Post-World-War-II American Jewry and the Confrontation With Catastrophe

Abstract

From perspective of early-twenty-first-century American Jewish communal culture, few issues loom as large or carry as much valence in performance of Jewish identity as Holocaust, horrific destruction of six million Jews at hands of Nazis and obliteration of their communities. That cataclysmic event has come by 2004 to play a pivotal role in shaping of American Jewry's political and cultural agendas. Jewish communities across United States have created memorials, large physical monuments, often set boldly in highly public places. They have lobbied to make study of a part of social studies curricula in their various states. Jewish educational institutions have created volumes of instructional material on how best to teach Holocaust, producing guidelines, teachers' manuals, and textbooks. Jewish communities as organized bodies representing panoply of institutions that comprise communal infrastructure sponsor remembrance rituals, replete with traditional and innovative liturgies and attended by public officials who come annually to express their solidarity with Jewish people. Jewish organizations have developed informational packets that are distributed to schools, synagogues, and organizations to help communities remember. The memorial gatherings, as well as organized pilgrimages to sites of Nazi death camps in Europe and newly written liturgical texts, have catapulted to near top of American Jewish repertoire of performance American publishers, university presses and trade houses alike, fill their catalogues with scholarly analyses of Holocaust. These books, whether focusing on victims or perpetrators, on actual destruction or its aftermath, demonstrate continued draw of and degree to which has come to dominate discussions about the Jews. In its 2003 Jewish Studies catalogue, for example, Indiana University Press offered nine Forthcoming works. Two of these treated some aspect of Holocaust, while section explicitly marked Holocaust highlighted twenty-one books. In field of Bible, on other hand, same list described only eight titles.1