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

by Arlene Stein

Overview

Americans now learn about the Holocaust in high school, watch films about it on television, and visit museums dedicated to preserving its memory. But for the first two decades following the end of World War II, discussion of the destruction of European Jewry was largely absent from American culture and the tragedy of the Holocaust was generally seen as irrelevant to non-Jewish Americans. Today, the Holocaust is widely recognized as a universal moral touchstone. In Reluctant Witnesses, sociologist Arlene Stein--herself the daughter of a Holocaust survivor--mixes memoir, history, 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. If survivors tended to see Holocaust storytelling as mainly a private affair, their children--who reached adulthood during the heyday of identity politics--reclaimed their hidden family histories and transformed them into public stories. Reluctant Witnesses documents how a group of people who had previously been unrecognized and misunderstood managed to find its voice. It tells this story in relation to 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, it affirms that confronting traumatic memories and catastrophic histories can help us make our world mean something beyond ourselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199381920
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/04/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Arlene Stein is Professor of Sociology at Rutgers and the author of three books about American culture and gender politics. Her previous works include The Stranger Next Door, which won the Ruth Benedict Prize, and Sex and Sensibility. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The Forward, and Jacobin, among other publications.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Interrupted Lives Chapter 2: Desperately Seeking Normality Chapter 3: The Children Wish to Remember What the Parents Wish to Forget Chapter 4: Claiming Victimhood, Becoming Survivors Chapter 5: Ghosts into Ancestors Chapter 6: Too Much Memory? Holocaust Fatigue in the Era of the Victim Appendix: Methodological notes, Interviewees Notes References Index

Editorial Reviews

"With her new book, Reluctant Witnesses, Arlene Stein makes a welcome contribution to our understanding of Holocaust memory in the United States Sharing her family story, interweaving multiple levels of analysis, and bringing US social movements as well as sociological theory to bear on the origins of this second generation makes Stein's work an innovative approach in the [children of survivors] literature. Her arguments are evocative and compelling." - American Journal of Sociology

"Stein makes a persuasive case that connects the rise of Holocaust consciousness with the advance of social justice movements often equated with the ascent of the Baby Boomers, during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s." -Genocide Studies International

"Reluctant Witnesses models a form of empathic scholarship that is rigorous without being jargon, persuasive without being polemical, theoretical without privileging theory. It is personal without sacrificing objectivity, critical without losing sight of empathy. It is the kind of scholarship our world needs more of." -Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society

"A must read for people working in Holocaust studies and numerous related fields." -Cultural Sociology

"Stein has written an important book on the sociology of Holocaust memories; the reality of the Holocaust like other realities, did not and does not speak for itself. She is right about the tremendous cultural change from privacy to public display of suffering." -Contemporary Sociology

"Arlene Stein traces the history and transformation of Holocaust consciousness from the postwar period to the present, deftly interweaving oral history, interviews, and autobiography. Reluctant Witnesses is a compelling portrayal of the paradoxes, complexities, and politics of Holocaust memory.... an important, necessary contribution." -Marita Sturken, author of Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero

"Today, growing numbers of Americans are both obsessed with-and fatigued by-efforts to remember the Holocaust. After years of relative silence, how did we get here? In this perceptive and profoundly moving account, Reluctant Witnesses shows how feminist and therapeutic ideas changed our culture, opening up new spaces for victims of world-shattering events to speak for themselves." -Phil Zuckerman, author of Living the Secular Life and Faith No More

"Reluctant Witnesses is an important addition to our understanding of what happens subsequently to victims of trauma and genocide. Though Stein's focus is on the Holocaust, her insightful and sensitive work speaks to a wide audience." -Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, Emory University

"Reluctant Witnesses shows how stories of trauma shape personal identities, families across generations, and political consciousness. No other study so clearly demonstrates how narratives are shaped as much by the historical moments in which they are told as by the history they tell." -Arthur W. Frank, author of The Wounded Storyteller and Letting Stories Breathe

"...a complex sociological and psychological exploration of what it is to be a descendant of a survivor in the 21st century. This book is a result of decades of research and interviews with children of survivors. Academics as well as those with a personal interest in the history and sociology of the second and third generation of Holocaust survivors will find value in this research." -Library Journal

"This beautiful book mixes elegy and exegesis to uncover the labors of a generation of Jewish Americans who have made meaning from and given meaning to the horrors of the Holocaust. Stein writes so well and fluidly that her rich sociological analysis reads more like an intimate family history. Highly recommended." -Public Books

"Beautifully and clearly written, Reluctant Witness presents the challenges and complexities of Holocaust remembrance through interpretive history, interviews with survivors, and the author's own stories of her life as a child of survivors. The brilliance of this book is how it painstakingly traces the distinct time periods in which attitudes shifted. Anyone interested in this topic should read this incisive and wise analysis in this outstanding volume." -New Jersey Jewish News

"[Stein's] deeply felt and researched book leaves us then with the next set of questions about which traumas will be privileged (or played against each other) and what role Holocaust Consciousness can and should claim for whom as we move further into a globalized twenty-first century not lacking in traumatic events." -Atina Grossmann, Cooper Union

From the Publisher

09/01/2014
Stein (sociology, Rutgers Univ.; The Stranger Next Door) reflects on her experiences as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor to write a complex sociological and psychological exploration of what it is to be a descendant of a survivor in the 21st century. The author describes the slow rise of Holocaust consciousness, which emerged in the 1970s as children of survivors persuaded their parents to turn "private pains into public stories" instead of blocking out the past as some had done previously. While Stein's work is academic in tone, it relates her memories of childhood experiences, both good and bad, dealing with her survivor father and her own explorations of identity. VERDICT This book is a result of decades of research and interviews with children of survivors. Academics as well as those with a personal interest in the history and sociology of the second and third generation of Holocaust survivors will find value in this research.—Felicia J. Williamson, Sam Houston State Univ. Lib., Huntsville, TX

Library Journal