The Holocaust In American Life

The Holocaust In American Life PDF Author: Peter Novick
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547349610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Prize-winning historian Peter Novick illuminates the reasons Americans ignored the Holocaust for so long -- how dwelling on German crimes interfered with Cold War mobilization; how American Jews, not wanting to be thought of as victims, avoided the subject. He explores in absorbing detail the decisions that later moved the Holocaust to the center of American life: Jewish leaders invoking its memory to muster support for Israel and to come out on top in a sordid competition over what group had suffered most; politicians using it to score points with Jewish voters. With insight and sensitivity, Novick raises searching questions about these developments. Have American Jews, by making the Holocaust the emblematic Jewish experience, given Hitler a posthumous victory, tacitly endorsing his definition of Jews as despised pariahs? Does the Holocaust really teach useful lessons and sensitize us to atrocities, or, by making the Holocaust the measure, does it make lesser crimes seem "not so bad"? What are we to make of the fact that while Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars for museums recording a European crime, there is no museum of American slavery?

The Holocaust In American Life

The Holocaust In American Life PDF Author: Peter Novick
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547349610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Prize-winning historian Peter Novick illuminates the reasons Americans ignored the Holocaust for so long -- how dwelling on German crimes interfered with Cold War mobilization; how American Jews, not wanting to be thought of as victims, avoided the subject. He explores in absorbing detail the decisions that later moved the Holocaust to the center of American life: Jewish leaders invoking its memory to muster support for Israel and to come out on top in a sordid competition over what group had suffered most; politicians using it to score points with Jewish voters. With insight and sensitivity, Novick raises searching questions about these developments. Have American Jews, by making the Holocaust the emblematic Jewish experience, given Hitler a posthumous victory, tacitly endorsing his definition of Jews as despised pariahs? Does the Holocaust really teach useful lessons and sensitize us to atrocities, or, by making the Holocaust the measure, does it make lesser crimes seem "not so bad"? What are we to make of the fact that while Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars for museums recording a European crime, there is no museum of American slavery?

The Holocaust in American Life

The Holocaust in American Life PDF Author: Peter Novick
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 9780618082322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
An award-winning history scholar explores the impact of the Holocaust in American political and cultural life, examining its role as a moral reference point for all Americans and the ways in which Jews have used it to define a distinctive identity for themselves. Tour.

The Holocaust in American Life

The Holocaust in American Life PDF Author: Peter Novick
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description


The Holocaust and Collective Memory

The Holocaust and Collective Memory PDF Author: Peter Novick
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9780747552550
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
In a book which continues to provide heated debate, Novick asks whether defining Jewishness in terms of victimhood alone does not hand Hitler a posthumous victory, and whether claiming uniqueness for the Holocaust does not diminish atrocities like Biafra, Rwanda or Kosovo.

Americans and the Holocaust

Americans and the Holocaust PDF Author: Daniel Greene
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978821689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This edited collection of more than one hundred primary sources from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s--including newspaper and magazine articles, popular culture materials, and government records--reveals how Americans debated their responsibility to respond to Nazism. It includes valuable resources for students and historians seeking to shed light on this dark era in world history.

LIVING A LIFE THAT MATTERS

LIVING A LIFE THAT MATTERS PDF Author: Ben Lesser
Publisher: Abbott Press
ISBN: 1458202739
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
In his highly readable, educational and inspiring memoir, Holocaust Survivor Ben Lesser’s warm, grandfatherly tone invites the reader to do more than just visit a time when the world went mad. He also shows how this madness came to be—and the lessons that the world still needs to learn. In this true story, the reader will see how an ordinary human being—an innocent child—not only survived the Nazi Nightmare, but achieved the American Dream.

A Mortuary of Books

A Mortuary of Books PDF Author: Elisabeth Gallas
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479833959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Winner, 2020 JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material, given by the Jewish Book Council The astonishing story of the efforts of scholars and activists to rescue Jewish cultural treasures after the Holocaust In March 1946 the American Military Government for Germany established the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt to store, identify, and restore the huge quantities of Nazi-looted books, archival material, and ritual objects that Army members had found hidden in German caches. These items bore testimony to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis’ systematic acts of mass murder. The depot built a short-lived lieu de memoire—a “mortuary of books,” as the later renowned historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—with over three million books of Jewish origin coming from nineteen different European countries awaiting restitution. A Mortuary of Books tells the miraculous story of the many Jewish organizations and individuals who, after the war, sought to recover this looted cultural property and return the millions of treasured objects to their rightful owners. Some of the most outstanding Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Dawidowicz, Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, and Gershom Scholem, were involved in this herculean effort. This led to the creation of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc., an international body that acted as the Jewish trustee for heirless property in the American Zone and transferred hundreds of thousands of objects from the Depot to the new centers of Jewish life after the Holocaust. The commitment of these individuals to the restitution of cultural property revealed the importance of cultural objects as symbols of the enduring legacy of those who could not be saved. It also fostered Jewish culture and scholarly life in the postwar world.

Holocaust

Holocaust PDF Author: Deborah E. Lipstadt
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813573696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Immediately after World War II, there was little discussion of the Holocaust, but today the word has grown into a potent political and moral symbol, recognized by all. In Holocaust: An American Understanding, renowned historian Deborah E. Lipstadt explores this striking evolution in Holocaust consciousness, revealing how a broad array of Americans—from students in middle schools to presidents of the United States—tried to make sense of this inexplicable disaster, and how they came to use the Holocaust as a lens to interpret their own history. Lipstadt weaves a powerful narrative that touches on events as varied as the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Stonewall, and the women’s movement, as well as controversies over Bitburg, the Rwandan genocide, and the bombing of Kosovo. Drawing upon extensive research on politics, popular culture, student protests, religious debates and various strains of Zionist ideologies, Lipstadt traces how the Holocaust became integral to the fabric of American life. Even popular culture, including such films as Dr. Strangelove and such books as John Hershey’s The Wall, was influenced by and in turn influenced thinking about the Holocaust. Equally important, the book shows how Americans used the Holocaust to make sense of what was happening in the United States. Many Americans saw the civil rights movement in light of Nazi oppression, for example, while others feared that American soldiers in Vietnam were destroying a people identified by the government as the enemy. Lipstadt demonstrates that the Holocaust became not just a tragedy to be understood but also a tool for interpreting America and its place in the world. Ultimately Holocaust: An American Understanding tells us as much about America in the years since the end of World War II as it does about the Holocaust itself.

Life in a Jar

Life in a Jar PDF Author: H. Jack Mayer
Publisher: Long Trail Press
ISBN: 098411131X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 523

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Book Description
Tells story of Irena Sendler who organized the rescue of 2,500 Jewish children during World War II, and the teenagers who started the investigation into Irena's heroism.

Children of the Holocaust

Children of the Holocaust PDF Author: Helen Epstein
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140112847
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
"I set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived." The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Helen Epstein traveled from America to Europe to Israel, searching for one vital thin in common: their parent's persecution by the Nazis. She found: • Gabriela Korda, who was raised by her parents as a German Protestant in South America; • Albert Singerman, who fought in the jungles of Vietnam to prove that he, too, could survive a grueling ordeal; • Deborah Schwartz, a Southern beauty queen who—at the Miss America pageant, played the same Chopin piece that was played over Polish radio during Hitler's invasion. Epstein interviewed hundreds of men and women coping with an extraordinary legacy. In each, she found shades of herself.