Winner of the 2009 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish
Studies
Recipient of the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Humanities-Intellectual
& 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.
