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

Holocaust studies is a vibrant area of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry in the social sciences and humanities. Relative to other disciplines, however, sociology has been underrepresented in this field, leading some observers to speculate that sociology might even have a “Jewish problem.” In a recent essay, Burton Halpert laments that when he undertook graduate work in sociology in 1968, he had no idea that the Holocaust might be an appropriate subject of study for someone pursuing a career in sociology. Two decades later, Zygmunt Bauman noted sociologists’ continued neglect and failure to appreciate the Holocaust as an area relevant to some of the central concerns of the discipline. Since that time, many (though mostly Jewish) sociologists have heeded Bauman’s call for a scholarly engagement with the Holocaust. Judith Gerson and Diane Wolf ’s anthology, Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas, is a significant contribution to this effort.

Gerson and Wolf ’s book grew out of an international conference held at Rutgers University in 2001 and includes original contributions by some of the leading scholars in the field. Contained within are interesting empirical studies of neglected topics as well as incisive theoretical analysis of sociological issues. The editors argue that a comparative approach aimed at developing generalizations that apply to other social phenomena should guide sociological research on the Holocaust. As Gerson writes in a chapter she contributed on Holocaust memoirs, “Continued assumptions of uniqueness only offer to place the Holocaust outside full scholarly study and perpetuate a priori conclusions about distinctiveness” (p. 131). Thus the editors seek to avoid the ghettoization of “Holocaust studies as an area of inquiry onto itself ” (p. 6) and instead link Holocaust scholarship to broader disciplinary concerns with ethnicity and immigration, diasporas and transnationalism, and collective memory and identity.

Among the noteworthy empirical contributions to the book are studies of Jewish children who were hidden in Belgian convents during the war, the Warsaw ghetto uprising, wartime and postwar experiences of Holocaust survivors, German Jewish cattle dealers who settled in rural New York, dilemmas of Soviet refugees in Israel and the United States, the international Jewish “diaspora business” that utilizes tourism to inculcate Jewish identity and pro-Israel sentiments, and postwar exchanges among German intellectuals over the question of collective guilt. From these and other contributions to the book we gain greater appreciation of the complexity of the Jewish experience—of Jewish identity as not only a social construction but a heterogeneous phenomenon, of Jews who mistreat or hold negative attitudes toward other Jews, of the conflict between Israel and the United States as the center of Jewish culture and identity, and of cultural boundaries that construct varying accounts of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders of the Holocaust.

Much of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust deals with the question of collective memory as a process by which the past is (re)interpreted in terms of ongoing interests and with what Marianne Hirsch calls post-memory, that is, memory characterized by “generational distance” that lacks “deep personal connection” to an historical event. Gerson and Wolf point out that most of us experience the Holocaust “filtered through a variety of sources including records and documents, memoirs and narratives of the destruction written and complied by survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders, and contemporary research, textual accounts, and artistic portrayals of the Holocaust” (p. 6). This memory, as Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider observe in their contribution to the book, reflects a complex mix of local and national memories that have led to the emergence of nation-transcending or cosmopolitan memories that now constitute “a moral touchstone of good and evil and . . . the standard reference point for a wide range of past injustices” (p. 275).

In the second-to-last essay of the book, Martin Oppenheimer astutely observes that the bulk of recent sociological work has focused on postwar issues and has neglected the very “real” story of Nazism...