Saving Our Survivors : How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust

How did American Jews come to learn about the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of the war?What kinds of images and representations of Holocaust survivors first circulated in America, when most Jewish survivors were still stuck in European displaced persons camps?Drawing on communal records and previously unexamined cultural materials, Saving Our Survivors details the kinds of narratives that inspired American Jewish action in the wake of the Holocaust and argues that American Jewish communal life became a significant site of knowledge formation and dissemination about the Holocaust.Through organizational campaign materials, public speeches, appeal letters, brochures, posters, radio broadcasts, and short films, American Jews were compelled to act as heroes, saving Jewish lives and a Jewish future.Bringing postwar communal narratives into the longer history of Holocaust memory in America challenges our understanding of what Holocaust narratives look and sound like and invites us to c