The Holocaust and American public memory, 1945-1960

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 62-88

  Baron, Lawrence ^a  

^a SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845329392     PISSN: 87566583     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hgs/17.1.62     Document Type: Review

References (173)

1. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 103.
2. Deborah E. Lipstadt, "America and the Memory of the Holocaust," Modern Judaism 16:3 (1996), p. 195.
3. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 22-23.
4. Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), pp. 3-20.
5. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, pp. 63-123;
6. Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust, From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 23-40;
7. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, pp. 4-19;
8. Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, 2000), pp. 11-30;
9. Lipstadt, "America and the Memory of the Holocaust," pp. 198-208.
10. Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman, "Why Do We Call the Holocaust 'The Holocaust?' An Inquiry into the Psychology of Labels," Modern Judaism 9:2 (1989), pp. 197-211;
11. Dalia Ofer, "Linguistic Conceptualization of the Holocaust in Palestine and Israel, 1942-1953," Journal of Contemporary History 31:3 (1996), pp. 567-89.
12. Hilene Flanzbaum, "The Americanization of the Holocaust," in The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 2.
13. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 628.
14. Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America, pp. 81-84.
15. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's "Final Solution" (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 65-100;
16. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 180-92;
17. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 19-103, 311-27.
18. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, pp. 72-76;
19. Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's "Final Solution," pp. 223-28.
20. Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, pp. 2-4.
21. Sharon R. Lowenstein, Token Refuge: The Story of the Jewish Refugee Shelter at Oswego, 1944-1946 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
22. "Refugees Arrive in America," Life, August 21, 1944, pp. 25-29.
23. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eyes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 49-61.
24. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, pp. 263-67;
25. German Extermination Camps: Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President, 1944).
26. Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 10-11.
27. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart, p. 19.
28. Compare with David S. Wyman, "The United States," in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, ed. David S. Wyman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 708-16.
29. Henry Shoskes, No Traveler Returns: The Story of Hitler's Greatest Crime (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran, and Co., 1945);
30. Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 39-71, 291-305;
31. Abram L. Sachar, Redemption of the Unwanted: From the Liberation of the Death Camps to the Founding of Israel (New York: St. Martins Press, 1986), pp.162-64, 199-201.
32. See also "Barbed Wire," Time, October 8,1945, pp. 31-32.
33. "International Military Tribunal: Indictment, October 6, 1945," in Michael R. Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945-46: A Documentary History (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), pp. 65, 70.
34. William J. Bosch, Judgment on Nuremberg: American Attitudes toward the Major German War-Crime Trials (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), pp. 90-109.
35. Michael R. Marrus, "The Holocaust at Nuremberg," Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998), pp. 40-41.
36. "War Crimes," Time, December 24, 1945, p. 29
37. The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People (New York: The Jewish Black Book Committee, 1946).
38. Seymour Krieger's Nazi Germany's War Against the Jews (New York: American Jewish Conference, 1947), provides a similar compilation of evidence from the Nuremberg trials. In the 1947/1948 YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, Josef Guttmann demonstrated how the documents introduced at Nuremberg closed "many gaps in our knowledge of the preparation and execution of the greatest crime in our history." Guttmann, "The Fate of European Jewry in the Light of the Nuremberg Documents," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science (New York: YIVO, 1948), pp. 313-27.
39. G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1947).
40. Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1954);
41. Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1953).
42. On this and many other key omissions in Dawidowicz's The War Against the Jews, see Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), pp. 143-47.
43. See E. L. Quarantelli, "Harvest of Hate," American Journal of Sociology 61:5 (1956), pp. 512-13;
44. Norman Bentwich, "Harvest of Hate," International Affairs 32: 2 (1956), pp. 230-31;
45. Kurt R. Grossmann, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 292 (March 1954), pp. 211.
46. Albert M. Hyamson, "The Final Solution," International Affairs 29:4 (1953), pp. 494-95.
47. Whitney R. Harris, Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1954);
48. Solomon F. Bloom, "The Great Unsolved Crime," Commentary 19:1 (1955), pp. 89-93;
49. Grossmann, Annuals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, p. 211. Hyamson believed that the figure of six million was inflated.
50. Eva Reichmann, Hostages of Civilization: The Social Sources of National Socialist Anti-Semitism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), pp. 172-235.
51. Joseph Tenenbaum, Race and Reich: The Story of an Epoch (New York: Twayne, 1956), pp. xvi, 211-391.
52. V. C. Ferkiss, "Review of Race and Reich," Commonweal, February 17, 1956.
53. Philip Friedman, "European Jewish Research on the Recent Jewish Catastrophe in 1939-1945," Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 18 (1949), pp. 179-211;
54. Philip Friedman, "American Jewish Research and Literature on the Jewish Catastrophe of 1939-1945," Jewish Social Studies 13 (1951), pp. 235-50.
55. Koppel Pinson, "Editors Preface," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 8 (New York: YIVO, 1953), p. 5.
