How did American Jews come t
o 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 consider the relationship between humanitarian aid and the narratives they employ to inspire action. By expanding our understanding of how stories about the Holocaust became part of an American discourse and considering multiple forms of Holocaust survivor accounts, Saving Our Survivors highlights the messy, diffuse, and contested nature of memory construction in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, as well as each new tragedy we confront.
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“Rachel Deblinger’s Saving Our Survivors compellingly argues that the fact that American Jews talked about the Holocaust in the immediate years after the war is only the beginning of a truly important historical insight about the relationship between narrative making, capital raising, and the meaning of survival.”
~Lila Corwin Berman, New York University
“Focused on the immediate postwar era in America, Saving our Survivors reveals how Holocaust narratives were constructed for American audiences and how survivor experiences helped motivate a wide-range of American Jewish philanthropic efforts. Rich in archival research, Deblinger’s book is a timely reassessment of the myth of postwar silence and, instead, presents a fascinating tapestry of voices, campaigns, and media that help us appreciate the many ways in which Holocaust memory has been continually shaped and reshaped.”
– Todd Samuel Presner, University of California Los Angeles
“Saving Our Survivors tells the story of how American Jewish organizations taught American Jews about the Holocaust by amplifying first-person accounts via fundraising appeals, radio shows, films, and a hodge-podge of other media strategies. By documenting these efforts, Rachel Deblinger explains how American Jewish communal organizations framed and presented the voices of survivors and aid workers and, in the process, helped American Jews make sense of the Holocaust. By looking and listening to communal narratives about the Holocaust as they were taking shape, Deblinger expands the definition of Holocaust education beyond the classroom, and makes a vital contribution to how we understand the relationship between memory-making, meaning-making, and American Jewish life in the post-war period.”
– Ari Y Kelman, Stanford University
o 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.