We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust (review)

For several years the debate over postwar responses to the Jewish catastrophe has simply recycled the same data, with partisans declaring that the cup is either half empty or half full depending on their point of view. Now, thanks to the mountain of evidence she has excavated, Hasia Diner has landed a knockout punch on those who assert that after 1945 American Jews were silent about the fate that befell the Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe, preferring to forget about it while busily integrating into American society and enjoying the postwar boom.

This is not to say that Diner has answered all the questions hanging over the manner in which American Jews during the 1950s treated recent Jewish history. But within the terms of her inquiry it is hard to see how it would be possible to do a fuller or a better job. Her book will change the landscape of postwar American Jewish history irrevocably; the textbooks will have to be rewritten.

Diner’s methodology is simplicity itself: she has gone back to the sources. She has waded through countless sermons and liturgies written to commemorate the murdered Jews of Europe. She has looked at the record of meetings organized by an array of Jewish organizations to see how their leaders and members reflected on the war years. She has examined every major national periodical, and many minor local ones, serving American Jews. She has gone from the assiduous collators of the Jewish Book Annual to the history books, novels, books for children, textbooks, prayer books and anything else that touched on the recent genocide. She has also listened to recordings of radio broadcasts and tracked down TV programs that handled the subject. The weight of evidence is crushing. If her narrative has one stylistic weakness it is due to the unavoidable necessity of repeating the same thing over and over again.

Even before the war had ended American Jews began commemorating their brethren slaughtered in Europe. Each section of the community did so according to its own particular traditions. The non-Orthodox were most able to draft new prayers or adapt old ones; secular Jews, especially in the Jewish labor movement, quickly established dates and patterns for memorial meetings. Religious and nonreligious sentiments converged on Passover as a key time in the Jewish calendar for remembrance because it overlapped with the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. During the 1950s, Rabbi Rufus Learsi’s memorial haggadah was distributed to over 10,000 communal organizations and printed annually in over thirty Jewish periodicals. Dozens of Torah scrolls from destroyed communities in Europe were brought to the United States and distributed to congregations that made their reception and display a focal point for memorial activity.

Contrary to the notion that little was written or published about the genocide, Jewish institutions launched research projects, collected material, and built up libraries. YIVO led the way, but the Institute for Jewish Affairs and the American Jewish Committee all contributed to a wave of publications. The Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee channelled funds to survivor historians in Europe whose research fed back into public awareness in America. Within just a few years reviewers in Jewish Social Studies, notably Philip Friedman and Koppel Pinson, were bemoaning the sheer volume of historical works on the Nazi period. There was certainly no inhibition against exploring the subject.

American Jews raised prodigious amounts of money for the survivors and sent aid of all kinds, including rabbis and social workers (such as Pinson). In campaigning for the improvement of conditions in displaced persons camps and struggling to enlarge the quotas for immigration to the U.S., they constantly invoked recent horrors. Their incessant campaign against British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and for the Zionist cause unhesitatingly drew on sympathy for Jews as the survivors of Nazi...