The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance

Description

The United States and the Nazi Holocaust is an invaluable synthesis of United States policies and attitudes towards the Nazi persecution of European Jewry from 1933 to the modern day. The book weaves together a vast body of scholarship to bring students of the Holocaust a balanced overview of this complex and often controversial topic. It demonstrates that the United States' response to Nazism, the refugee crisis it provoked, the Holocaust, and its aftermath were-and remain to this day-intricately linked to the shifting racial, economic, and social status of American Jewry. Using a broad chronological framework, Barry Trachtenberg guides us through the major themes and events of this period. He discusses the complicated history of the Roosevelt administration's response to the worsening situation of European Jewry in the context of the ambiguous racial status of Jews in Depression and World War II-era America. He examines the post-war decades in America, and discusses how the Holocaust, like American Jewry itself, moved from the margins to the center of American awareness. This book considers the reception of Holocaust survivors, post-war trials, film, memoirs, memorials, and the growing field of Holocaust Studies. The reactions of the United States government, the general public, and the Jewish communities of America are all accounted for in this detailed survey.

Barry Trachtenberg is Michael H. and Deborah K. Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University, USA. He is the author of The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (2008).

This text crisply synthesizes much of the secondary literature on the Holocaust's impact in the US, presenting the subject within the larger context of anti-Semitism and racial hatred in American life ... This volume provides students with an entree to a fraught and all-too-timely subject. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. * CHOICE * The United States and the Nazi Holocaust brings together two closely related topics that are often treated separately: Americans' response to the Nazi persecution of Europe's Jews and Americans' confrontation with the Holocaust in the aftermath of the event. Trachtenberg challenges long-held misconceptions about this history in very engaging ways. * Daniel Greene, Professor of Modern History, Northwestern University, USA * This book shows the turbid and ambivalent context in which the US negotiated its response to the persecution of Jews in Europe. Barry Trachtenberg offers a sober, informed, engaged, and smart analysis. Political in the best sense of the word, The United States and the Nazi Holocaust is a book for a thinking reader. * Anna Hajkova, Professor of Modern European Continental History, University of Warwick, UK *