Out of the Discourse, Into the Classroom

Abstract

As the Holocaust became more popular and pervasive in American culture, researchers became interested in how this came to be and why. The majority of the literature focused on one of two questions: first, could the Americans have done more to aid the European victims of the Holocaust during World War II? Second, how has the popularity of the Holocaust in America transformed memory of the event? The first question has been examined extensively. Historians like Arthur Morse, Henry Feingold, Monty Noam Penkower, and Martin Gilbert have argued that, in fact, the American administration could and should have done more during World War II to prevent the Nazi assault on the Jews. They point to the anti-Semitic U.S. immigration policies and the failure to heed Jewish pleas for aid and rescue.¹ David Wyman has even gone so far as to criticize the U.S. military for not directly attacking the rail lines to the Nazi death camps.² Similarly, Deborah Lipstadt has reviewed the American press coverage of the Jewish persecution during the war. She discovered that accounts of the Holocaust were often ignored, dismissed, or buried deep inside newspapers, because most editors and reporters literally found the stories “beyond belief.”³