We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962

Notes

391 Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. All Eyes Are on the . . . Literary Magazine, n.p., in American Jewish Archives (AJA), Hebrew Union College, collection 266, National Federation of Temple Youth, box 3, folder 2. 2. Leon Jick, “The Holocaust: Its Uses and Abuses in the American Public,” Yad Vashem Studies 14 (1981), pp. 308–9. 3. Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 4. Gerald Sorin, Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 217. 5. Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), pp. 1, 5. 6. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 333. 7. Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993), p. 7. See also Ruth K. Angress, afterword to Ilona Karmel, An Estate of Memory (New York: Feminist Press, 1969), p. 445. 8. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Rabb wrote broadly that “American Jews . . . along with everyone else, were fully engaged in ‘making it’ in a benign postwar America” (Lipset and Rabb, Jews and the New American Scene [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995], p. 117). 9. Edward Alexander, The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish Fate (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), p. 122. Susan Gubar contends that a “number of assimilated American Jews worrying that any attention to the disaster would bring further harm to Jewish people,” participated in a “highly effective . . . conspiracy . . . to nullify the Holocaust” (Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003], pp. 2–3). 10. Linda Gritz states with utter certainty that “for at least two decades, the Holocaust was a taboo subject, too raw for most to contemplate. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a proud moment . . . but it was a drop in the bucket compared with the magnitude of six million murdered.” Gritz, “Commemorating the Uprising: Challenges Throughout the History of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Observances,” Jewish Currents (March–April 2006), p. 24. Like writers from a leftist perspective, Gritz asserted with absolutely no evidence that “the leftwing organizations that publicly embraced the Uprising . . . were shunned by mainstream Jewish organizations as McCarthyism gripped the country. Against this backdrop, the path to memorializing the Holocaust was not clear” (p. 24). 392 Notes to the Introduction 11. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The Assault on Holocaust Memory,” in American Jewish Year Book: 2001 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2001), pp. 6, 9. 12. Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 179. 13. Lipset and Rabb, Jews and the New American Scene, p. 119. 14. Kirsten Fermaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957–1965 (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2006), p. 170. 15. Michael L. Morgan, “To Seize Memory: History and Identity in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought,” in Thinking About the Holocaust: After Half a Century, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 158. 16. According to Jacob Neusner, American Jews seized onto the idea of the Holocaust in 1967 as a direct reaction to the new realities in Israel. That new iteration of Judaism put the Holocaust and Israel into the center of spiritual life (Neusner, Death and Birth of Judaism: The Impact of Christianity, Secularism, and the Holocaust on Jewish Faith [New York: Basic Books, 1987]). 17. Sherry B. Ortner, New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 300, 309. 18. Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 7, 8. The word “subterranean” to describe postwar American Jewish engagements with the Holocaust surfaced repeatedly. See, for example, Eli Lederhendler, “On Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life: A Review,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2001), p. 163. 19. Judith Smith, Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 140. 20. Nathan Glazer, “Hansen’s Hypothesis and the Historical Experience of Generations ,” in American Immigrants and Their Generations: Studies and Commentaries on the Hansen Thesis After Fifty Years, ed. Peter Kvisto and Dag Blanck (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 109. 21. Tim Cole, Images of the...