We Remember With Reverence And Love

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.

Refutes the widespread belief that American Jews refused to discuss the Holocaust until the 1960s, presenting evidence of the ways in which it was memorialized before that era through liturgy, history books, and public ceremonies.

The year was 1932. At age fourteen Robert Beir’s journey through life changed irrevocably when a classmate called him a “dirty Jew.” Suddenly Beir encountered the belligerent poison of anti-Semitism. The safe confines of his upbringing had been violated. The pain that he felt at that moment was far more hurtful than any blow. Its memory would last a lifetime. Beir’s experiences with anti-Semitism served as a microcosm for the anti-Semitism among the majority of Americans. That year, a politician named Franklin Delano Roosevelt ascended to the presidency. Over the next twelve years, he became a scion of optimism and carried a refreshing, unbridled confidence in a nation previously mired in fear and deeply depressed. His policies and ethics saved the capitalist system. His strong leadership and unwavering faith helped to defeat Hitler. The Jews of America revered President Roosevelt. To a young Robert Beir, Roosevelt was an American hero. In mid-life, however, Beir experienced a conflict. New research was questioning Roosevelt’s record regarding the Holocaust. He felt compelled to embark on a historian’s quest, asking only the toughest questions of his childhood hero, including: • How much did President Roosevelt know about the Holocaust? • What could Roosevelt have done? • Why wasn’t there an urgent rescue effort? In answering these questions and others, Robert Beir has done a masterful job. This book is graphically written, well-researched, and provocative. The portrait depicted of a man he once thought to be morally incorruptible amidst a circumstance of moral bankruptcy is truly unforgettable.

Survivor Transitional Narratives of Nazi-Era Destruction: The Second Liberation examines the historical circumstances that gave rise in the 1960s to the first cohort of Nazi-era survivors who massed a public campaign focusing on remembrance of Nazi racial crimes. The survivors' decision to engage and disquiet a public audience occurred against the backdrop of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and the West German debate over the enforcement of statutory limitations for prosecuting former Nazis. Dennis B. Klein focuses on the accounts of three survivors: Jean Améry, an Austrian ex-patriot who joined the Belgian Resistance during the war, Vladimir Jankélévitch, a member of the French Resistance, and Simon Wiesenthal, who dedicated his life after the war to investigating Nazi crimes. As Klein argues, their accounts, in addition to acting as a reminder of Nazi-era endemic criminality, express a longing for human fellowshipThis contextual and interdisciplinary interpretation illustrates the explanatory significance of contemporary events and individual responses to them in shaping the memory and legacy of Nazi-era destruction. It is essential reading for students and scholars of the Nazi era and its legacy, genocide studies, Jewish Studies, and the history of emotions.

Between the late 1700s and the 1920s, nearly one-third of the world’s Jews emigrated to new lands. Crossing borders and often oceans, they followed paths paved by intrepid peddlers who preceded them. This book is the first to tell the remarkable story of the Jewish men who put packs on their backs and traveled forth, house to house, farm to farm, mining camp to mining camp, to sell their goods to peoples across the world. Persistent and resourceful, these peddlers propelled a mass migration of Jewish families out of central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to destinations as far-flung as the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America. Hasia Diner tells the story of millions of discontented young Jewish men who sought opportunity abroad, leaving parents, wives, and sweethearts behind. Wherever they went, they learned unfamiliar languages and customs, endured loneliness, battled the elements, and proffered goods from the metropolis to people of the hinterlands. In the Irish Midlands, the Adirondacks of New York, the mining camps of New South Wales, and so many other places, these traveling men brought change—to themselves and the families who later followed, to the women whose homes and communities they entered, and ultimately to the geography of Jewish history.

As Christians, we have real hope in Jesus that we have been called to share with others. But how we share that hope makes a difference. In a world that rejects everything we believe, we face a dilemma: how do we walk closely with God without caving in to pressure or alienating those we want to reach? In this six-session video Bible study, Chris Hodges looks at the lives of both Daniel and Jesus, showing how we can stand for our biblical beliefs without being hostile or insulting to others. We can stand up for God's truth in a morally corrupt culture–while still loving others–because the goal is never about winning the argument but about winning hearts. As Jesus demonstrated, when we connect with others before we correct them, we can handle the hard questions without compromising God's grace or truth. Chris offers fresh insights and practical ideas to encourage Christians struggling with their cultural reality to hold God's standards high and to keep his grace deep–just as Jesus did, and just as his followers today are called to do. The Daniel Dilemma Study Guide includes video discussion questions, Bible exploration, and personal study and reflection materials for in-between sessions. Sessions include: In the World but Not of It Identity Theft You Are What You Worship Who's the Boss? Divided, Distracted, and Disturbed What the World Needs Now Designed for use with the Daniel Dilemma Video Study (sold separately).

The 1950s and early 1960s have not traditionally been viewed as a particularly creative era in American Jewish life. On the contrary, these years have been painted as a period of inactivity and Americanization. As if exhausted by the traumas of World War II, the American Jewish community took a rest until suddenly reawakened by the 1967 Six-Day War and its implications for world Jewry. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that previous assumptions about the early silence of American Jewry with regard to the Holocaust were exaggerated. And while historians have expanded their borders and definitions to encompass the postwar decades, scholars from other disciplines have been paying increasing attention to the unique literary, photographic, artistic, dramatic, political, and other cultural creations of this period and the ways in which they hearken back to not only the Holocaust itself but also to images of prewar Eastern Europe. Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades brings together scholars of literature, art, history, ethnography, and related fields to examine how the American Jewish community in the post-Holocaust era was shaped by its encounter with literary relics, living refugees, and other cultural productions which grew out of an encounter with Eastern European Jewish life from the pre-Holocaust era. In particular, editors Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen are interested in three different narratives and their occasional intersections. The first narrative is the real, hands-on interaction between American Jews and European Jewish refugees and how the two groups influenced one another. Second were the imaginative reconstructions of a wartime or prewar Jewish world to meet the needs of a postwar American Jewish audience. Third is the narrative in which the Holocaust was mobilized to justify postwar political and philanthropic activism. Reconstructing the Old Country will contribute to the growing scholarly conversation about the postwar years in a variety of fields. Scholars and students of American Jewish history and literature in particular will appreciate this internationally focused scholarship on the continuing reverberations of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Explore how American conditions and Jewish circumstances collided in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries In this new book award-winning author Hasia R. Diner explores the issues behind why European Jews overwhelmingly chose to move to the United States between the 1820s and 1920s. Unlike books that tend to romanticize American freedom as the force behind this period of migration or that tend to focus on Jewish contributions to America or that concentrate on how Jewish traditions of literacy and self-help made it possible for them to succeed, Diner instead focuses on aspects of American life and history that made it the preferred destination for 90 percent of European Jews. Features: Examination of the realities of race, immigration, color, money, economic development, politics, and religion in America Exploration of an America agenda that sought out white immigrants to help stoke economic development and that valued religion as a force for morality