Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum - Hardcover

Linenthal, Edward T.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670860670 ISBN 13: 9780670860678

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1995

Synopsis

A chronicle of the fifteen-year fight to build the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

About this title

About the Author:

Edward T. Linenthal is professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. He is the author of The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory and Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields.

From Booklist:

President Carter created the President's Commission on the Holocaust in 1978. It then took 15 years of bitter and emotional debate to design and build the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Linenthal, author of Sacred Grounds: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991), chronicles all that went on during those painful and acrimonious years as Holocaust survivors, politicians, museum professionals, historians, and architects struggled to define "the boundaries of Holocaust memory." Linenthal deftly summarizes all the complex issues that had to be resolved. Jews believed that they should be the focus, but members of other groups victimized by the Holocaust demanded equal representation. Some felt the memorial should be in New York; others fretted over whether Washington, D.C., was an appropriate location. And what an agonizing task it was to create a memorial that both eulogized and educated without simplifying, sensationalizing, or offending. Linenthal portrays major players, including Elie Wiesel, Yaffa Eliach, and architect James Ingo Freed, who was finally able to visualize a building "expressive of the event" after traveling to Auschwitz. A sobering, yet fascinating, testament to the value of preserving memories with respect and creativity. Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0670860670
• ISBN 13: 9780670860678
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352