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THE HOLOCAUST: ANTHOLOGIES AND MEMOIRS Jack Nusan Porter

The Spencer Group (ComemporaryJewryv.15 1994)

Holocaust Literature: A Handbook of Critical, Historical, and Literary Writings edited by SAUL S. FRIEDMAN. Westport, CI': Greenwood Press, 1993, Foi'eward by Dennis Klein, 677 pages (cloth).

Burning Memory: limes of Testing and Reckoning edited by ALICE L. ECKARDT. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1993, 340 pages, $88 (cloth). Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust edited and with introductions by CAROL R1TTNER and JOHN K. ROTH. New York: Paragon House, 1993, 435 pp., $26.95 (cloth).

Defiance: The Bielski Partisans: The Story of the Largest Armed Rescue of Jews by Jews During World War 11 by NECHAMA TEC. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 276 pp., $27.50 (cloth).

Prosecuting Nazi War Criminalsby ALAN S. ROSENBAUM. Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1993, 144 pages, $34.95 (cloth). The Holocaust presents social scientists with an extraordinary "case history." In the years following World War II, social scientists produced an overwhelming quantity of research in areas that either directly related to the period or to issues by the War itself. World War II was massive in its scale of death and power, towering and complex in its elemental imbalance of good and evil, majestic and stirring in its heroism, overwhelming in its multi-leveled set of meanings, overpowering in its content, beyond good and evil, beyond explanation. Every scholar feels somehow impotent when facing the enormity of this event. Still we try, and with the new Holocaust museums in Washington, Los Angeles, and Europe, we are seeing a long stream of books on the subject. Fortunately, they are nearly all good or interesting or both. I do not know how one can write a "bad" book on the Shoah. Most of the books under review here are anthologies, often based on conference papers. However, one volume deals with 1ewish resistance and especially Jewish partisans in Western Belorussia and another with Nazi war criminals. I recommend ALL of them. They should be in everyone's library. Friedman's anthology comes at an auspicious time with the rise of nee-fascist groups in Germany and the cancer of Holocaust denial

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growing. It is an excellent collection, well-bound, in short, a handsome library edition. It reminds me of an earlier collection that should be reprinted and is still relevant: Encountering the Holocaust: An Interdisciplinary Survey (edited by Byron L. Sherwin and Susan G. Ament, Chicago: Impact Press, Sperms College of Judaica, 1979). It is a time as Dennis Klein says when the "subject is victim to ideological warfare and, for that reason, threatens to vaporize completely" (p. xvii) and why these thirty-two bibliographic essays are noteworthy. Holocaust Literature is divided into three parts: Conceptual Approaches to the Holocaust, Holocaust Area Studies, and the Holocaust in Education and the Arts. Part One contains important essays on the "major texts of the Holocaust" by Annette EI-Hayek, the rise and fall of National Socialism by Reynold Koppel, selected bibliographies and interpretations of Hitler by Robert Whealey, understanding motivations in the Holocaust by Eva Fogelman, Jewish women in the resistance by Bca Stadtler, and the relationship of genocide to Holocaust Studies by the late Nora Levin. Part Two deals with area studies in such places as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, the Balkans, France, Holland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Great Britain, and German-Arab relations during the Holocaust (1933-1945). Part Three investigates school textbooks in Germany, Holocaust diaries and memoirs, the Holocaust in fiction and poetry, juvenile books, the Holocaust in art, music, and in movies, and concludes with further resomv.es for study. This book should be on every scholar's desk as a reference. Eckardt's anthology, Burning Memory, is a collection of essays, some philosophical, others historical, based on the 18th Annual Scholars Conference on the Church Struggle and the Holocaust (1988) when she was chairperson and program director. Essays include Henry Huttenbach on Kristallnacht, between burning books in 1933 and burning bodies in 1943; Paul Bartrop on refugees and the Evian Conference of 1938; the orthodox Jewish response by Gershon Greenberg; essays by Nechama Tec and Franklin Littell; rescuers of Jewish children in Poland and the Netherlands by Mordechai Paldiel; the Italian role by Susan Zuccotti; Catholics and Jews in Poland today by Iwona Irwin-Zarecka; Waldheim, the Pope, and the Holocaust by Richard L. Rubenstein; the Gypsy's fate by Gabrielle Tyrnauer; Christians and Jews in Germany today by Eberhard Bethge; and finally Black Protestantism and antisemitism by Hubert G. Locke.

