Post-World-War-Ii American Jewry and the Confrontation with Catastrophe (Part Two: Recent American Jewish History, 1954-2004‪)‬

From the perspective of early-twenty-first-century American Jewish communal culture, few issues loom as large or carry as much valence in the performance of Jewish identity as the Holocaust, the horrific destruction of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis and the obliteration of their communities. That cataclysmic event has come by 2004 to play a pivotal role in the shaping of American Jewry's political and cultural agendas. Jewish communities across the United States have created Holocaust memorials, large physical monuments, often set boldly in highly public places. They have lobbied to make the study of the Holocaust a part of the social studies curricula in their various states. Jewish educational institutions have created volumes of instructional material on how best to teach the Holocaust, producing guidelines, teachers' manuals, and textbooks. Jewish communities as organized bodies representing the panoply of institutions that comprise the communal infrastructure sponsor Holocaust remembrance rituals, replete with traditional and innovative liturgies and attended by public officials who come annually to express their solidarity with the Jewish people. Jewish organizations have developed informational packets that are distributed to schools, synagogues, and organizations to help communities remember. The memorial gatherings, as well as the organized pilgrimages to the sites of the Nazi death camps in Europe and newly written liturgical texts, have catapulted the Holocaust to the near top of the American Jewish repertoire of performance