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The Impact of the Holocaust in America: The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, Volume 6, edited by Zev Garber. W. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press for the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, University of Southern California, 2008. 230 pp. $25.00.
Not long ago I was present at a meeting of Holocaust scholars at Yad Vashem discussing contemporary research among graduate students and young lecturers. “Almost none of them are actually dealing with the Holocaust these days,” sighed one of the senior historians, himself a Holocaust survivor. “If they study history, they write about the impact of the Holocaust after the war. If they study memory, then they usually choose something about Holocaust representation in the arts. And if they deal with comprehension then they end up writing about post-Holocaust philosophy, theology or education. No one deals any more with the actual event which brought about the impact, the memory, the philosophy or the education!” he moaned.
Although all of us present understood and empathized with what he was saying, a few reminded him that it wasn’t only the lack of knowledge of European languages or the difficulty of traveling for long periods to archives throughout Europe which was drawing scholars towards topics of post-war impact and aftermath. And it wasn’t only young scholars who were drawn towards these topics. “Every Man is close to Himself,” states the author of Ecclesiastes, and so, many scholars were drawn to writing about their present, the impact of the Holocaust on the world in which they lived in the recent past and in which they live today. This choice in no way diminishes the importance of the Holocaust or detracts from its horror; instead it provides an additional perspective to the tremendous depth and scope of its impact, showing how it continues to affect various aspects of our lives today in countries far away from the killing grounds or even those who had been under Nazi domination.
The most recent volume of the Casden Annual Review, The Impact of the Holocaust in America, is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Ten articles, most of which were based on papers delivered at the Association of Jewish Studies conference held in San Diego in 2006, provide the reader with a broad vista of topics, all related to how the major Jewish cataclysm of the twentieth century affected various areas of thought, action, education, media, economy, theology, sociology, and history in the United States.
Although all the articles are worthy of note, I will focus on three which were of particular interest to me and I think are especially deserving of further discussion. The first is Beth Cohen’s excellent analysis of the survivor’s first years in America. Based on the research for her book on the subject, Case Closed, Cohen paints a vivid picture of what life was really like for some of the 140,000 European Jewish refugees who resettled in the United States between 1946 and 1954.
Citing poignant case studies of families who were brought from Europe to the United States during the immediate post-war years, Cohen depicts the complex and often multifaceted process through which “refugees” became “new Americans.” It would still take years before they could be identified publicly as “Holocaust survivors,” she shows us, and meanwhile, to their American-Jewish relatives, to the organizations that cared for them, and to the Jewish community in general they were often just “poor refugees,” some with severe emotional difficulties which they were unable to overcome in the war’s aftermath. Cohen paints a very different picture than that described in most existing studies regarding the life of Holocaust survivors in America, primarily because she concentrates on the immediate post-war years, those in which various survivors who came to America were still quite far from being success stories.
Lawrence Baron’s relatively brief but fascinating article, “Imagining the Shoa in American Third Generation Cinema,” takes us from the realm of history to that of media and the arts. Although his training was originally in history, Baron believes that cinema has become one of the main tools which transmit the legacy of the Holocaust to the general public. In an erudite but extremely readable essay Baron explores the narratives of and meanings behind several contemporary movies which have dealt with third generation issues: I Love You, I Love You Not (1996), The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999) and Everything Is Illuminated (2005). Baron finds it fitting that the creative artists of the third generation after the Holocaust have often resorted to film as the preferred means through which to grapple with what are often surrealistic stories which have been passed on to them as their family’s legacy. Thus these stories have become a stimulus to their imagination and creativity, making a connection between them and an audience which is often far remote from the events being described.
In a third poignant essay Peter J. Haas and Lee W. Haas probe what American Jewish children’s literature teaches about the Holocaust. What do Jewish children, especially those who have little or no formal Jewish education, know about the Holocaust? Peter and Lee Haas attempt to answer this question by examining picture books, fiction, and biographies for children, all of which deal with the Holocaust. Although children’s books on the subject were few and far between in the 1950s and 1960s, the authors show how that situation changed during the 1970s when the Holocaust became a more open topic of discussion in both the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. At the time, some of the books being written in English were composed by former child refugees who based their tales on their own memoirs. As time passed children’s Holocaust literature became bifurcated, with accounts becoming more graphic and realistic than in earlier literature, but with literature also focusing more on rescue and friendship. This appears to be a working synthesis which evolved to allow the Holocaust to be more or less accurately conveyed to young readers without it being overly traumatic. The authors delve into the development of children’s Holocaust literature in the 1990s and onward when the Holocaust was becoming part of the school curriculum in many areas. Yet in spite of the growth of children’s Holocaust literature, the authors conclude that the generation of children who came of age in the past decade knows little about the Holocaust. In spite of the plethora of books which exists on the subject, they can read about the Holocaust without any explicit reference to Jews or Judaism, and it can be depicted as another tale of human cruelty and human good. The positive factor, however, is that just the very existence of these story books attempts to make sure that the Holocaust will be remembered.
The ways and means by which the Holocaust is remembered in various forms in America is the leitmotif which connects the other essays included in this volume: Michael Berenbaum writing about survivors as teachers, Zev Garber describing the making of an American Holocaust conference, Steven Leonard Jacobs on the impact of the Shoah on Jewish-Christian relations, just to mention a few. Zev Garber is to be congratulated in putting together a well written, interesting, and innovative volume which provides the reader with insight into various aspects of the impact and aftermath of the Holocaust in the United States over a period of more than sixty years.
Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz
Graduate Program in Contemporary Jewry and
Israel and Golda Koschitsky Jewish History Department
Bar-Ilan University
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