Hasia Diner is a historian who believes that things actually happened in history. She is also comprehensive, indeed dogged in her research, which her oeuvre amply demonstrates. Diner, who teaches history at New York University, made a major contribution with her superb “A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), which articulated for many of us a vocabulary for understanding mid-19th century American Jewish history. In her latest work, “We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945-1962” — also an assiduously researched book — Diner tackles the question of consciousness of the Holocaust in America. Diner’s mission is to explode the eponymous “myth” that there was only a gradual evolution of Holocaust consciousness. Diner asserts that much of postwar American Jewish history and public affairs needs to be understood in the context of the Holocaust. There was no “silence” about the Holocaust — far from it. Diner avers that discussion, programming, and indeed activism of and about the Holocaust were the reality from early on, right after World War II.
The author bombards us with data in support of her thesis. Holocaust observances, memorials, programs, school curricula, survivors’ gatherings, literature both serious and popular — all and more are catalogued by Diner in her effort to demonstrate not only that people knew about the Holocaust, but that the Holocaust had come immediately to centrality in American Jewish life.
Diner’s view is, on its face, plausible. The activities she documents did take place. There is much of interest, and of value, in Diner’s catalogue. But the reality is that whatever memorials and other programs took place, overall these were marginal to the core agendas of American Jews, both individually and as a community.
Why this notion is so, is a matter of debate. On the one hand, there was the powerful psychological dynamic of many survivors who were reluctant to talk about the past. At the same time, there was an American Jewish community that — in some of the most shameful and shabby episodes of our history — in many cases treated the survivors with contempt. When survivor groups in the early 1960s went around to synagogues in New York, hat in hand, for a place to hold their first commemorations, they were turned away at the door. (It was Temple Emanuel that in 1967, after the survivors had held two commemorations at Carnegie Hall, hosted the first communal synagogue-based Holocaust commemoration in New York.)
More important was the nature of the American Jewish communal agenda during the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. The priorities on the national agenda moved from antisemitism — absolutely regnant until the mid-1950s — to civil rights, which was the central issue to American Jewish groups until the mid-1960s. In the mid-1960s two things happened that irrevocably changed the nature of the Jewish communal agenda in America: the beginnings of the Soviet Jewry movement in the United States in 1963, and the Six-Day War in 1967. The most important result of the 1967 war was that for the first time, Israel was absolutely front-and-center as a priority for American Jews and Jewish organizations.
From policymakers to professional historians to community members, many had thought that the 1960 Eichmann trial in Israel would generate American Jewish consciousness of the Holocaust. But this trial happened in Israel, not in the United States. It was the Six-Day War, with the specter of another Holocaust in the days and weeks prior to the conflict, which in the view of many triggered for the first time consciousness of the Holocaust. Many analysts maintain that it was not the Six-Day War but the screening in 1978 of Gerald Greene’s landmark television series Holocaust that was the key. Whichever is the case, the Holocaust was not in the forefront of the Jewish personal or organizational mind until relatively late.
Part of the problem is that Diner falls into the trap that has ensnared many a scholar of the American Jewish experience who addresses issues of public policy as processed by Jewish communal organizations. Historians are rarely sure-footed when it comes to the organizational dynamics of the American Jewish community. Examples abound: The “American Jewish Year Book” is pretty much the document of record for Diner when it comes to American Jewish affairs, fair enough. The Year Book is a most important resource; but more telling in terms of what was on the Jewish communal agenda was the annual “Joint Program Plan” of the National Community Relations Advisory Council. This latter was the contemporary document of record when it came to what Jewish groups were thinking about and doing in public affairs, but is overlooked by Diner.
Likewise, Diner overstates the “swastika epidemic” of the late 1950s in terms of its impact on survivors’ activism. “The survivors shook up the American Jewish communal framework” over American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell and swastika daubing? That statement is hardly the case. And Diner would have it that the Holocaust was the raison d’etre for the respected Orthodox journal Tradition getting off the ground in 1958. Not true: Tradition was an important part of the warp and weft of an American Orthodoxy that was shaping its own intellectual and religious contours at that time; the Holocaust was, at most, a minor factor in the genesis of the journal.
