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Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness

Online ISBN:
9780199381937
Print ISBN:
9780199733583
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness

Arlene Stein
Arlene Stein

Professor of Sociology

Rutgers University
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Published online:
21 August 2014
Published in print:
1 September 2014
Online ISBN:
9780199381937
Print ISBN:
9780199733583
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Reluctant Witnesses mixes history, memoir, and sociological analysis to tell the story of the rise of Holocaust consciousness in the United States from the perspective of survivors and their descendants. The public reckoning with the destruction of European Jewry, the book argues, was due to more than simply the passage of time. It took the coming of age of the “second generation”—who reached adulthood during the rise of feminism, the ethnic revival, and therapeutic culture—for survivors’ families to reclaim their hidden histories. Inspired by the changed status of the “victim” in American society, the descendants coaxed their parents to share their losses with them, transforming private pains into public stories. Reluctant Witnesses documents how a group of people who had previously been unrecognized and misunderstood managed to find their voice. It is also the story of generational change, and the changing status of trauma and victimhood in American culture. At a time when a sense of Holocaust fatigue seems to be setting in, and when the remaining survivors are at the end of their lives, Reluctant Witnesses offers a vivid reminder that the ability to speak openly about survivors’ traumatic experiences had to be struggled for, and that by confronting catastrophic histories we can make our world mean something beyond ourselves.

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