56. "Jewish Organizations and Spiritual Resistance During the Third Reich," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 1 (1956), pp. 51-190.
57. Hilberg, The Politics of Memory, pp. 69-119.
58. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorships and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956).
59. Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 108-113.
60. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951).
61. Hannah Arendt, "Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility," Jewish frontiers 12:1 (1945), pp. 19-23.
62. For example, see Hannah Arendt, "Approaches to the German Problem," Partisan Review, 12:1 (1945), pp. 93-106;
63. Hannah Arendt, "The Concentration Camps," Partisan Review, 15:7 (1948), pp. 743-63;
64. Hannah Arendt, "The Aftermath of Nazi-Rule: Report from Germany," Commentary, 19:4 (1950), pp. 342-53.
65. Hannah Arendt, "The History of a Great Crime," Commentary 13:3 (1952), pp. 300-304.
66. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), pp. 342, 348, 406, 410, 454.
67. Max Weinreich, Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes Against the Jewish People (New York: YIVO, 1946).
68. Roland G. Usher, "Review of Hitler's Professors," American Historical Review 52:1 (1946), pp. 120-21.
69. Fred Mielke and Alexander Mitscherlich, Doctors of Infamy: The Story of Nazi Medical Crimes (New York: H. Schumann, 1949);
70. Joseph Hirsch, "Review of Doctors of Infamy," Social Forces 28:102 (1949).
71. Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953), pp. 641-44.
72. See Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, pp. 31-32. Dawidowicz claimed that the only American historian in the 1950s to recognize sufficiently the significance of German antisemitism was Alexander Dallin.
73. Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, pp. 643-44.
74. Willi Frischauer, Himmler: The Evil Genius of the Third Reich (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), pp. 148-212.
75. Edward Crankshaw, Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny (New York: Viking Press, 1956), pp. 159-201.
76. Gerald Reitlinger, The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945 (New York: Viking Press, 1957), pp. 253-88.
77. Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 74-83, 125-26.
78. Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, trans. Heinz Norden (New York: Farrar and Straus, 1950);
79. Élie A. Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp, trans. M. H. Braaksma (New York: Norton, 1953);
80. Viktor E. Frankl, From Death-Camp to Existentialism, trans. Ilse Lasch (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959);
81. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960);
82. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 56-60, 79-85, 114-28, 151-63.
83. Bruno Bettelheim, "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 38: 4 (1943).
84. Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1959), pp. 103-33.
85. Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 23-40.
86. The quotation is from Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern American (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 131-33.
87. Waldemar Gurian, "German Anti-Semitism," in Essays on Anti-Semitism, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (New York: Conference on Jewish Relations, 1946), pp. 218-65.
88. Paul W. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), pp. xv-xvii.
89. and Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1973), pp. 219-52.
90. Samuel H. Flowerman and Max Horkheimer, "Foreword to Studies in Prejudice," in Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction, pp. v-viii.
91. Carey McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948), p. ix.
92. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison- Wesley Publishing Company, 1954), pp. 14-15.
93. Philip Friedman, "The Bibliography of the Warsaw Ghetto," Jewish Book Annual 2 (1952/1953).
94. Isaac Schwarzbart, The Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Its Meaning and Message (New York: World Jewish Congress, 1953).
95. Schwarzbart, The Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, pp. 21-23.
96. Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, ed. Ada June Friedman (New York: Conference on Jewish Social Studies, 1981).
97. Philip Friedman, Their Brothers' Keepers (New York: Crown Books, 1957).
98. Roman Vishniac, Polish Jews: A Pictorial Record (New York: Schocken Books, 1947);
99. Joseph Leib Tenenbaum and Sheila Tenenbaum, In Search of a Lost People: The Old and New Poland (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1949);
100. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth Is The Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe (New York: H. Schuman, 1950).
101. Germaine Bree, Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment (New York: Delta Books, 1972), pp. 20-30, 156-231.
102. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George L. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), pp. 7-11.
103. Also see Steven S. Schwarzschild, "J. P Sartre as Jew," Modern Judaism 3:1 (1983), pp. 45-48.
104. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 254-58.
105. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), pp. 177-87 on Nazi atrocities and pp. 226-52 on Stalinist atrocities.
106. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Freedom and Karl Jasper's Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 36-97.
107. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (New York: Dial Press, 1947), pp. 51-81.
108. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 419-59.
109. Michael Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 9-27.
110. Anita Shapira, "The Holocaust and World War Two as Elements of the Yishuv Psyche Until 1948," in Thinking About the Holocaust After Haifa Century, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 65-69.
111. "Towards a Jewish State: The Biltmore Program," in The Israel-Arab Reader, eds. Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 78-79.
112. Milton Steinberg, A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem (New York: Charter Books, 1945), pp. 19-43, 221-66.
113. Bartley C. Crum, Behind the Silken Curtain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), pp. 79-141.
114. Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966);
115. Arthur Gilbert, The Vatican Council and the Jews (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1968).
116. See also Zachary Braiterman, Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998),
117. Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relationship Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1952), p.132.
118. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man's Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1954), pp. 147-51.
119. Also see Morris M. Faierstein, "Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Holocaust," Modern Judaism 19:3 (1999), pp. 255-63.
120. Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1951), p. 3.
121. Chaim Grade, "My War With Hersh Rasseyner," trans. Milton Himmelfarb, Commentary 16:5(1953).
122. Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Stella Rodway (New York: Avon, 1960).
123. Richard L. Rubenstein, Power Struggle: An Autobiographical Confession (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), p. 86, pp. 428-41.
124. Richard L. Rubenstein, "The Symbols of Judaism and the Death of God," in After Auschwitz, pp. 226-41.
125. Edward H. Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews: 23 Centuries of Anti-Semitism (New York: Macmillan, 1965);
126. A. Roy Eckardt, Elder and Younger Brothers: The Encounter of Christians and Jews (New York: Scribner's, 1967);
127. Franklin H. Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1975);
128. Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).
129. James W. Parkes, The Conflict of Church and Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Anti-Semitism (Cleveland: World Publications, 1961 <1934>).
130. James W. Parkes, An Enemy of the People: Anti-Semitism (New York: Penguin Books, 1946);
131. James W. Parkes, The Emergence of the Jewish Problem, 1878-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946);
132. James W. Parkes, Judaism and Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).
133. Thomas Sugrue, "Introduction," in Malcolm Hay, The Foot of Pride: The Pressure of Christendom on the People of Israel for 1900 Years (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), p. xx.
134. Hay, The Foot of Pride, p. 4.
135. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 164.
136. For Tillich's VOA broadcasts, see Against the Third Reich: Paul Tillich's Wartime Addresses to Nazi Germany, eds. Ronald H. Stone and Mathew Lon Weavor (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1998).
137. Michael Phayer and Eva Fleischner, Cries in the Night: Women Who Challenged the Holocaust (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1997), pp. 94-110.
138. The Seelisberg Conference(New York: National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1947).
139. Gilbert, The Vatican Council and the Jews, pp. 30-31.
140. Cardinal Richard Cushing, "Comments," in Jules Isaac, Has Anti-Semitism Roots in Christianity? trans. Dorothy and James W. Parkes (New York: National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1961), p. 10.
141. Bernhard E. Olson, "Introductory Essay," in Isaac, Has Anti-Semitism Roots in Christianity?, p. 12.
142. Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964).
143. John Hersey, The Wall (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950).
144. Ernst Pawel, "Fiction of the Holocaust," Midstream 16:6 (1970), pp. 15-17.
145. Cole, Selling the Holocaust, pp. 21-36.
146. Bruno Bettelheim, "The Ignored Lessons of Anne Frank," Harper's Magazine (November 1960), pp. 45-50;
147. Cynthia Ozick, "Who Owns Anne Frank?", The New Yorker, October 6, 1997, pp. 76-87;
148. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank," in Lessons and Legacies, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1991), pp. 243-78.
149. Jewish Film Advisory Committee's 1957 letter to George Stevens, quoted in Judith E. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1987), p. 72.
150. Also see Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film, pp. 59-83.
151. Pawel, "Fiction of the Holocaust," pp. 17-18.
152. Leon Uris, Exodus (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1958).
153. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), pp. 959-79.
154. Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 1-79.
155. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 287-94.
156. Bernard Postal, "Holocaust Memorials and Landmarks in the United States and Canada," in The Holocaust: An Annotated Bibliography and Resource Guide, ed. David M. Szonyi (New York: National Jewish Resource Center, 1985), pp. 277-311.
157. http://www.1939club.com.
158. Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking Press, 1995), p. 8;
159. Stephen J. Whitfield, "The Holocaust in the American Jewish Mind," Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), pp. 33-34.
160. For the list of questions posed to participants, see "Symposium on Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals," Commentary 31:4 (1961), p. 311;
161. "Letters: Symposium I," Commentary 31: 6 (1961), pp. 528-33
162. and "Letters: Symposium II," Commentary, 32:1 (1961), pp. 68-72.
163. Charles Y. Glock, Gertrude J. Selznick, and Joe L. Spaeth, The Apathetic Majority: A Study Based on Public Responses to the Eichmann Trial (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 19-29.
164. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 678-79;
165. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1961).
166. For a table of different estimates of Jewish losses during the Holocaust, see Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 177
167. Glock et al., The Apathetic Majority, p. 27.
168. Jennifer Golub and Renae Cohen, What Do Americans Know About the Holocaust? (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1993), pp. 24-26.
169. For an early survey of what Roosevelt did to help European Jews, see Edith N. Savath, "Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Jewish Crisis," American Jewish Year Book 47 (1945/1946), pp. 37-50.
170. For subsequent criticism of his failure to do more, see Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York: Random House, 1968);
171. Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust 1938-1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970);
172. Saul S. Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938-1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1973).
173. In 1992, thirty-six percent of adults and fifty-nine percent of students polled listed school as a source of their Holocaust awareness; the figures would have been lower in the early 1960s. Tom W. Smith, Holocaust Denial: What the Survey Data Reveal (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1995), p. 46.