America and the Memory of the Holocaust, 1950-1965

What is Holocaust perpetrator fiction?

“…This tendency may simply reflect the continuing position of English as the lingua franca of the West, but it may also feed into the ongoing 'Americanization' of the Holocaust. For further discussion of the latter, see Lipstadt (1996), Landsberg (1997), Flanzbaum (1999, Novick (1999) Brangança, Hitler's French Literary Afterlives 1945-2017(2019. 7 For a more in-depth discussion, see Pettitt (2016).…”

“…This tendency may simply reflect the continuing position of English as the lingua franca of the West, but it may also feed into the ongoing ‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust. For further discussion of the latter, see Lipstadt (1996), Landsberg (1997), Flanzbaum (1999), Novick (1999). Exceptions that are not widely available in English include Robert Merle’s La Mort est mon métier (1952) and Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s more recent La Part de l’autre (2005).…”

“We are a people, one people”: How 1967 Transformed Holocaust Memory and Jewish Identity in Israel and the US

“…Meanwhile, public memorialization of anything but the resistance remained rare and one is hard-pressed to find political activism in the name of Jews or Israel making recourse to the Holocaust. 35 In sum, the Eichmann trial and a host of other developmentsamong them Israel's first recession and disillusionment with the post-Ben Gurion governments, increased American-Jewish security and success, coverage of Soviet Anti-Semitism and the rise of "identity" as an academic, journalistic and popular category in the US 36 -undoubtedly played an important role in predisposing a more intense engagement with the Holocaust as an episode of Jewish victimhood. However, it is also clear that they very much underdetermined the form it would take during the crisis of 1967 and in the months, years and the decades to follow.…”

“…." 43 Indeed the 1968 AJC Yearbook postulates a similar progression, noting "The conflict aroused in American Jewry unpredictedly [sic] intense feelings regarding Israel, Jewish survival and of their own sense of Jewish identity." It continues: the "trauma, perhaps best diagnosed as a reliving of the Holocaust," was, quoting Arthur Herzberg, "far more intense and widespread than anyone could have foreseen."…”

The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945–1960

“…"The prominence of the Holocaust in American Jewish identity is particularly noteworthy," Deborah Lipstadt has contended, "since throughout the 1950s and most of the 1960s it was barely on the Jewish communal or theological agenda." 3 Lucy Dawidowicz lamented "it is plain from even the most cursory review of textbooks and scholarly works by English and American historians that the awesome events of the Holocaust have not been given their historic due." 4 Though Alan Mintz acknowledges the popularity of The Diary of Anne Frank among Americans during the 1950s, he characterizes this decade as one of silence about the Jewish catastrophe.…”