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In our gender-sensitive era, it is not surprising that we should also see an examination of how the Holocaust affected women and how their coping behavior differed from men. The collection by Ritmer and Roth does that splendidly. As Myrna Goldenberg observes: "The hell was the same, but the horrors were different." Women were under "double jeopardy" as both Jews and as women--facing rape and terror--since women were the propagators of the Jewish race. Women encountered special pressures as they had to give up their children, commit forced abortions, and even kill or passively allow their children to die in order to save themselves. Yet, despite the "double jeopardy," women survived better than men. They could face hardships better; they bonded better and were less alienated. In short, they were tougher. All the great memoirs are here: Ida Fink, Etty Hillesum, Charlotte Delbo, Isabella Leitner, Gisella Perl, and Olga Lengyel. In addition there are scholarly works by Gisela Beck, Marion Kaplan, Sybil Milton, Vera Laska, Claudia Koonz, Irena Klepfisz, Deborah Lipstadt, and Joan Ringelheim. A deeply moving and powerful book. And one of these famous ladies is our very own colleague and fellow-sociologist Nechama Tec who adds to her already illustrious list of contributions a book on the Jewish resistance-the famous fighting unit and family camp of the Bielski brothers' Otryad (Russian for partisan detachment). Happily, Nechama undertook this project just in time. For example, she completed her interview with the leader Tuvia Bielski only two weeks before his death in 1987. Based on extensive interviews will all major actors in this little-known resistance, Tec's book is possibly the last testament of this 12OO-unit "family camp," a concept also new to readers. The role of the Jewish family camp was not simply to resist the Germans but to save the remnant of Polish or Ukrainian Jewry that survived the nearly successful Einsatzgruppen (special killing squads). These Jewish family camps and fighting units had to stave off attacks not only from Germans and their collaborators but from some Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian partisan brigades or simply hooligan brigades masquerading as partisans. Most partisan detachments did not survive the war. Under Bielski's superb leadership, the losses among the 12OO Jews were not more than five percent, an extraordinary rate of survival. I applaud this book and I am happy that it was a fellow social scientist who wrote it.

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Finally, I recommend Rosenbaum's short book on prosecuting Nazi war criminals, an issue it seems we should have resolved by now. However, the Demjanjuk trial (or should I say mis-trial) has thrown the very question of trials into the open. Should we spend more money on such trials or put it into Holocaust education and museum~? I feel that the latter is more important at this stage in history, fifty years after the Shoah. Should Demjanjuk be deported7 Yes, a fitting punishment is that he go back to cold, economically unstable Ukraine rather than to the warm bosom of his family in Cleveland.

JEREMIADS AND SCHOLARSHIP Samuel Z. Klausner

The University of Pennsylvania (Cantcmporarylowryv.15 1994) Observing America's Jews by MARSHAIJ~ SKLARE (edited by Jonathan Sarna). Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993, xi + 302 pp. $39.95. Jonathan D. Sama has selected and edited fifteen previously published papers by Marshall Sklare and framed them with Sklare's intellectual autobiography, a touching comment on the man as husband and father by Rose SHare, his widow, and an appreciative Afterword by his long-time friend and colleague, Charles S. Liebman. The papers are collected under four headings: American Jews and American Judaism, American Jews and Israel, Jews and American Life and Survival of the American Jewish Community. The last section, concluding with the essay "American Jewry: The Ever-Dying People," hovers over the corpus documenting an asymptotic approach to becoming a corpse. SHare's research problems are set by paradox. Almost simultaneously he observes that "The Jewish community as all organized entity has gained in visibility in recent decades rather than diminished in visibility..." (p.21) and then "...it is conceivable that American Jewry will be decimated in numbers and in status - with those Jews who survive occupying a beleaguered fortress from which many have departed whether out of fear of remaining Jewish or out of a feeling that Jewishness plays no significant part in their fife" (p. 262). To explain these contrasting observations he reviews historical archival materials, gathers social survey data or, more often than not, synthesiz-

