Bloomsbury The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Perspectives on the Holocaust)

Review The United States and the Nazi Holocaust brings together two closely related topics that are often treated separately: Americans' response to the Nazi persecution of Europe's Jews and Americans' confrontation with the Holocaust in the aftermath of the event. Trachtenberg challenges long-held misconceptions about this history in very engaging ways. - --Daniel Greene, Professor of Modern History, Northwestern University, USAThis book shows the turbid and ambivalent context in which the US negotiated its response to the persecution of Jews in Europe. Barry Trachtenberg offers a sober, informed, engaged, and smart analysis. Political in the best sense of the word, The United States and the Nazi Holocaust is a book for a thinking reader. - --Anna Hájková, Professor of Modern European Continental History, University of Warwick, UK Product Description The United States and the Nazi Holocaust is an invaluable synthesis of United States policies and attitudes towards the Nazi persecution of European Jewry from 1933 right up to the modern day. The book, which includes 20 illustrations, weaves together a vast body of scholarly literature to bring students of the Holocaust a balanced, readable overview of this complex and often controversial topic. It demonstrates that the United States' response to the rise of Nazism, the refugee crisis it provoked, the Holocaust itself, and its aftermath were and remain to this day intricately linked to the ever-shifting racial, economic, and social status of American Jewry. Using a broad chronological framework, Barry Trachtenberg navigates us through the major themes and events of this period. He discusses the complicated history of the Roosevelt administration's response to the worsening situation of European Jewry in the context of the ambiguous racial status of Jews in Depression and World War II-era America. He examines the post-war decades in America, and discusses, over a series of chapters, how the Holocaust, like American Jewry itself, came to move from the margins to the very center of American awareness. The United States and the Nazi Holocaust considers the reception of Holocaust survivors, post-war trials, film, memoirs, memorials, and the growing field of Holocaust Studies. The reactions of the United States government, the general public, and the Jewish communities of America are all accounted for in this integrated, detailed survey. About the Author Barry Trachtenberg is Michael H. and Deborah K. Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University, USA. He is also the author of The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse University Press, 2008).