The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945–1960

The Holocaust in American Life

Writing the History of Representations Between 1939 and 1945, many things happened to vast numbers of diverse and dispersed people. To talk in everyday life about all of them requires capacious words, representations which develop as events recede and gain their meaning only with the passage of time. An American soldier in 1944 might have described himself as storming the beaches of France or fighting in the outskirts of Caen. As a veteran twenty years later, he could say he fought in World War II. Peter Novick understands the centrality of representations in historical inquiry (pp. 220-1; cf. pp. 66, 68, 74). Collecting in one phrase an enormous mass of horrible events, 'the Holocaust' is such a representation. Novick boldly asserts ' "the Holocaust", as we speak of it today, was largely a retrospective construction, something that would not have been recognizable to most people at the time' (p. 20; cf. pp. 59, 116). This is the historical fact that he tackles in The Holocaust in American Life. The tone of this book is generally commensurate with its large ambitions. Bold and occasionally pugnacious debunker, Novick writes like somebody who wants to call a spade a spade. Nevertheless, his text is persistently punctuated by hesitations (pp. 166, 176, 183, 226, 232, 233, 257). He seems wary of hubris. He wants the reader to know that he knows when his way is blocked. Some barriers to historiography are unavoidable: documents are missing, witnesses are dead. Other impediments arise from the way the historian sets to the task. Every inquiry constitutes both an 'object' and its own peculiar impasse. I will argue thet Novick's project is blocked by the way he has chosen to investigate 'the Holocaust in American life'. To orient the discussion, consider that Americans today often use the word 'Holocaust' without clear reference to the

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2003

Holocaust Studies, 2005

The American Jewish Archives Journal, 2022

Reviews volume lxxiv. 2022. numbers 1&2 141 Herzl, with a town named after him and a giant sketch of his head on its water tower. It is to tell a messier story of a complex human beinga human being whose life seems so particular and unusual and yet has lessons for a broader understanding of humans. It is also to suggest that a messier story, including attention to embodiment as a central part of that story, might be a new way to tell the stories of iconic thinkers and writers (221). Like the work of brilliant writer and theorist Saidiya Hartman, whose concept of critical fabulation has revolutionized how African American history is written, Imhoff's work on Jesse Sampter offers a radical methodology for writing an embodied Jewish history that is attendant to the messier story of Jewish lives, iconic or not.

Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 27, 3 , 2013

This article presupposes that historical research on its own cannot aspire to constitute the pinnacle of “understanding” of the Holocaust and to offer a sufficiently broad basis for grappling with its philosophical significance. Questions concerning divine and human justification, the feasibility of human culture and education in the wake of and in the face of the Holocaust, and what we should learn from the memory of the Holocaust and turn into a component of our lives, are not only the battlegrounds of historians, but also of thinkers and writers, artists and public leaders, and educators, theologians, and social leading figures. Questions of theodicy as well as those of the justification of humankind, culture, and religion are universal, above all, and only as such are they also uniquely "Jewish." The Holocaust obliges the Jew to confront the questions that arise from its memory from a dual perspective: that of the Jewish Holocaust survivor and that of a member of the human race that perpetrated and allowed this murder to happen. All Jews living after the Holocaust, to the end of time, are, in some respect, Holocaust survivors. Still, individual Jews also belong to the greater human race that executed and enabled the Holocaust and that must grapple with the fact that, from this point onward, the act of “Holocaust” is part of the reserve of possible human behavior. Every individual is obliged, therefore, to be aware of the fact that human beings are liable to act in this horrible way, that racial hatred can descend into such chasms, and that murderous totalitarianism is capable of paralyzing virtually all resistance.

The often-unspoken idea that the Holocaust was a unique event has become a key feature of American Jewish identity. As a result, universalizing the Holocaust is a complicated matter for those who feel Jewish "ownership" of the event must remain paramount.This essay explores the Holocaust as part of American history and its implications for contemporary American Jewish identity from three vantage points: the institutionalization of the Holocaust as part of American history and as a Jewish "event" in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Holocaust as seen through the lens of various recent readings of The Diary of Anne Frank, and the image of the Holocaust in American popular culture. Through these three lenses I suggest that the Holocaust will remain an important source of identity, but in order for it to do so, it must become a broader and more complex model for Jewish survival and for Jewish flourishing in an increasingly globalized world.

Contemporary Jewry, 1995

CONTEMPORARY JEWRY the lewish community as assimilating. On the contrary, the latter are, in the main, what SHare ehartcterized as "lurvivaligg," that is, those who personally hope for the ultimate mrvival of the Jewish community, even as they are skeptical of the community's ability to do m.