Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (review)

This book makes a valuable contribution to the area of Holocaust Studies, and also to Migration, Diasporic, Gender, and modern Jewish Studies. It extends earlier efforts by Jack Nusan Porter and Helen Fein to develop a sociology of the Holocaust and genocide. Written from a sociological perspective (mainly by academic sociologists), most of the articles are infused with the idioms and sensibilities of post-modernism and cultural studies, and a concern with the analysis of discourse and the construction and uses of historical memory.

I found all of the articles, the major essays and the commentaries, informative and insightful. It should be noted that while there are references to Israel and Germany (no mention of Canada) the frame of reference is American, since the papers derived from an American conference and all but one of the contributors are based in American institutions.

In keeping with recent preoccupations (including my own research in the area), the book’s major focus is on the multidimensional and changing postwar impact of the Holocaust on societies, cultures, and identities. Key foci are consequences for survivors as immigrants to new lands, as Jews, and as minority groups, and the impact on various nations (the US, Germany, and Israel) and for humanity at large. It sheds less light on antecedents and the Holocaust period itself.

In terms of a sociological agenda, this volume is far from exhaustive. This is not criticism. It is simply that a full confrontation with the Holocaust in all its horror and mystery touches upon an enormous number of complex sociologically relevant topics, which cannot be covered in one volume.

One missing topic: the role of the Holocaust in the evolution of the postwar generic legal/human rights paradigm, beginning with the Nuremberg trials, issues of war criminality and genocide, jurisprudence on hate speech/free speech, and continuing right through debates on redress, restitution, and reconciliation. The rise of Nazism and the (inadequate?) response of actors such as the Weimar government or German and Western Jewry, and other states, are not dealt with in the volume. Neither is the actual wartime period, with the exception of a sociological analysis by Rachel Einwohner of the groups of resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

This is a shame, since it is this period which probes the depths and heights of the human condition. Conventional discussions of the actual Holocaust period itself usually break down the cast of characters into perpetrators, bystanders, victims, and (non-Jewish) rescuers. But even these four categories are too broad to capture the dramatic complexities of the event. For example, as Nechama Tec’s research has shown, even the rescuers comprised a mixed group of diverse backgrounds and motivations.

The volume begins with two essays by the editors, and the second is a particularly useful review of the existing social scientific literature on the Holocaust. Even Talcott Parsons opined on the issue, and in fact their review inadvertently suggests the field may not be as barren as the editors themselves lament.

The next section, “Jewish Identities in the Diaspora” features four essays dealing with the role of the Holocaust in shaping contemporary Jewish identity, and a response. Among these papers, Chaim Waxman analyzes the particular role of the Holocaust in shaping the identity of Orthodox American Jewry. Caryn Aviv and David Shneer cast a skeptical eye on the growing trend toward Jewish (Holocaust and Israel) travel and the “diaspora business.”

There is no doubt that the Holocaust has become an element in the arsenal of Jews seeking to stave off assimilation or mobilize Jews to face new anti-Semitic dangers, often expressed in attempts to delegitimize the existence of Israel, through bombs, boycotts, or intellectual musings. Sociologists studying these phenomena should resist the easy temptation to be hyper-critical, thereby dismissing very real processes of assimilation and the fact that Jews and Israel have, alas...