Two motives have evidently driven the composition of this important book. One is the desire to correct the historical record. The author is determined to revise the common scholarly understanding of how American Jewish leaders and institutions came to terms—from V-E Day until the Eichmann trial—with the shock and horror of the Holocaust. Instead of indifference, Hasia R. Diner contends that the largest postwar Jewish community in the Diaspora tried to express its grief, to explore the meaning of the catastrophe, to help the survivors, and to struggle against oblivion. Instead of a kind of psychic numbing, American Jewry demonstrated resolve: never again. Diner also traces the effort to connect lessons drawn from the Holocaust—the menace of ignoring antisemitism, the consequences of weakening democratic and liberal values—to an era in American history that is often associated with conservative complacency, suburban self-indulgence, and political paralysis.

The second motive that animates We Remember is a yearning to vindicate the honor of American Jewry. (The author's adoption of the first-person plural in the title suggests attachment rather than distance.) This book constitutes a defense of a community that was subsequently accused not only of political febrility while the Third Reich was realizing the Final Solution, but also of minimizing the magnitude of the loss of two-thirds of European Jewry. The allure of postwar affluence and the fulfillment of the promise of full integration into American society are supposed to have led its Jewish minority into silence, which only events in Israel—the trial in Jerusalem's Beth Hamishpat of the SS “desk murderer” and then the Six-Day War—are alleged to have broken. We Remember vigorously and effectively challenges that accusation. Diner does so by marshaling more evidence of communal responsiveness than any scholar has heretofore uncovered. The evidence—from youth group programs, to memorial ceremonies, from early (and admittedly failed) efforts to build monuments, to synagogue programs—is quite overwhelming. So resourcefully has Diner tracked down sermons and song lyrics, posters and programs, that this reviewer finds it hard to imagine any future historians continuing to perpetrate the claim that an explicit communal consciousness of the Holocaust did not really surface until the 1960s.

Why did Diner's claim have to wait until 2009 before such a view could be discredited? She offers two explanations. The more speculative is that “perhaps the very grandeur and force of the Holocaust projects of the later era dwarfed the earlier, disorganized, scattered, and spontaneous ones,” Diner suggests. Beginning by the end of the 1960s, American Jewish interest in the extinction of most of European Jewry had gathered such momentum that “the colossal size of the later Holocaust memorial projects may have done much to cast those of the postwar period into oblivion” (17). Her second explanation may make some members of the historical profession wince. It is indicted for failing to encourage or require the archival research that is so amply deployed in We Remember. If ever a case were needed for the value of revisionist scholarship by examining sources that previous scholars have ignored, We Remember would be a clinching argument. If ever a monograph can be safely characterized as having altered the course that historiography might have taken, this book will have performed an immense service to the evolution of scholarship.

But one consequence of so relentless an assault on the regnant assumption of silence is unfortunate, though there is no obvious way to have solved the problem. There is an absence of the tension and drama that can make reading a pleasure rather than a duty. The historians who got this part of the American Jewish past wrong are quoted often but briefly. Then the masses of counterevidence are typically presented, rather predictably and insistently. Knowing that this book is organized around primary material that shows the devotion of American Jews to commemorating the losses inflicted on the body and spirit of their coreligionists in Europe, the reader encounters virtually no surprises. Everything is subsumed to the argument, which grants no significant variations or modifications or complications. In We Remember, potential problems are resolved in favor of the supremacy of revisionism. Take, for example, sociologist Nathan Glazer's remark in his classic American Judaism (1957), that “the two greatest events in modern Jewish history, the murder of six million Jews by Hitler and creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, have had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry” (quoted on page 329). Other scholars might be struck by the authority of this observation, and Diner herself might have raised the question of how Glazer could have gotten so wrong the contemporary agenda of the Jewish community in the United States. But instead she shifts the discussion to the sources of quickened interest (by publishers and others) in the Jewish religion, and the impact of suburbanization in stirring such curiosity. Thus a potentially jarring note is left unaddressed.

Until the publication of Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961, the most significant scholarly works on the Holocaust were by Gerald Reitlinger (who was British) and Leon Poliakov (who was French). Diner records the popularity of these works in the United States, without directly considering why no American counterpart appeared until virtually the end of the era that exhibits so much awareness of the terrible fate of European Jewry. The difficulty that Hilberg experienced in getting a publisher to accept his manuscript is unmentioned. The extraordinary impact that the diary of Anne Frank registered (as a book beginning in 1952, as a Broadway play in 1955, as a Hollywood film in 1959) are, oddly enough, downplayed in We Remember, perhaps because of the enormity of the critical response to the writings in the secret Amsterdam annex. Diner fails to mention the earlier indifference on publishers' row to The Diary of a Young Girl. But its autobiographical counterweight, Elie Wiesel's Night, which Diner labels a novel, is given even less consideration in this historical account of Holocaust consciousness. Nor does she mention that some fifteen publishers rejected as uninteresting or unmarketable Wiesel's account of his ordeal in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This pattern among publishers can perhaps be rationalized as simply folly or stupidity, rather than as a collision with the thesis of We Remember. But it would have been more nuanced had such counterevidence been absorbed and addressed.

The limits of Diner's revisionism are nevertheless sound. She does not argue that the intensity and breadth of Holocaust consciousness were symmetrical in the eras before and after 1962. “The Jews of postwar America created from nothingness the commemorative forms—literary, liturgical, political, and rhetorical—to memorialize” the doomed Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe (374). The next generation of American Jews concluded that such efforts were insufficient, and built on them, so that “the Holocaust has become a vastly enlarged, amply funded, and well-coordinated element in American Jewish community life” (372). The bar was raised so that the immediate postwar generation looked deficient in ethnic pride and in political influence, and looked unimpressive in financial resources and in Jewish identity. Perhaps. But a wider cultural shift should also be enlisted to explain the asymmetry. The public discourse of the 1950s had special attraction for subtlety and allusiveness; the 1960s marked the exaltation of let-it-all-hang-out forthrightness. In the 1950s, indirection meant that a word to describe the indescribable loss in Jewish life was elusive. By the end of the 1960s, however, a term could be widely and succinctly bestowed on what previously had been labeled “the Hitler times” or “the catastrophe” or “the six million.” A word made it easier to signal the thing, and to disseminate thereafter its historical and moral meaning.