America American Jews And The Holocaust

This volume incorporates studies of the persecution of the Jews in Germany, the respective responses of the German-American Press and the American-Jewish Press during the emergence of Nazism, and the subsequent issues of rescue during the holocaust and policies towards the displaced.

The Jewish Role in American Life examines the complex relationship between Jews and the United States. Jews have been instrumental in shaping American culture and Jewish culture and religion have likewise been profoundly recast in the United States, especially in the period following World War II.

This edited collection of more than one hundred primary sources from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s--including newspaper and magazine articles, popular culture materials, and government records--reveals how Americans debated their responsibility to respond to Nazism. It includes valuable resources for students and historians seeking to shed light on this dark era in world history.

Prize-winning historian Peter Novick illuminates the reasons Americans ignored the Holocaust for so long -- how dwelling on German crimes interfered with Cold War mobilization; how American Jews, not wanting to be thought of as victims, avoided the subject. He explores in absorbing detail the decisions that later moved the Holocaust to the center of American life: Jewish leaders invoking its memory to muster support for Israel and to come out on top in a sordid competition over what group had suffered most; politicians using it to score points with Jewish voters. With insight and sensitivity, Novick raises searching questions about these developments. Have American Jews, by making the Holocaust the emblematic Jewish experience, given Hitler a posthumous victory, tacitly endorsing his definition of Jews as despised pariahs? Does the Holocaust really teach useful lessons and sensitize us to atrocities, or, by making the Holocaust the measure, does it make lesser crimes seem "not so bad"? What are we to make of the fact that while Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars for museums recording a European crime, there is no museum of American slavery?

The Holocaust took place far from the United States and involved few Americans, yet rather than receding, this event has assumed a greater significance in the American consciousness with the passage of time. As a window into the process whereby the Holocaust has been appropriated in American culture, Hollywood movies are particularly luminous. Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America examines reactions to three films: Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), The Pawnbroker (1965), and Schindler�s List (1992), and considers what those reactions reveal about the place of the Holocaust in the American mind, and how those films have shaped the popular perception of the Holocaust. It also considers the difference in the reception of the two earlier films when they first appeared in the 1960s and retrospective evaluations of them from closer to our own times. Alan Mintz also addresses the question of how Americans will shape the memory of the Holocaust in the future, concluding with observations on the possibilities and limitations of what is emerging as the major resource for the shaping of Holocaust memory�videotaped survivor testimony. Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America examines some of the influences behind the broad and deep changes in American consciousness and the social forces that permitted the Holocaust to move from the margins to the center of American discourse.

This edited collection of more than one hundred primary sources from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s--including newspaper and magazine articles, popular culture materials, and government records--reveals how Americans debated their responsibility to respond to Nazism. It includes valuable resources for students and historians seeking to shed light on this dark era in world history.

The reemergence of a united Germany as a dominant power in Europe has increased even more it's importance as a major political ally and trade partner of the United States, despite the misgivings of some U.S. citizens. Ambiguous Relations addresses for the first time the complex relationships between American Jews and Germany over the fifty years following the end of World War II, and examines American Jewry's' ambiguous attitude toward Germany that continues despite sociological and generational changes within the community. Shlomo Shafir recounts attempts by American Jews to influence U.S. policy toward Germany after the ware and traces these efforts through President Reagan's infamous visit to Bitburg and beyond. He shows how Jewish demands for justice were hampered not only by America's changing attitude toward West Germany as a postwar European power but also by the distraction of anti-communist hysteria in this country. In evaluating the impact of Jewish pressure on American public opinion and on the West German government, Shafir discusses the rationales and strategies of Jewish communal and religious groups, legislators, and intellectuals, as well as the rise of Holocaust consciousness and the roles of Israel and surviving German Jewish communities. He also describes the efforts of German diplomats to assuage American Jewish hostility and relates how the American Jewish community has been able to influence German soul-searching regarding their historical responsibility and even successfully intervened to bring war criminals to trial. Based on extensive archival research in Germany, Israel, and the Unities States, Ambiguous Relations in the first book to examine this tenuous situation in such depth. It is a comprehensive account of recent history that comes to groups with emotional and political reality.

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 a compelling work sure to draw fire from academics and pundits alike, Hasia R. Diner shows this assumption of silence to be categorically false.