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1 Introduction Deeds and Words T H E J E W I S H T E E N AG E R S who spent the summer of 1956 at the Reform movement’s Camp Institute in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, edited a literary magazine, a repository of their fond memories of a summer well spent. They could not possibly have known, as they cobbled together All Eyes Are on the . . . Literary Magazine—made up of mimeographed short stories, poems, humorous vignettes of camp life, mixed in with some serious pieces which speculated on the religious and cultural programs that they had just experienced—that, a half-century later, their camp yearbook would be used to show how American Jews went about the process, text by text, artifact by artifact, and act by act, of creating a communal culture that hallowed the memory of the six million Jews who perished in Europe during the Holocaust. Neither could they imagine that their deeds and words would play a role in undermining a widely accepted paradigm about post– World War II American Jews and the Holocaust, one which asserted that, on the whole, they remained silent about that catastrophe which had so recently befallen their people. But their naive and youthful words show how profoundly the destruction of one-third of the Jewish people at the hands of the Germans infused the rhetoric and action of the Jews of America who, despite their distance in space and time from the tragedy, lived in its shadow. One camper, Sharon Feinman, said it most clearly as she focused in her piece on the summer’s theme, “Naaseh v’nishma” [we will do and we will hear], the words drawn from Exodus, declaimed by the Israelites at Mt. Sinai as they accepted the Ten Commandments. In summarizing what she learned during those weeks away from home, she demonstrated how American Jews in the post–World War II period engaged with the horrendous events that had recently engulfed their people in Europe. Her brief essay’s determined prose reflected the widespread concern of the Jews of the United States with the Holocaust, with their insistence that it be remembered and their understanding that it affected their lives. 2 Introduction “Everywhere,” she wrote, wherever “Jews wandered, they established centers of learning in which the deed and word were enshrined in the life of the people. The waves of persecution beat against us but our spirit remained unbroken.” That summer at Camp Institute, the teenagers contemplated the long chain of Jewish history and pondered “how today in the twentieth century, our people still affirm Naaseh v’nishma.” During “the dark reign of terror when Hitler and the Nazis ruled Germany and plunged the world into a catastrophic war, when the people who called themselves the ‘master race’ murdered six million Jews,” they had perpetrated “the worst slaughter in the history of mankind.” The Reform youngsters had learned, however, that even amid this horror, “the light of ‘Naaseh v’nishma’ burned mightily. As the world watched, a miracle came to pass. Out of the bitter struggle, and against overwhelming odds, the nation of Israel was born.”1 These words of a Jewish high school student encapsulated much about how American Jews after the war integrated the Holocaust into their communal lives. Jewish youngsters attending left-wing Zionist camps in California, Workmen’s Circle Yiddish schools in the Bronx, or Orthodox Jewish day schools in Brooklyn would have recognized themselves in Feinman ’s essay. They would have articulated her feelings somewhat differently, each reflecting sentiments particular to their ideas as to the meaning of Jewish culture, but they would have, as she did, see this as a tragedy of “our people.” So, too, would the adults who attended religious services, went to lectures in Jewish community centers, read the Jewish press, and participated in the public life of postwar American Jewry. Metaphorically along with Sharon Feinman, America’s Jews participated in building a culture that gave the Holocaust a prominent place. When they gathered in their myriad Jewish spaces and when they faced the larger American public, they invoked the all-too-horrendous devastation that had taken place in Europe. These American Jewish women and men, adults and young people, posed the catastrophic event in both deeply Jewish and broadly universal terms. Feinman’s essay—just like the books and articles, sermons and literary works, liturgies and letters to public officials written by so many of the adults who ran Jewish institutions, staffed...

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