Reluctant Witnesses

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 heydayof 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 beyondourselves.

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., 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., 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. s 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., ...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.

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.