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American Jewish History 91.3-4 (2003) 439-467



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Post-World-War-II American Jewry and the Confrontation With Catastrophe

From the perspective of early-twenty-first-century American Jewish communal culture, few issues loom as large or carry as much valence in the performance of Jewish identity as the Holocaust, the horrific destruction of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis and the obliteration of their communities. That cataclysmic event has come by 2004 to play a pivotal role in the shaping of American Jewry's political and cultural agendas.

Jewish communities across the United States have created Holocaust memorials, large physical monuments, often set boldly in highly public places. They have lobbied to make the study of the Holocaust a part of the social studies curricula in their various states. Jewish educational institutions have created volumes of instructional material on how best to teach the Holocaust, producing guidelines, teachers' manuals, and textbooks. Jewish communities as organized bodies representing the panoply of institutions that comprise the communal infrastructure sponsor Holocaust remembrance rituals, replete with traditional and innovative liturgies and attended by public officials who come annually to express their solidarity with the Jewish people. Jewish organizations have developed informational packets that are distributed to schools, synagogues, and organizations to help communities remember. The memorial gatherings, as well as the organized pilgrimages to the sites of the Nazi death camps in Europe and newly written liturgical texts, have catapulted the Holocaust to the near top of the American Jewish repertoire of performance

American publishers, university presses and trade houses alike, fill their catalogues with scholarly analyses of the Holocaust. These books, whether focusing on the victims or the perpetrators, on the actual destruction or its aftermath, demonstrate the continued draw of the Holocaust and the degree to which the Holocaust has come to dominate discussions about "the Jews." In its 2003 Jewish Studies catalogue, for example, Indiana University Press offered nine "Forthcoming" works. Two of these treated some aspect of the Holocaust, while the section explicitly marked "Holocaust" highlighted twenty-one books. In the field of Bible, on the other hand, the same list described only eight titles.1 [End Page 439] Random House's 2004 "Cultural and Ethnic Studies" catalog, a listing of books geared for college course adoption, offered nineteen books in its Jewish Studies section. Of them, fourteen involved the Holocaust.2

In the realm of popular reading, the public's appetite for Holocaust subject matter has been stoked with works of various kinds geared to both children and adults, including survivor memoirs, poetry, and fiction. The Scholastic Book Club of October, 2003 offered a special "Holocaust Pack" to middle-school students. The "pack" consisted of three recent books—When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Katrina, and I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust—all of which dealt with "one of the darkest times in world history." The same brightly colored handout, distributed in classrooms around the country, placed among its "Must-Read" books Eleanor's Story: An American Girl in Hitler's Germany.3

Similarly, the scholarly world has enshrined the Holocaust primarily, although not exclusively, through the study of Jewish history. Scholarly symposia and conferences sponsored by Jewish Studies departments continuously highlight the Holocaust as a subject worthy of study. Jewish Studies departments as well as history and literature departments offer courses on the Holocaust and hire scholars specifically in Holocaust Studies. In 1997 , Clark University inaugurated its Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, a free-standing department in the university, dedicated to teaching about and fostering research on "the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and other genocides around the world."4

The United States Holocaust Museum, which opened in 1993 , standing astride the Mall in Washington, D.C., and placed prominently adjacent to the nation's sacred spaces—the Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the White House—has transformed the American landscape. Images of the Holocaust have infused American Jewish communal rhetoric. Rabbis, Jewish educators, journalists, leaders of the various...

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