Synopses & Reviews
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.
In a compelling work sure to draw fire from academics and pundits alike, Hasia R. Diner shows this assumption of silence to be categorically false. Uncovering a rich and incredibly varied trove of remembrancesin song, literature, liturgy, public display, political activism, and hundreds of other formsWe 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.
Uncovering a wonderfully rich and incredibly varied trove of remembrancesin song, literature, liturgy, public display, and hundreds of other formsthe NYU professor shows 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.
Diner has at last recovered these vital years in American Jewish history, and radically alters our understanding not only of postwar America Jewry, but of the ways that the Holocaust and the 1960s alike continue to reverberate in our lives.
Review
“Diner refutes the conventional wisdom that the American Jewish community ignored, or actively resisted, discussing the Holocaust until the 1960s. She makes a convincing case that in the post-1945 era American Jews, through their communal and religious institutions, assiduously grappled with the question of how to understand and commemorate the Holocaust. . . . An important contribution to American Jewish historiography.”
- Library Journal
Review
"A powerful book worthy of its important subject. Diner revises our understanding of the critical postwar decades when American Jews incorporated bitter memories of the murder of European Jews into their collective consciousness."
- Deborah Dash Moore, author of GI Jews
Review
“Diner hurls a passionate, well-delineated attack on the conventional view that postwar Jews and survivors wanted to forget the Holocaust rather than memorialize the tragedy. . . . A work of towering research and conviction that will surely enliven academic debates for years to come.”
- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Review
“Through her meticulously researched book, Diner helps to restore the vital postwar years to our understanding of American Jewish history and to honor those Jewish men and women who helped pick up the pieces of a shattered Jewish world.”
- Jewish Woman Magazine
Review
“Diners worthy, innovative, diligently researched work should spark controversy and meaningful dialogue among Holocaust scholars and in the Jewish community.”
- Publishers Weekly
“Diner hurls a passionate, well-delineated attack on the conventional view that postwar Jews and survivors wanted to forget the Holocaust rather than memorialize the tragedy. . . . A work of towering research and conviction that will surely enliven academic debates for years to come.”
- Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Diner sets out to drive a stake, once and for all, through the heart of a historical falsehood that has proved remarkably durable. This is the notion that, as Dineṟs subtitle has it, American Jews were initially ‘silent about the Holocaustthat the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history was somehow swept under the rug of American Jewrys collective consciousness. . . . Perhaps the ‘myth of silence was a necessary stage in American Jewry's ongoing struggle to make sense of its place in a post-Holocaust world. But even if that myth once served a need, thanks to Hasia Diners work, it must now be retired for good.”
- The New Republic
“Diner refutes the conventional wisdom that the American Jewish community ignored, or actively resisted, discussing the Holocaust until the 1960s. She makes a convincing case that in the post-1945 era American Jews, through their communal and religious institutions, assiduously grappled with the question of how to understand and commemorate the Holocaust. . . . An important contribution to American Jewish historiography.”
- Library Journal
“Through her meticulously researched book, Diner helps to restore the vital postwar years to our understanding of American Jewish history and to honor those Jewish men and women who helped pick up the pieces of a shattered Jewish world.”
- Jewish Woman Magazine
Review
"In the last hundred pages of her book, Diner turns to other factors that led to more widespread memorialization of Holocaust victims and discusses the evolution of Holocaust commemoration in the United States. She commands enormous knowledge and her observations are astute." "The evidence- from youth groups programs, to memorial ceremonies, from early (and admittedly failed) efforts to build monuments, to synagogue programs- is quite overwhelming. So resourcefully has Diner tracked down sermons and song lyrics, posters and programs, that this reviewer finds it hard to imagine any future historians continuing to perpetrate the claim that an explicit communal consciousness of the Holocaust did not really surface until the 1960s." "Diner's book successfully proves that American Jews did remember the Holocaust with reverence and love prior to the early 1960s. Rich in documentation, her work challenges preconceived notions extent in many areas." "Diner conclusively disproves American Jewish Holocaust amnesia before 1962 or 1967... In over five hundred pages of massively researched text and notes, including numerous illustrations, we see documented in great detail how American Jews not only remembered and memorialized the six million during those earlier years; they invoked them in almost everything they said and did as a community, particularly in the struggle for civil rights, where they drew from memories of Nazism a special hatred and fear for American racism, segregation, and bigotry."
“Diner’s worthy, innovative, diligently researched work should spark controversy and meaningful dialogue among Holocaust scholars and in the Jewish community.”