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es the findings of others' ~ h in statements of the scientific statesman. The contrast between visibility and decimation devolves into a tragic Jeremiad presented in a quotation from Simon Rawidowicz. "Let us prepare the ground for the last Jews who will come after us and for the last Jews who will rise after them, and so on until the end of days" (quoted, p. 273). Dying becomes the Jewish way of living. SHare is a pessimist about realizing what he most treasures, Jewish survival, but he is determined, like Jeremiah, to sound the clarion and pursue the struggle for survival. He expected to, and did, die with his boots on. Other paradoxes are subtended by this master one. SHare observes that Conservatism has become the largest American lewish religious movement, but despite this growth morale has been low among its leaders. His answer involves the identification of the leadership with renascent orthodoxy while their strategy of "liberalization, beautification and innovation" failed to stem the decline of observance, a deculturalization of Conservative Judaism. In the "Greening of Judaism," he criticizes the Jewish Catalog and its authors for subverting Judaism to American youth counterculture. He is astounded, even furious, that the very Jewish "establishment" which the Catalog rejects has adopted and promoted the book. His explanation is that they misperceive the Catalog as representing a return to Judaism of lost youth albeit in their own style. The Jeremiad bemoans their distorted perception which is born, not of deep perception into the insidious subversion but out of their need to escape their frustration with alienated youth. In "Lakeville and Israel: The Six Day War and its Aftermath," he observes that the outpouring of support among even non-Zionist Jews for a threatened Israel is followed by a return to normal indifference six months later. The first response, he explains, was due to "a strong unconscious element in the reaction to crisis" relating to Jewish history from the 1930s onwards." Lakevillers needed to make a gesture against another possible Holocaust which threatened to "plunge American Jewry into total anomie." Again, the Jeremiad, Jewishness rests on clay feet. A final example is taken from his article on "intermarriage and the Jewish Future." The numbers, writes SHare, which Jewish communal workers use to assess the extent of intermarriage are low estimates. Otherwise good analysts misperceive the data in order not to face up to a crisis which contradicts their own commitment to the values of personalism, romantic love and integrationism. He predicts, and rightly

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so, a rising rate of intermarriage. The Jeremiad here is that the new cultural values blind leaders to these clear trend indicators. They take no programmatic steps to counter that trend. There is not only culture to condemn but there are leaders to blame. These include Jewishly alienated college faculty who believe themselves an intellectual "religious" community above all parochial ones, the youth of the New Left who appeal to universal values while criticizing Israel and the Jewish establishment. He tries to alert the Jewish commUlllty to the Inissionafies, not so much the cultic ones but to such as the significant Protestant groups who sponsored Key '73. In his "The Conversion of the Jews" he laments and warns the Jewish analysts seemingly blind to the history of missions to the Jews. While the Jeremiad is a moral evaluation of social action, SHare remains the careful conceptualizer. Whatever problem he elects, he always tells us that the issue is more complicated than it seems. To account for Jewish acculturation, in the opening article he offers seven concepts, independent variables, each of which may be operationalized and tested. The concepts dissect social relations at various levels. He offers a psychohistorical hypothesis that since America has no Christian medieval past, Jews who acculturate suffer no "overwhelming guilt and conflict." He offers a social structural and interactionist hypothesis that Jewish upward social mobility increases relations with gentiles and empties the ghettos. He offers a cultural hypothesis that the Jews who came here shared secularist and educational values with other Americans and so easily blend in. Marshall SHare has been called the dean of the sociology of American Jews. This volume demonstrates that he earned the title.