There are other missteps in “We Remember with Reverence and Love.” It is deeply troubling that Diner lumps together Norman Finkelstein and Peter Novick, historians who assert the thesis of American Jewish Holocaust avoidance. Both are fierce critics of the American Jewish establishment, especially with respect to processing the Holocaust; but it does her scholarship a disservice to talk about these two in the same breath. Whatever one thinks of Novick’s conclusions, agree or not — and I have serious questions about his views on Jewish organizations cynically manipulating the Holocaust — Novick is a serious historian who, in his “The Holocaust in American Life,” did truly amazing archival research. Finkelstein, by contrast, is simply out to “get” the Jewish organizational establishment by attacking the use of the Holocaust as a means of rationalizing the abuses of the State of Israel, which Finkelstein detests.
Having said these things, Diner is right on the mark in her discussion of the landmark “Studies in Prejudice,” commissioned in the late 1940s as a series of studies, published as books by the American Jewish Committee. These included a number of watershed volumes, which are duly noted by Diner, although she inexplicably fails to note the most important work in the series, the classic “The Authoritarian Personality.” The AJCommittee was responding to the potential of an authoritarian threat in the United States, and concluded that people who are anti-Jews will be anti-other groups. But the AJCommittee research program was not, as Diner would have it, a vehicle “to advance its liberal agenda” — unhelpfully imputing ulterior motives — but for establishing strategic and tactical guidelines for combating prejudice in this country.
“We Remember with Reverence and Love” is a treasure trove of reproductions of posters, flyers and handbills, advertisements, cartoons, sheet music and other early postwar popular-culture artifacts. These memorabilia (with their helpful descriptive captions) are invaluable resources. And Diner’s long chapter on Germany and Germans in the post-war era is splendid. Both the data in this chapter, and the analysis about Germany in the postwar era that flows from those data, will serve scholars well, even though Diner’s discussion of the Christian rescuers of Jews is off the mark.
“We Remember with Reverence and Love” is a valuable volume; the prodigious research in the book will be of immeasurable assistance to scholars. But Diner’s history of the American Jewish communal response to the Holocaust, in terms of political and public-affairs dynamics — and those are the ones that count — is flawed. What happened, in the end, proved to be far less significant than the myriad of events recorded by Diner. However we regret it, American Jews did not in the postwar years acknowledge the Holocaust in a way it should have been acknowledged, recalled, commemorated; and no amount of 21st century review can change that.
Jerome A. Chanes is the author of the award-winning “A Dark Side of History: Antisemitism through the Ages” and the forthcoming “The Future of American Judaism” (Columbia University Press).
The Forward welcomes reader comments in order to promote thoughtful discussion on issues of importance to the Jewish community. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, the Forward requires that all commenters be appropriately respectful toward our writers, other commenters and the subjects of the articles. Vigorous debate and reasoned critique are welcome; name-calling and personal invective are not. While we generally do not seek to edit or actively moderate comments, the Forward reserves the right to remove comments for any reason.
Copyright © 2013, Forward Association, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Cleveland Kidnapping, Elizabeth Smart and Us
Tracing the Jewish Origins of the Holy Ghost
Ethical Kosher Seal Stalls Amid Orthodox Opposition
Baby Boomers’ Rocky Road to Jewish Love
Rama Burshtein Offers Rare Glimpse of Orthodox World
You've successfully signed up!
Since there is no place to comment on your editorial I will do so here:
You say
"The escalating friction between Sweden and Israel over the publication of an outrageous story in one of Sweden’s largest newspapers has many causes and culprits, but we must never lost sight of the real victims: the Jews of Sweden who are isolated and fearful about this outbreak of antisemitism."
If Jews in one country will not be able to fight back against an antisemitic assault because the Jews living in the country from which the assault was mounted are afraid of retribution than none of us is free to defend ourselves and all of us are hostages in the countries in which we reside.
Israel had a right and a duty to fight against blood libel accusations in Sweden and if the Swedish Jews are afraid to live there let them move.
They can chose to live in many different coutries where they will not be targeted. Israel will be gald to have them but so will the US, Canada, Australia, etc.
In the world today there is no need for any Jews to be afraid to fight back as the editorial implies and they need not be timid about it, either.
