| You are cordially invited to another Book Talk of the Tamiment Library / Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. WHAT: Professor Hasia Diner discusses her just-published book, "We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962" [April 2008, New York University Press] WHEN May 4th, 2009 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. WHERE NYU Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South, 10th floor MORE INFO Michael Nash < michael.nash@nyu.edu > 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. Whether motivated by fear, shame, or the desire to assimilate, the Jewish community in the United States simply did not memorialize the Holocaust until the Eichmann trial and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War made it socially acceptable for them to do so. Hasia R. Diner's new book shows this 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. Note: Prof. Diner made use of diverse resources at Tamiment / Wagner, including the archival collections of the Jewish Labor Committee, and related collections of Julius Bernstein, Edward Goldstein, Isaiah Minkoff and Jacob Pat.* Her work revealed a wonderfully rich and incredibly varied trove of remembrances — in song, literature, liturgy, public display, and hundreds of other forms — that show that publicly memorializing those who died in the Holocaust was a deep and powerful element of Jewish life in postwar America. Not only does she marshal enough evidence to utterly destroy 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. * Jewish Labor Committee Records, Part 1: 1934-1947 http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/jlc_h.html Jewish Labor Committee Records, Part 2: 1947-1956 http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/jlc_h2.html Jewish Labor Committee, Chicago Records http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/jlc_chicago.html Julius Bernstein Papers http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/bernstein.html Edward S. Goldstein: Jewish Labor Committee Research Files http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/goldstein.html Isaiah Minkoff Papers http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/minkoff.html Jacob Pat Papers http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/pat.html {see also: Baruch Charney Vladeck Papers http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/vladeck.html } |
