Synopses & Reviews
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.
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
“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
"A groundbreaking and extremely innovative book."-Thomas J. Bernard,Pennsylvania State University
Review
"As American are becoming increasingly sensitized to ingrained racial pathologies, Katheryn Russell's book, particularly her highly original chapter on racial hoaxes, is a crucial addition to the national discussion on race."-Jody Armour,author of Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism
Review
"Russell brilliantly scrutinizes the demonization of black men in the mass media and criminal justice system. Since slavery whites have fabricated fictions of dangerous black men and a distinctive 'black crime,' while playing down the real dominance of (unnamed) 'white crime.' Russell demonstrates that media distortions and racial hoaxes grow from and feed black demonization. Reviewing the failure of reforms to create a fair criminal justice system, and society, she offers imaginative, workable solutions."-Joe R. Feagin,coauthor of White Racism
Review
"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."-H-Net Reviews,
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
When Americans are asked what concerns them most about the direction of the country, crime and racial tensions invariably figure prominently in the answer. In the minds of many, these two problems are inextricably linked. Yet opinions and beliefs about race and crime are often informed as much by myth and preconception as by fact and reality.
In this important book, Katheryn K. Russell surveys the landscape of American crime and identifies some of the country's most significant racial pathologies. Why do Black and White Americans perceive police actions so differently? Is White fear of Black crime justified? Do African Americans really "protect their own"? Should they?
Perhaps the most explosive and troublesome phenomenon at the nexus of race and crime is the racial hoax--a contemporary version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Examining both White-on-Black hoaxes such as Susan Smith's and Charles Stuart's claims that Black men were responsible for crimes they themselves committed, and Black-on-White hoaxes such as the Tawana Brawley episode, Russell illustrates the formidable and lasting damage that occurs when racial stereotypes are manipulated and exploited for personal advantage. She shows us how such hoaxes have disastrous consequences and compellingly argues for harsher punishments for offenders.
Stressing that journalists, scholars, and policymakers alike have an ethical imperative to disregard and refute inflammatory or wrong-headed work on race, The Color of Crime is a lucid and forceful book, impossible to ignore.
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.