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American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares (Paperback)
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American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares (Paperback)
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To a great extent, Holocaust consciousness in the contemporary
United States has become intertwined with American Jewish identity
and with support for right-wing Israeli politics -- but this was
not always the case. In this illuminating study, Kirsten Fermaglich
demonstrates that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many American
Jewish writers and academics viewed the Nazi extermination of
European Jewry as a subject of universal interest, with important
lessons to be learned for the liberal reform of American politics.
Fermaglich analyzes the lives and writings of Stanley M. Elkins,
Betty Friedan, Stanley Milgram, and Robert Jay Lifton, four social
scientific thinkers whose work was shaped by a liberal perspective.
For them, the Holocaust served as a critical frame of reference for
a particular issue: Elkins on slavery's legacy, Friedan on the
oppressions of domesticity, Milgram on the willingness to obey, and
Lifton on war's survivors. In each case, these thinkers were deeply
influenced by their Jewish backgrounds, whether by early encounters
with antisemitism or by the profound sense that only fate and an
ocean had spared them death in Hitler's Europe. Thus, each chose
imagery from the concentration camps, albeit utterly devoid of a
particular Jewish association, to illuminate themes that advanced
liberal politics, including civil rights, the nuclear test ban,
feminism, and Vietnam veterans' rights.
Rather than being offended by these authors' comparisons between
American institutions and Nazi concentration camps, American
audiences of all ethnic and religious backgrounds during the late
1950s and early 1960s generally cheered these authors' Nazi imagery
and adopted it as part of their own political ideology. Fermaglich
demonstrates that liberalism in the United States in the 1960s was
more substantially shaped by the Holocaust than we have previously
recognized.
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