This volume expands the intellectual exchange between researchers working on the Holocaust and post-Holocaust life and North American sociologists working on collective memory, diaspora, transnationalism, and immigration. The collection is comprised of two types of essays: primary research examining the Shoah and its aftermath using the analytic tools prominent in recent sociological scholarship, and commentaries on how that research contributes to ongoing inquiries in sociology and related fields.

Contributors explore diasporic Jewish identities in the post-Holocaust years; the use of sociohistorical analysis in studying the genocide; immigration and transnationalism; and collective action, collective guilt, and collective memory. In so doing, they illuminate various facets of the Holocaust, and especially post-Holocaust, experience. They investigate topics including heritage tours that take young American Jews to Israel and Eastern Europe, the politics of memory in Steven Spielberg's collection of Shoah testimonies, and the ways that Jews who immigrated to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union understood nationality, religion, and identity. Contributors examine the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 in light of collective action research and investigate the various ways that the Holocaust has been imagined and recalled in Germany, Israel, and the United States. Included in the commentaries about sociology and Holocaust studies is an essay reflecting on how to study the Holocaust (and other atrocities) ethically, without exploiting violence and suffering.

Contributors. Richard Alba, Caryn Aviv, Ethel Brooks, Rachel L. Einwohner, Yen Le Espiritu, Leela Fernandes, Kathie Friedman, Judith M. Gerson, Steven J. Gold , Debra R. Kaufman, Rhonda F. Levine , Daniel Levy, Jeffrey K. Olick, Martin Oppenheimer, David Shneer, Irina Carlota Silber, Arlene Stein, Natan Sznaider, Suzanne Vromen, Chaim Waxman, Richard Williams, Diane L. Wolf

The trauma of the Jewish Holocaust has had the effect in scholarship of marginalizing it as a special case within the study of diaspora, ethnicity, and collection memory, yet as the contributors to this collection argue, the Holocaust and its aftermath have much to contribute to these discourses

About the Author

Judith M. Gerson is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she is also an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Jewish Studies.

Diane L. Wolf is Professor of Sociology and a member of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland.

Reviews
"Sociology Confronts the Holocaust does not simply reflect a field: It creates one. The productive movement back and forth between the particular case of the Holocaust and general conceptual concerns of sociology is a substantial intellectual achievement."-Robert Zussman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
"While research on the Holocaust exists in a variety of disciplines, a sociology of the Holocaust has yet to be fully developed and articulated. This book therefore fills a significant gap in Holocaust studies, bringing a much needed theoretical and empirical perspective to the field."-Janet Liebman Jacobs, author of Hidden Heritage: The Legacy of the Crypto-Jews
"This volume is a welcome addition to the field of Holocaust studies. In seeking to address the gap in the sociological study of ethnic and religious genocide, the book brings together a diverse group of social thinkers, each of whom offers a unique and important sociological approach to the study of the Holocaust." -- Janet Jacobs * Contemporary Sociology *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822339991
Author Judith M. Gerson
Format Paperback
Page Count 424
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 576g