Review
"Rupp's intellectually ambitious monograph attempts to present and trace the diverse threads of lesbian history in a worldwide and comparative framework... The resulting text is thought-provoking, readable, and challenging and belongs in every college and university library."-CHOICE,
Review
"Judicious, copious, scholarly and heartfelt, it will appeal equally to general readers and serious historians for its carefully chosen content and its novel methodology... As to methodology, Rupp is an old school historian who scrupulously recognizes the limitations of her craft, but who doesn't let those limitations keep her from rich imaginings and a refreshingly humane interest in the historical record... Sixty six pages of endnotes attest to the seriousness of the work; over two hundred pages of lucid and accessible prose make history fun again."-Salem Press, Magill Book Reviews,
Review
" is the rare kind of history book that a reader might pick up thinking of glancing at just a few pages- only to discover a few hours later that she has effortlessly breezed through the entire book."-Curve,
Review
“Sapphistries is amazing.”-John D'Emilio,author of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
Review
“Rupp succeeds in writing a fascinating and at times startling transnational history. . . . The range of this book is extraordinary. . . . Rupp has given us an invaluable history that promises to inform and inspire.”
-The San Francisco Chronicle,
Review
"We Remember's real interest lies not only in its polemical conclusion, but also in its primary argument and supporting evidence."-Simon Perego,Books and Ideas
Review
“For several years the debate over postwar responses to the Jewish catastrophe has simply recycled the same data, with partisans declaring that the cup is neither half empty or half full depending on their point of view. Now, thanks to the mountain of evidence she has excavated, Hasia Diner has landed a knockout punch on those who assert that after 1945 American Jews were silent about the fate that befell the Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe, preferring to forget about it while busily integrating into American society and enjoying the postwar boom.”
-David Cesarani,Royal Halloway, University of London
Review
“Diner seeks in this passionate volume to shatter the widespread myth that US Jews from 1945 to 1962 “had little interest in thinking about, engaging with, and memorializing the Holocaust.””
-CHOICE,
Review
“Diner's compelling, albeit lengthy, study is an extremely important addition to the literature. Probing and compassionate, it dynamically challenges the myth of silence that has been so durable in popular and scholarly accounts of postwar American Jewish life.”
-American Jewish Archives Journal,
Review
“Only a seasoned, mature, and brilliant scholar such as Professor Diner could take it upon herself to challenge long-accepted beliefs maintained by an entire school of historians who preceded her. . .[her[ work is a very important, critical addition to the massive output of Holocaust research.”
-Association of Jewish Libraries,
Review
“In the last hundred pages of her book, Diner turns to other factors that led to more widespread memorialization of Holocaust victims and discusses the evolution of Holocaust commemoration in the United States. She commands enormous knowledge and her observations are astute.”-Holocaust and Genocide Studies,
Synopsis
Winner of the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish StudiesRecipient of the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Humanities-Intellectual and 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.
Synopsis
From the ancient poet Sappho to
tombois in contemporary Indonesia, women throughout history and around the globe have desired, loved, and had sex with other women. In beautiful prose,
Sapphistries tells their stories, capturing the multitude of ways that diverse societies have shaped female same-sex sexuality across time and place.
Leila J. Rupp reveals how, from the time of the very earliest societies, the possibility of love between women has been known, even when it is feared, ignored, or denied. We hear women in the sex-segregated spaces of convents and harems whispering words of love. We see women beginning to find each other on the streets of London and Amsterdam, in the aristocratic circles of Paris, in the factories of Shanghai. We find womens desire and love for women meeting the light of day as Japanese schoolgirls fall in love, and lesbian bars and clubs spread from 1920s Berlin to 1950s Buffalo. And we encounter a world of difference in the twenty-first century, as transnational concepts and lesbian identities meet local understandings of how two women might love each other.
Giving voice to words from the mouths and pens of women, and from mens prohibitions, reports, literature, art, imaginings, pornography, and court cases, Rupp also creatively employs fiction to imagine possibilities when there is no historical evidence. Sapphistries combines lyrical narrative with meticulous historical research, providing an eminently readable and uniquely sweeping story of desire, love, and sex between women around the globe from the beginning of time to the present.
About the Author
Hasia R. Diner is The Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History and Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at NYU. She is the recipient of the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Humanities-Intellectual & Cultural History. Her books include The Jews of the United States, 1654-2000; Hungering for America; Her Works Praise Her; and The Lower East Side Memories.