The Impact of the Holocaust in America

In past volumes of the Casden Annual Review, the annual publication of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, the editors have always tried to cast as wide a net as possible. With this volume (Volume 6) we have decided to take a different editorial tack: to focus instead on a single topic and to present articles that largely consider aspects of this topic alone. The topic we have chosen is one that, on the one hand, may seem highly familiar, since it is a well-traveled and well-considered area of interest in Jewish studies; indeed arguably the topic in modern Jewish thought: the Holocaust or Shoah. On the other hand, our aim in this volume is to consider the Shoah from a perspective that has been largely unexplored in the literature and, not only that, is particularly appropriate to the Casden Institute's area of interest: namely, the impact of the Holocaust in America. The articles herein consider topics such as the immigrant experience in coming to America after the trauma of the Holocaust; how the Shoah has shaped more recent interpretation of the Hebrew Bib the role that survivors have fulfilled in educating American youth not only about the Holocaust itself, but also about how values-especially in regard to tolerance-can and must be shaped by eye-witness testimony on the Shoah; the impact of Holocaust in film, especially in "third-generation" cinema; the issues and difficulties of presenting the Shoah in children's literature; the dialogue between Christians and Jews, especially in America, and how that dialogue has been constructively influenced and shaped by the Holocaust; the way in which Jewish business activities have altered in the post-World War II environment and in the aftermath of the Holocaust and how the lessons of the Shoah have facilitated the change from nationalist to global economy; how the image and awareness of the Holocaust developed in the American media. Yet for all the range that these articles encompass, throughout them all runs a common theme: that the Holocaust has indelibly marked almost every aspect of American culture. Indeed, we cannot think of America, American ideals and values, America's role in the world today and the future of America in an increasingly dangerous world, without recognizing that the Shoah casts a long shadow across all these concerns and serves as one of the primary points of horrific historical reference by which we, as Americans, must measure ourselves. Book jacket.