The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an excerpt of Hasia’s book. The introduction is below - read the full piece here.

The Myth of Silence

Postwar American Jews did not ignore the Holocaust
The Jewish teenagers who spent the summer of 1956 at the Reform movement’s Camp Institute in Oconomowoc, Wis., edited a literary magazine, a repository of their fond memories of a summer well spent. They could not possibly have known as they cobbled together All Eyes Are on the … Literary Magazine that, a half-century later, their camp yearbook would be used to show how American Jews went about the process, text by text, artifact by artifact, and act by act, of creating a communal culture that hallowed the memory of the six million Jews who perished in Europe during the Holocaust.

Neither could they imagine that their deeds and words would play a role in undermining a widely accepted paradigm about post-World War II American Jews and the Holocaust, one which asserted that, on the whole, Jews remained silent about the catastrophe.

One camper, Sharon Feinman, said it most clearly as she focused on the summer’s theme, “Naaseh v’nishma” (”We will do and we will hear”), the words declaimed by the Israelites at Mount Sinai as they accepted the Ten Commandments. Her brief essay’s determined prose reflected the widespread concern of Jews of the United States with the Holocaust, their insistence that it be remembered, and their understanding that it affected their lives. “Everywhere,” she wrote, wherever “Jews wandered, they established centers of learning in which the deed and word were enshrined in the life of the people. The waves of persecution beat against us but our spirit remained unbroken.” She wrote: During “the dark reign of terror when Hitler and the Nazis ruled Germany … the people who called themselves the ‘master race’ murdered six million Jews.”

Commentary Magazine’s Jonathan S. Tobin has a critical take on the book. Look for Hasia’s response in this space soon.

“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.’ ”

Read the full review here.

People are already raving about the importance and originality of Hasia’s book. Here are a few samples.

Kirkus Reviews:
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.

Library Journal:
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, speaking of the destruction of European Jewry in Yom Kippur liturgy, history books, and public ceremonies ,and mobilizing its memory to promote causes such as civil rights and support for Israel. Despite this evidence, why do scholars, lay leaders, and the public today often reject the notion that American Jews discussed the slaughter of European Jewry? Diner postulates that in the 1960s young intellectuals who had little but contempt for their elders argued that they represented “new” ideas in Jewish life. These radicals, on the Right and Left of the political spectrum, went on to become Jewish professionals, including academics in Jewish studies, and promoted the concept that the older generation had ignored the Shoah. An important contribution to American Jewish historiography, this book is recommended for all libraries.

Publishers Weekly:
An NYU professor of American Jewish history, Diner (The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000) sets out to refute what she contends is an accepted truth: that until the 1960s, American Jewry suffered from a “self-imposed collective amnesia” about the Holocaust. Diner marshals considerable evidence that American Jews were aware of the Holocaust and their culture was influenced by it, from their newspapers to youth movements, to whom speakers repeatedly invoked the Holocaust. They raised $45 million in 1945 alone to succor survivors in Europe. A 1952 commemorative Passover text from the American Jewish Congress was widely distributed and reprinted yearly in Jewish newspapers. Even Adolph Lerner’s failed campaign to create a memorial in New York City demonstrates postwar American Jewish engagement with the Holocaust, Diner says. The 1961 publication of Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar” exposed both German barbarities and Soviet anti-Semitism. Diner’s worthy, innovative, diligently researched work should spark controversy and meaningful dialogue among Holocaust scholars and in the Jewish community.

From the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum:

The United States Congress established the Days of Remembrance as our nation’s annual commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust and created the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a permanent living memorial to those victims. In accordance with its Congressional mandate, the Museum is responsible for leading the nation in commemorating the Days of Remembrance, and for encouraging and sponsoring appropriate observances throughout the United States.

Observances and remembrance activities can occur during the week of Remembrance that runs from the Sunday before Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) through the following Sunday. Days of Remembrance are observed by state and local governments, military bases, workplaces, schools, churches, synagogues, and civic centers.