We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (review)

In We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962, Hasia Diner thoroughly discredits the theory of the "myth of silence" that she documents has governed academic writings on the Holocaust since the mid 1960s. The "Myth of Silence" refers to the theories of Peter Novick, Norman Finkelstein, and others who have written that in the period right after World War II the Holocaust meant very little to Americans. Americans suffered from a "collective amnesia" which blocked all public discussion of the Holocaust, according to these writers. The Holocaust did not find a place in Jewish communal life, these theories stated, until the American Jewish community changed in response to the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s, the Six Day War in 1967, and the increasing prominence of the State of Israel.

But in fact, through meticulous documentation and examination of the archives of Jewish organizations, camps, synagogues, schools, and publications, Diner shows that the Jewish community's postwar response to the Holocaust created a "vast, unorganized spontaneous project that sought to keep alive the image of Europe's murdered Jews" (p. 11). This project consisted of three parts: memorials of words, images, and the arts; rhetoric in the American political arena using the deaths of the six million to address the needs of the survivors and punish the perpetrators; and Holocaust references to advance causes important to the Jewish community in order to strengthen American Jewish life and culture. The project was amorphous, no one organization controlling its design and output and no one religious body dictating its content. It is Diner's contention that the activities of this period that sought to commemorate the events of the Holocaust and the six million dead led to the better organized, better funded, and bigger projects of the last half of the twentieth century.

In example after example, the book describes the extent and breadth of the vast undertaking that occurred after the war. The memorials consisted of such items as small physical markers or small displays of religious articles in synagogues and cemeteries in contrast to the large well-funded exhibits and museums of the latter half of the century or of yizker bikhurs (memorial books) focusing on specific communities that Diner calls "symbolic tombstones." Artistic works spanned the creative spectrum from music to drama to dance. Articles in books, magazines, newspapers, scholarly journals, and other venues shared insights about the Holocaust not only within the Jewish community but with the broader American community as well. The in-depth documentation that We Remember provides supports Diner's conclusion that the later scholars ignored the grassroots nature of the "vibrant and variegated memorial repertoire" that commemorated the Holocaust in the immediate postwar period. The extent of the commemoration efforts, revealed in this book for the first time in careful detail, stands, in her words, as clear evidence of the centrality of the Holocaust in the postwar Jewish communal culture.

However, the question arises while examining this documentation as to why the myth of silence gained such a stronghold in the minds of scholars and of survivors and their children. What happened to cause scholars to disregard or ignore all that occurred in the public arena from 1945 to the early 1960s? Diner attributes this situation to several factors. Later scholars focused on the relatively few articles of the period that criticized the commemoration efforts. Moreover, Diner thinks that the mammoth size of the Holocaust commemorations in the second half of the twentieth century completely overshadowed what went before. It also did not fit in with the new historical scholarship that stated that the postwar Jews did not want to appear as victims. This scholarship postulated that postwar Jews wanted to buy into the white suburban middle class society, and that it was not until the...