Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love. American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962, New York-London, New York University Press, 2009, 23 $.

Reviewed by Simon Perego

Translated by Michael C. Behrent

 

Hasia R. Diner’s latest book, We Remember with Reverence and Love. American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962, was born out of unease—the unease that Diner, a professor of history at New York University, recalls feeling when reading critiques of American Jews for their alleged indifference, during the postwar years, to the genocide of their European brethren. This frustration led her to write her lengthy new book, which seeks to dispel what Diner without reservations calls a “myth,” in the term’s most common sense (i.e., a falsehood). This is not the first time that Diner has taken an interest in Jewish memory in the United States: while also authoring works in keeping with the multidisciplinary spirit of Jewish studies, which ties Jewish history to ethnic studies [1] as well as women’s studies, [2] she explored, in 2000, the representation and uses of the mythic New York City neighborhood of the Lower East Side in the Jewish American imagination. [3] Yet it is to a far more sensitive myth that her new book is devoted.

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