Sociology Confronts the Holocaust

by Gerson, Judith M.; Wolf, Diane Lauren

• ISBN13: 9780822339991
• ISBN10: 0822339994
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-06-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

This volume expands the intellectual exchange between researchers working on the Holocaust and post-Holocaust life and North American sociologists working on collective memory, diaspora, transnationalism, and immigration. The collection is comprised of two types of essays: primary research examining the Shoah and its aftermath using the analytic tools prominent in recent sociological scholarship, and commentaries on how that research contributes to ongoing inquiries in sociology and related fields.Contributors explore diasporic Jewish identities in the post-Holocaust years; the use of sociohistorical analysis in studying the genocide; immigration and transnationalism; and collective action, collective guilt, and collective memory. In so doing, they illuminate various facets of the Holocaust, and especially post-Holocaust, experience. They investigate topics including heritage tours that take young American Jews to Israel and Eastern Europe, the politics of memory in Steven Spielbergrs"s collection of Shoah testimonies, and the ways that Jews who immigrated to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union understood nationality, religion, and identity. Contributors examine the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 in light of collective action research and investigate the various ways that the Holocaust has been imagined and recalled in Germany, Israel, and the United States. Included in the commentaries about sociology and Holocaust studies is an essay reflecting on how to study the Holocaust (and other atrocities) ethically, without exploiting violence and suffering.Contributors. Richard Alba, Caryn Aviv, Ethel Brooks, Rachel L. Einwohner, Yen Le Espiritu, Leela Fernandes, Kathie Friedman, Judith M. Gerson, Steven J. Gold , Debra R. Kaufman, Rhonda F. Levine , Daniel Levy, Jeffrey K. Olick, Martin Oppenheimer, David Shneer, Irina Carlota Silber, Arlene Stein, Natan Sznaider, Suzanne Vromen, Chaim Waxman, Richard Williams, Diane L. Wolf

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Reconsidering Holocaust Study

Introduction: Why the Holocaust? Why Sociology? Why Now?

Sociology and Holocaust Study

Jewish Identities in the Diaspora

Post-memory and Post-Holocaust Jewish Identity Narratives

The Holocaust, Orthodox Jewry, and the American Jewish Community

Traveling Jews, Creating Memory: Eastern Europe, Israel, and the Diaspora Business

Trauma Stories, Identity Work, and the Politics of Recognition

Responses to the Holocaust: Discussing Jewish Identity Through the Perspective of Social Construction

Memory, Memoirs, and Post-Memory

In Cuba I was a German Shepherd: Questions of Comparison and Generalizability in Holocaust Memoirs

Collective Memory and Cultural Politics: Narrating and Commemorating the Rescue of Jewish Children by Belgian Convents during the Holocaust

Holocaust Testimony: Producing Post-memories, Producing Identities

Survivor Testimonies, Holocaust Memoirs: Violence in Latin America

Historicizing and Locating Testimonies

Immigration and Transnational Practices

In the Land of Milk and Cows: Rural German Jewish Refugees and Post-Holocaust Adaptation

Post-Holocaust Jewish migration: From Refugees to Transnationals

"On Halloween We Dressed Up Like KGB Agents": Reimagining Soviet Jewish Refugee Identities in the United States

The Paradigmatic Status of Jewish Immigration

Circuits and Networks: The Case of the Jewish Diaspora

Collective Action, Collective Guilt, Collective Memory

Availability, Proximity, and Identity in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Adding a Sociological Lens to Studies of Jewish Resistance

The Agonies of Defeat: "Other Germanies" and the Problem of Collective Guilt

The Cosmpolitanization of Holocaust Memory: From Jewish to Human Experience

The Sociology of Knowledge and the Holocaust: A Critique

Violence, Representation, and the Nation

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

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