For the last decade scholars have been questioning the idea that the Holocaust was not talked about in any way until well into the 1970s. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence is the first collection of authoritative, original scholarship to expose a serious misreading of the past on which, controversially, the claims for a ‘Holocaust industry’ rest. Taking an international approach this bold new book exposes the myth and opens the way for a sweeping reassessment of Jewish life in the postwar era, a life lived in the pervasive, shared awareness that Jews had narrowly survived a catastrophe that had engulfed humanity as a whole but claimed two-thirds of their number.
The chapters include:
- an overview of the efforts by survivor historians and memoir writers to inform the world of the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe
- an evaluation of the work of survivor-historians and memoir writers
- new light on the Jewish historical commissions and the Jewish documentation centres
- studies of David Boder, a Russian born psychologist who recorded searing interviews with survivors, and the work of philosophers, social thinkers and theologians
- theatrical productions by survivors and the first films on the theme made in Hollywood
- how the Holocaust had an impact on the everyday life of Jews in the USA
- and a discussion of the different types, and meanings, of ‘silence’.
A breakthrough volume in the debate about the ‘Myth of Silence’, this is a must for all students of Holocaust and genocide.