Sociology Confronts the Holocaust

Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas

Auteur: Gerson, Judith M.; Wolf, Diane L.
Éditeur: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822339823
eISBN Pdf: 9780822389682
Lieu de publication: Durham , United States
Année de publication électronique: 2007
Mois : Juillet
Pages: 420
DDC: 940.53/18142
Langue: Anglais

Légende

This volume expands the intellectual exchange between researchers working on the Holocaust and post-Holocaust life and North American sociologists working on collective memory, diaspora, transnationalism, and immigration. The collection is comprised of two types of essays: primary research examining the Shoah and its aftermath using the analytic tools prominent in recent sociological scholarship, and commentaries on how that research contributes to ongoing inquiries in sociology and related fields.

Contributors explore diasporic Jewish identities in the post-Holocaust years; the use of sociohistorical analysis in studying the genocide; immigration and transnationalism; and collective action, collective guilt, and collective memory. In so doing, they illuminate various facets of the Holocaust, and especially post-Holocaust, experience. They investigate topics including heritage tours that take young American Jews to Israel and Eastern Europe, the politics of memory in Steven Spielberg’s collection of Shoah testimonies, and the ways that Jews who immigrated to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union understood nationality, religion, and identity. Contributors examine the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 in light of collective action research and investigate the various ways that the Holocaust has been imagined and recalled in Germany, Israel, and the United States. Included in the commentaries about sociology and Holocaust studies is an essay reflecting on how to study the Holocaust (and other atrocities) ethically, without exploiting violence and suffering.

Contributors. Richard Alba, Caryn Aviv, Ethel Brooks, Rachel L. Einwohner, Yen Le Espiritu, Leela Fernandes, Kathie Friedman, Judith M. Gerson, Steven J. Gold , Debra R. Kaufman, Rhonda F. Levine , Daniel Levy, Jeffrey K. Olick, Martin Oppenheimer, David Shneer, Irina Carlota Silber, Arlene Stein, Natan Sznaider, Suzanne Vromen, Chaim Waxman, Richard Williams, Diane L. Wolf

Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I: Reconsidering Holocaust Study
- Introduction: WHy the Holocaust? Why Sociology? Why Now?
- Sociology and Holocaust Study
Part II: Jewish Identities in the Diaspora
- Post-memory and Post-Holocaust Jewish Identity Narratives
- The Holocaust, Orthodox Jewry, and the American Jewish Community
- Traveling Jews, Creating Memory: Eastern Europe, Israel, and the Diaspora Business
- Trauma Stories, Identity Work, and the Politics of Recognition
- Responses to the Holocaust: Discussing Jewish Identity through the Perspective of Social Construction
Part III: Memory, Memoirs, and Post-Memory
- In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd: Questions of Comparison and Generalizability in Holocaust Memoirs
- Collective Memory and Cultural Politics: Narrating and Commemorating the Rescue of Jewish Children by Belgian Convents during the Holocaust
- Holocaust Testimony: Producing Identities
- Survivor Testimonies, Holocaust Memoirs: Violence in Latin America
- Historicizing and Locating Testimonies
Part IV: Immigration and Transnational Practices
- In the Land of Milk and Cows: Rural German Jewish Refugees and Post-Holocaust Adaptation
- Post-Holocaust Jewish Migration: From Refugees to Transnationals
- "On Halloween We Dressed Up Like KGB Agents": Reimaging Soviet Jewish Refugee Identities in the United States
- The Paradigmatic Status of Jewish Immigration
- Circuits and Networks: THe Case of the Jewish Diaspora
Part V: Collective Action, Collective Guilt, Collective Memory
- Availability, Proximity, and Identity in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Adding a Sociological Lens to Studies of Jewish Resistance
- The Agonies of Defeat: "Other Germanies" and the Problem of Collective Guilt
- The Cosmopolitanization of Holocaust Memory: From Jewish to Human Experience
- The Sociology of Knowledge and the Holocaust: A Critique
- Violence, Representation, and the Nation
Bibliography
Contributors
Index