder of European Jews into their collective consciousness." (Deborah Dash Moore,author of GI Jews)

"This research should convince even the most recalcitrant that American Jewry did care far beyond the mundane purposes to which some misused the Holocaust. . . . No course on the postwar period in American Jewish history can afford to ignore it." (The Journal of American History)

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0814721222
• ISBN 13: 9780814721223
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 540