HEALING OR DILUTION? A Timefor Healing: American Jewry Since World War H by EDWARD S. SHAPIRO (Vol. 5 of The Jewish People in America edited by Henry Feingold). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 313 pp. 1992. $145 (set). Samuel C. Heilman Queens College, CUNY (ContemporaryJewryv15 1994) This story of contemporary Jewry (the last volume in the American Jewish History series edited by Henry Feingold) begins in a period that

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for a long time was overshadowed by its far more tumultuous predecessor decades. Compared to the preceding years, the decade after World War H seemed a lull after the storm. Although far from placid, it was apparently a calm enough time for planting or, morn precisely, replanting Jewish life in America. The harvest would come later. For however tumultuous the first half of this century was for Jewry in general - with its mass migrations, socio-economic changes, two world wars, pogroms and Holocaust, and the remarkable and miraculous re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in Israel - the last four end half decades have been no less decisive. Inexorably, the events that have allowed Jews to live in relative security have presented them with perhaps an even greater challenge than did the adversity and upheaval of the years leading up to 1950. The new haven in America, with its myriad of new possibilities and absence of organized anti-Semitism, made the membrane of Jewish life almost completely permeable. Moreover, the core began to shrink while the periphery was pulled ever further away. American Jews became no less, and some might argue even more, American than any other group. During the reorganization of American life in the last half of this century, Jews jumped into the thick of things and were caught up in the whirlwind. These are the years Shapiro chooses to call "A Time for Healing," in a volume he subtitles "American Jewry since World War II." While Shapiro is certainly correct in suggesting that the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust called for healing, any objective reading of the slow but apparently inexorable demographic, religious, and cultural erosion of Jewish life in America - an erosion that Shapiro himself describes - confirms that the period was anything but a time when the condition of American Jewish was healed. To be sure, Shapiro is correct in his assertions that throughout these years, Jews experienced "rapid social and economic mobility," had to adapt to "affluence and freedom," and were involved in a variety of causes (not always or even most frequently Jewish ones, by any means). However, the evidence suggests that many did so while transforming their Jewish identity and involvement into something passive at best, a background heritage, rather than allowing it to become an active part of their lives. It is hard to call such transformation, "healing." The evidence Shapiro offers that Jews were becoming more assertive and proud of their Jewish identity struck me as sometimes marginal at best. For example, the fact that Jewish Bess Myerson became Miss America or that Jewish ball player Hank Greenberg hit a home run to win the 1945 American League pennant for the Tigers

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(two events Shapiro. chose to highlight in his introduction) seem emblematic of very little that would follow for American Jewry. Indeed, there is too much reference to such popular culture figures (Arthur Murray, Ann Lauders and Ralph Lauren as well as Barry Manilow and Barbra Streisand make the list) as a barometer of American Jewish life. I would have preferred a way to understand how it has happened that American Jewry hangs between a feeling of being at home in America and an anxiety about its future survival. To be sure, by the end of the volume, although still making reference to figures in the news (e.g., NeLl Rudenstine, the newly selected President of Harvard University, son of Jewish father and Italian Catholic mother, raised with little or no Jewish identity), Shapiro has demonstrated that rather than being a time of healing, this period may have been less "cheery." That is, as he puts it in one chapter, "the diffusion of Jewish population," not only into suburbia but throughout America, "diluted Jewish identity," and few beyond the Orthodox (and some who were committed to philanthropic work or Zionism) manifested much passion in their Judaism and Jewish identity. That is, in the final analysis, Shapiro allows the reader to see the ambiguity and ambivalence of American Jewish life, a people who, for example (as Shapiro quotes Eugene Borowitz putting it), "can boast of men who are zealously committed to interfaith activities, but who have no faith of their own . . . . " In his narrative, Shapiro jumps back and forth across the decades as if these periods are somehow collapsible into a single unit. Of course, there are crucial distinctions between the relative quiescence of the Fifties, the turbulence and ferment of the Sixties and Seventies, the decline of Jewish involvement characteristic of the Eighties and the reorganization of the current decade. Much of this variation is lost in the broad sweep of Shapiro's approach. Still, there is much to recommend this book, particularly as something of a collection of headlines of the period. Moreover, Shapiro writes in an often engaging style with an ability to provide readers with a phrase or line (either quoted or his own) that echoes in your mind long after the book is put down. For example, in explaining how much American Jews socially and psychologically became part of this country he writes: "the American Jewish theme song was not 'Hatikvah' but 'God Bless America,' a song written by Irving Berlin, a first generation product of New York's Lower East Side." Readers will likely find this style appealing. Moreover, it is an insight into American Jewry that sounds just about fight.