We Remember with Reverence and Love

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. Whether motivated by fear, shame, or the desire to assimilate, the Jewish community in the United States simply did not memorialize the Holocaust until the Eichmann trial and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War made it socially acceptable for them to do so. In a compelling work sure to draw fire from academics and pundits alike, Hasia R. Diner shows this 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 post-war 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. Uncovering a wonderfully rich and incredibly varied trove of remembrances -- in song, literature, liturgy, public display, and hundreds of other forms -- the NYU professor shows that publicly memorializing those who died in the Holocaust was a deep and powerful element of Jewish life in post-war America. Not only does she marshal enough evidence to utterly destroy 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 post-war 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 post-war years. This distorted legacy has been transformed by two generations of scholars, writers, rabbis, and Jewish community leaders into a taken-for-granted truth. Diner has at last recovered these vital years in American Jewish history, and radically alters our understanding not only of post-war America Jewry, but of the ways that the Holocaust and the 1960s alike continue to reverberate in our lives.