Did Postwar Jews Really Ignore the Holocaust for Several Decades?

        Of all the books that I have written over the course of my career, We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945-1962 is one that I should have not had to write. The previous 10 books came into being as a result of some historical puzzle which intrigued me and my interest in reconstructing some aspect or another of the past.          

          But We Remember had a very different birth. My decision to embark on it came from the fact that American and American Jewish historians, as well as journalists, public intellectuals, Jewish communal activists, among others, have been involved for several decades now in the construction and dissemination of a false history about American Jews in the post-World War II years and their relationship to the Holocaust.

         In the regnant view of that history the Jews of the United States in the two decades following the end of the war with its shuddering reality that one-third of the Jewish people had been destroyed, would not, could not, and did not make that horrendous reality part of their communal culture. Those who have constructed this rendition of the past and those who continue to repeat it as truth agree that a culture of silence stalked American Jewry in the postwar period. Whether writing from the left or from the right, whether from inside the Jewish community or from outside, they have converged around a common tale which has asserted that as postwar Jews found American society opening up for them in new and welcoming ways, they decided that the Holocaust could not be part of their repertoire of concerns. The architects of the myth have likewise made much of the Cold War and have stated emphatically and repeatedly that in the tense atmosphere of those years Jews assiduously sought to avoid anything that made them seem different than other white, middle class Americans and conspired to deflect attention from West Germany, which had emerged as America's bulwark against Communism. Jews, this narrative has declaimed, did not want to seem soft on Communism by pointing out the vast crime perpetrated by the Germans. Additionally, the standard narrative, constructed by historians, has focused on the leaders of American Jewry, who purportedly put the lid on any talk of the Holocaust, ensuring that memorializations of the deaths of the six million at the hands of the German Nazis and their allies, did not take place. That horrific topic had to be bracketed, marginalized, and talk of it, particularly in the public sphere, had to be squelched.

           This kind rhetoric became established as fact and enshrined in serious pieces of scholarship in the early 1980s, and when I first confronted it, it took me aback. When I read this for the first time I wondered about the worthiness of this particular understanding of the postwar period. First, it seemed to me that if American Jews had in actuality decided to forget those brutal deaths and not dwell on the destructions, they would have acted in ways that made them quite different from any other group whose history we know about. Human beings, in all places and at all times, have memorialized the tragedies endured by their people. The experience of Jews since before the common era itself stands as a testimony to the power of tragedy to shape communal practice and something as simple, but fundamental, as the cycle of the Jewish calendar moves from one devastation to another, giving Jewish life its yearly flow. How amazing it would have been if these American Jews could in actuality have deviated so far from a universal norm.

         Secondly, had the Jews of the United States really followed orders imposed upon them by the communal elite and agreed to remain silent about the Holocaust, they would have, for that moment in time also departed from the basic trajectory of their own history. The kind of communal discipline upon which the myth of silence stands represents a radical deviation from the basics of the Jewish experience in America. I knew as an historian that since the early nineteenth century the distinctive feature of Jewish life in America had been the lack of communal authority, grass roots anarchy, and the rise of multiple and constantly changing groupings of American Jews, all scuffling with each other over the nature of Judaism, Jewish culture, politics, and the structure of community life, with no one ever able to dictate what American Jews could say, when, and how.

            Finally the historic consensus that maintained that the Holocaust lay buried below the surface of American Jewish life until the middle or the end of the 1960s grabbed my attention because it flew in the face of my own memories of those earlier years. While I am generally skeptical about personal recollections as the basis of history, memories of lived life can at times be helpful in launching our inquiries about the past. Was I, I asked myself, misremembering the American Jewish world of the 1950s and early 1960s in which talk about the tragedy of the six million, texts about their brutal deaths, and rituals to memorialize abounded? Or, did my particular experiences of Holocaust works in the American Jewish public world just jar profoundly with those of other American Jews at the time?

          Had other historians offered a more complicated and nuanced interpretation of postwar American Jewish history and the role of the Holocaust in it and had they actually done any real sustained scholarship, I might never had written this book. Had they explored changes in the nature of Holocaust memorial projects from 1945 through the beginning of the twenty-first century, I would have been satisfied. Had they acknowledged that American Jews always used the deaths of the six million as a way to advance their political and cultural agendas, but that as those agendas moved from one cause to another, the ways they used the Holocaust also shifted, I might never have taken on this project. But rather they stated and restated as a given that in the years from 1945 into the middle of the 1960s the Holocaust had no place in their communal lives and that they did not confront the larger American public with its horrendous narrative.

         I wanted to know what the women and men who constituted the Jews of the United States in the postwar period said and did in relationship to the Holocaust. What did they create in terms of rituals, words and images to make their world a place which recognized the enormity of the loss and the burden which that loss placed on them? What I found was a mammoth range of memorial projects created in various genres, articulated in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew, by every segment of American Jewry. Instead of silence American Jews in their public sphere employed the Holocaust to shoulder a range of tasks: providing aid to the survivors of the catastrophe, making sure that the world and Americans in particular remembered that Germany had been the perpetrator of the crime, advancing such political projects as civil rights, immigration reform, passage of the Genocide Convention, and garnering support for Israel, among others. The leaders of American Jewry from across the spectrum of ideology and class, rather than hushing up the tragedy, used it affirmatively as a justification for a call to the masses of American Jews to become “more Jewish,” more committed to communal institutions and more zealous in their commitment to Jewish life. Silence did not reign, but rather postwar American Jewish life functioned as a place where the details of the Holocaust, words about it, metaphors, details, allusions, could be heard everywhere.

Why did this vast history of engagement with the Holocaust get erased? How was it possible for historians and others to claim with utter conviction that the Holocaust had no place in American Jewish life in the post war period? To answer that fully would require a full historical treatment in itself. I think however that it would suffice here to say that the architects of the myth of silence fall into two camps.

Some historians, journalists, and other contemporary commentators, writing from the right and from within the Jewish world, see the postwar period as the nadir of Jewish authenticity. They consistently condemn postwar Jews for having been too fervent in their embrace of the acceptance being offered to them by postwar liberalism. Those Jews, accordingly, could not have been willing to make their communities places to enshrine the Holocaust. For this swathe of historians and other scholars, the 1950s represented a moment in time when Jews would have done anything to win the favor of the non-Jewish world. Following that logic, the Jewish women and men of that decade, broadly defined, would not have used their political agency to act in the name of the Holocaust’s devastation.

On the other hand the myth of silence has also been built from the left, from critics of contemporary American Jewish politics. They assert that American Jews only turned to the Holocaust after they emerged as the almost monomaniacal defenders of Israel as a post-1967 occupier of Arab lands. Before that transformative moment in Jewish and world politics, those from the left have declared, American Jews had no need for the Holocaust. These scholars and writers as such could not have seen that the Holocaust had always been on the center stage of American Jewry’s public culture, that long before those six days in June, American Jews had made the Holocaust a powerful element in their communal culture.

Those who have created the myth of silence have been blinded by their political agendas to the grass roots, experimental, spontaneous process by which text by text, artifact by artifact, and deed by deed American Jews of the postwar years made themselves the custodians of the memory of the Holocaust and made it a powerful element in their communal culture.