Saving Our Survivors

How American Jews Learned About the Holocaust

Rachel Deblinger (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

224 Seiten

2025
Indiana University Press (Verlag)
978-0-253-07270-2 (ISBN)

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How did American Jews come to learn about the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of the war? What kinds of images and representations of Holocaust survivors first circulated in America, when most Jewish survivors were still stuck in European displaced persons camps? Drawing on communal records and previously unexamined cultural materials, Saving Our Survivors details the kinds of narratives that inspired American Jewish action in the wake of the Holocaust and argues that American Jewish communal life became a significant site of knowledge formation and dissemination about the Holocaust. Through organizational campaign materials, public speeches, appeal letters, brochures, posters, radio broadcasts, and short films, American Jews were compelled to act as heroes, saving Jewish lives and a Jewish future.
Bringing postwar communal narratives into the longer history of Holocaust memory in America challenges our understanding of what Holocaust narratives look and sound like and invites us to consider the relationship between humanitarian aid and the narratives they employ to inspire action. By expanding our understanding of how stories about the Holocaust became part of an American discourse and considering multiple forms of Holocaust survivor accounts, Saving Our Survivors highlights the messy, diffuse, and contested nature of memory construction in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, as well as each new tragedy we confront.

Rachel Deblinger is Director of the Modern Endangered Archives Program at the UCLA Library, a granting program that supports digitization, preservation, and access to at-risk cultural heritage materials from around the world. She is a member of the UCLA Holocaust Research Lab and continues to write and teach about digital archives and Holocaust memory in America.

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: In a World Still Trembling
1. Heartstrings and Purse Strings: Fundraising and the Battle for Jewish Survival
2. Voicing Survivor Narratives: Postwar American Radio and Refugee Policy
3. Translating Postwar Europe: American Jewish Aid Workers as Secondary Witnesses
4. Sending Hope, Securing Peace: Volunteerism and Direct Aid in the Early Cold War
Conclusion: Toward a Longer History of American Holocaust Memory
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	10.04.2025
Reihe/Serie	The Modern Jewish Experience
Zusatzinfo	12 b&w illus.
Verlagsort	Bloomington, IN
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	308 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik ► Sozialpädagogik
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
ISBN-10	0-253-07270-0 / 0253072700
ISBN-13	978-0-253-07270-2 / 9780253072702
Zustand	Neuware