Author: Laura Levitt Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814752179 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
Many of us belong to communities that have been scarred by terrible calamities. And many of us come from families that have suffered grievous losses. How we reflect on these legacies of loss and the ways they inform each other are the questions Laura Levitt takes up in this provocative and passionate book. An American Jew whose family was not directly affected by the Holocaust, Levitt grapples with the challenges of contending with ordinary Jewish loss. She suggests that although the memory of the Holocaust may seem to overshadow all other kinds of loss for American Jews, it can also open up possibilities for engaging these more personal and everyday legacies. Weaving in discussions of her own family stories and writing in a manner that is both deeply personal and erudite, Levitt shows what happens when public and private losses are seen next to each other, and what happens when difficult works of art or commemoration, such as museum exhibits or films, are seen alongside ordinary family stories about more intimate losses. In so doing she illuminates how through these “ordinary stories” we may create an alternative model for confronting Holocaust memory in Jewish culture.
Author: Hasia R Diner Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814720420 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 545
Book Description
Winner of the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies Recipient of the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Humanities-Intellectual & Cultural History It has become an accepted truth: after World War II, American Jews chose to be silent about the mass murder of millions of their European brothers and sisters at the hands of the Nazis. In this compelling work, Hasia R. Diner shows the assumption of silence to be categorically false. Uncovering a rich and incredibly varied trove of remembrances—in song, literature, liturgy, public display, political activism, and hundreds of other forms—We Remember with Reverence and Love shows that publicly memorializing those who died in the Holocaust arose from a deep and powerful element of Jewish life in postwar America. Not only does she marshal enough evidence to dismantle the idea of American Jewish “forgetfulness,” she brings to life the moving and manifold ways that this widely diverse group paid tribute to the tragedy. Diner also offers a compelling new perspective on the 1960s and its potent legacy, by revealing how our typical understanding of the postwar years emerged from the cauldron of cultural divisions and campus battles a generation later. The student activists and “new Jews” of the 1960s who, in rebelling against the American Jewish world they had grown up in “a world of remarkable affluence and broadening cultural possibilities” created a flawed portrait of what their parents had, or rather, had not, done in the postwar years. This distorted legacy has been transformed by two generations of scholars, writers, rabbis, and Jewish community leaders into a taken-for-granted truth.
Author: Bruce Zuckerman Publisher: Purdue University Press ISBN: 1557535345 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
The Jewish Role in American Life examines the complex relationship between Jews and the United States. Jews have been instrumental in shaping American culture and Jewish culture and religion have likewise been profoundly recast in the United States, especially in the period following World War II.
Author: Jeffrey Gurock Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136675280 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 516
Book Description
This volume incorporates studies of the persecution of the Jews in Germany, the respective responses of the German-American Press and the American-Jewish Press during the emergence of Nazism, and the subsequent issues of rescue during the holocaust and policies towards the displaced.
Author: Hasia R. Diner Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 48
Book Description
Dismisses the historiographic tendency of the 1990s-2000s, which claims that between 1945-early 1960s the organized American Jewish community was silent on the Holocaust - i.e. survivors refused to talk and American Jews refused to listen. They contend that this deliberate policy of silence was aimed at easing the integration of the immigrant Jews in America. States that the writers representing this tendency ignore huge arrays of texts - in Yiddish, in Hebrew, but first and foremost in English - compiled by various Jewish institutions, both religious and secular, relating the events of the Holocaust to both young and old. These texts, which before 1962 functioned exclusively within the boundaries of the American Jewish world, had two aims: to institutionalize the remembrance of the Jewish victims, and to mobilize the Jewish communities to help the refugees. The tendency of ignoring the postwar Holocaust narratives emerged in the late 1960s-70s as part of a campaign to incriminate the Jewish "establishment" for its alleged indifference toward the victims - both before and after the war. After 1962, the Holocaust narratives were addressed to Jews and non-Jews alike. It became accepted due to the emergence of a new American public culture that venerated and validated discussion on group suffering.
Author: Laura Levitt Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271088796 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 181
Book Description
On a November evening in 1989, Laura Levitt was raped in her own bed. Her landlord heard the assault taking place and called 911, but the police arrived too late to apprehend Laura’s attacker. When they left, investigators took items with them—a pair of sweatpants, the bedclothes—and a rape exam was performed at the hospital. However, this evidence was never processed. Decades later, Laura returns to these objects, viewing them not as clues that will lead to the identification of her assailant but rather as a means of engaging traumatic legacies writ large. The Objects That Remain is equal parts personal memoir and fascinating examination of the ways in which the material remains of violent crimes inform our experience of, and thinking about, trauma and loss. Considering artifacts in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and evidence in police storage facilities across the country, Laura’s story moves between intimate trauma, the story of an unsolved rape, and genocide. Throughout, she asks what it might mean to do justice to these violent pasts outside the juridical system or through historical empiricism, which are the dominant ways in which we think about evidence from violent crimes and other highly traumatic events. Over the course of her investigation, the author reveals how these objects that remain and the stories that surround them enable forms of intimacy. In this way, she models for us a different kind of reckoning, where justice is an animating process of telling and holding.
Author: Alan M. Dershowitz Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 0684848988 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 420
Book Description
Explores the meaning of Jewishness in light of the increasing assimilation of America's Jews and suggests ways to preserve Jewish identity.
Author: Yehuda Bauer Publisher: Pergamon ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
Out of the Ashes is a unique account of the contribution of American Jews to the continued survival of the remnant of European Jewry - the She'erit Hapletah - in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust. As the Second World War drew to a close and the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, the immediate American Jewish reaction of shocked silence and disbelief was soon transformed into pragmatic action: Jewish agencies throughout the US were mobilized to help the survivors and their communities to begin to rebuild shattered lives. Paramount among these organizations was the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which since its formation in 1914 had established itself as the foremost American Jewish agency for helping fellow Jews overseas. The JDC was joined by other organizations, including the well-established HIAS (Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society) and ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation and Training). Based on a variety of sources, including the JDC archives and oral interviews, the book examines the politics and mechanics of the American Jewish intervention and assesses its extent and effect on the fate of European Jewry both in Europe and elsewhere in the years immediately after 1945.
Author: Laura Levitt Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814752314 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
Many of us belong to communities that have been scarred by terrible calamities. And many of us come from families that have suffered grievous losses. How we reflect on these legacies of loss and the ways they inform each other are the questions Laura Levitt takes up in this provocative and passionate book. An American Jew whose family was not directly affected by the Holocaust, Levitt grapples with the challenges of contending with ordinary Jewish loss. She suggests that although the memory of the Holocaust may seem to overshadow all other kinds of loss for American Jews, it can also open up possibilities for engaging these more personal and everyday legacies. Weaving in discussions of her own family stories and writing in a manner that is both deeply personal and erudite, Levitt shows what happens when public and private losses are seen next to each other, and what happens when difficult works of art or commemoration, such as museum exhibits or films, are seen alongside ordinary family stories about more intimate losses. In so doing she illuminates how through these “ordinary stories” we may create an alternative model for confronting Holocaust memory in Jewish culture.
Author: Laura Levitt
Author: Hasia R Diner
Author: Bruce Zuckerman
Author: Jeffrey Gurock
Author: Hasia R. Diner
Author: Laura Levitt
Author: Alan M. Dershowitz
Author: Yehuda Bauer
Author: Seymour Maxwell Finger
Author: Laura Levitt