A couple of anecdotes (from a gentile Zionist) Somewhere around 1960 I said to my friend Judith "You know, I've come to the conclusion that the Holocaust is the central moral fact of our times". "My friend Hannah would agree with you', she said. I don't have to tell you who her friend was. I felt little small, but honored in a way, too. The other was as a psychotherapist working in NYC. I treated several survivors. my teachers insisted that I never probe into memories of the camps. This startled me, since my psychoanalytic credo held that always the truth was most important. Yet, uncomfortably, I accepted my teacher's point of view. They were wiser than I. Yet, I wondered. Was I too conspiring for silence? Remembering the assimilationist 50s and 60s, I don't think American Jews tried to run from the holocaust. It's importance was paramount But they were quiet about it. I'm not sure that was wrong. I've been more surprised by what seems to be a tendency to diminish the holocaust on the part of Israelis I know. The simple thing is, the holcauset is a truth that must always be self-evident.
Is this silence due to the facts that: (a) The majority of those survived had something to hide? I do not blame them - they survived the best way they possibky could, but it was at the expense of their poor brethen, of those less 'equipped' to survive a brutality, of those who could not buy their passage out, or were cut off a path to live... (b) that the American Jews were in denial, a least for a long while, of what was happening in Europe, especially in it's Eastern part? (c) even now the Ameican Jews confuse the true Holocaust surviver with those who managed by keeping a low profile. The most outrageous example is of the book published by a wife of an SS officer who did not suffer a squat, did not do anything at all to deserve any attention, let alone $ from the publication. Yet, the majority (luckily, not all, but a lot) of American Jewry, being gullable and naive, paraded her memoirs as if she was a true hero. The same goes for the couple who made up the ridiculous story about apples over the fence at a concentration camp. My family laughed the first time we read about it, yet people believed, because they never experienced anything of the kind, and the only life thy know is of one here in USA. Goodfor them. It's just sometimes the rest of us, foreign-born, wonder if you are entitled to an opinin at all.
As the child of two Holocaust survivors, I have been bemused from a distance by what I have seen/read of the response of America's Jewry to the Holocaust.
It seems to be an amalgam of guilt and suffering-by-proxy: guilt for being fortunate enough to escape the Holocaust, and suffering-by-proxy because fellow Jews, often even relatives, were victims in large numbers.
This understandable ambivalence may be significant in American Jewry's attitudes to and influence on/in Israel. It is striking that Israel's lurch to the right seems to be so closely correlated with the increasing influence of American (and Russian emigre) Jewry and financial support from American Jewry. I wonder how much of this can be attributed to bad conscience about the Holocaust.
I have a two questions 1 did jews try to go to africa or india after british restricted number for palestine 2 Did jews try to get german permission to leave occupied areas.
Richard "I have a two questions 1 did jews try to go to africa or india after british restricted number for palestine"
Richard, most of Africa and India was in hands of the Brtish.
A few Jews did manage to take refuge in India and Africa but most didn't make it.
2 "Did jews try to get german permission to leave occupied areas."
That you can ask this question shows how ignorant you are of conditions for Jews in Germany and its occupied areas.
Let's remember also that the Germans had what was called "the Madagscar" plan. They talked of moving all Jews to Madagscar. Of course Madagscar was a French colony and Germany didn't have the means to transport Jews there.
After the war started the plan became an impossibility.
the only diffenrence between novick and finkelstein is that finkelstein is an international personality and novick is known to the forward folks and some academic circles between boston and chicago
Very high on the agenda of American Jews after the end of World War II was the effort to establish a Jewish state, and more immediately, to protest the British mistreatment of the Jews in Mandatory Palestine, especially its closing the door all but a slight crack to would-be immigrants, a great many of whom were Holocaust survivors. American Jews did not dare protest the American post-war limitation of immigration (which, as Prof. David Wyman showed, began long before and continued during the war, when the State Department went out of its way to cut down the number of Jewish immigrants and sabotaged attempts to rescue European Jewry from annihilation during the war). But they did protest British policy at many meetings and rallies. I remember that one day in 1947, when I was at the 92nd St. Y for a music lesson, I read a sticker on a faucet in the Ladies' Room: "Is Blood Cheaper Than Oil?" that addressed this criminal policy of perfidious Albion.