Author Description

This book is the first comprehensive, as well as impartial, account of the various ways the people of the state of Israel, beginning with their social integration in the 1950s, grappled with the still fresh memory of the Holocaust and with finding a suitable way of commemorating it and passing that memory on to future generations. The public debate in Israel in the 1950s over the question of the Jewish response to the Nazi policy of extermination in areas under German domination during the Holocaust is the core of the book. Contrary to common assumption the book exposes the disagreements and differences of opinion which guided, and disturbed, Israeli society and its leadership, and raised fundamental questions concerning the collective memory of the Holocaust. Thus it throws light on the nature of Israeli society in the fifties as well as on the fears and the needs of its political leaders.