American Sociology and Holocaust Studies

Front matter

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Contents

Ackrowledgments 5.35.05 6 oa Gh BG aid aan alan E EG xi Preface Su bg eee Soassvi exp EPE o xiii Introduction: srusen aeea Aiaet aie beet E E dae e E ons xv The Famous October 2001 Conference: The Sociological Turning Point ...45.3.6000.000s0s00se00e0%s xviii MChOGCO GV. si.cndesansrcendereidenrapentarennasndes E xxiv English-Language Sources, .3.6.c005s0sse scr a cry eases es xxviii Chronology a 4.08 dasansadacasusestutadsagessweedeesesaies XXX The Outline of the Bók isei errean a E eS xxXxİ

1. Sociological Thinking about the Holocaust in the

LLA Preliminaty ssc.caacedteenseneed decd ietoveavaetasaeeds 1 12; A Totalitarian Ode, orgies hte brnt see eabe twee sedation 9 1.3. Reflections on Anti-Semitism: Frankfurt School Reactions to Nazi AO CIWS :.3 64-348 Saag eau sekar anaana eas 45-444 14 1.4. An Open Case: Talcott Parsons and National Socialism, from 1.4.1. Parsons Seven Published Papers 3.024244 <<0ss<as ne 29 1.4.2. The Seven Unpublished Writings <0 casas cceesvccenves 31 1.4.3. Years of Silence (1946-1948)... 0.0... c cece eee eee 37 1.4.4. The Parsons Controversy over His “Role in 1.6. The NSDAP and the Consensus: Between Mebetle and Lipset 25 asiaparinvase cass xeaysdeayaneyssans 66 1.6.2. Lipsets Election Analysis, ¢sccacaaatadn aie dawaanas ais 75 viii | Contents

Preface

At a time when references to the Holocaust saturate American popular culture and the media, and at a time when the so-called Final Solution has come to epitomize absolute evil in the United States - a country that opened a museum in the heart of its capital dedicated to an event that took place, on foreign soil, more than two decades before finally opening one dedicated to the history of African Americans - it is difficult to imagine a time when the Holocaust was not considered the moral and historical touchstone, tout court. In fact, as historian Peter Novick and others have shown, the history of the Holocaust - or rather its reception — has a history itself: it did not always receive the same level of public or scholarly attention that it does today. And the same holds true for Germany. Raul Hilberg, the late doyen of Holocaust studies in the United States, once observed that the genocide of the European Jews attracted some attention in the Federal Republic in the 1960s as a result of the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials, but was not a focal point of the “sixty-eighters,” i.e., the youthful participants in the protest movement that rocked Germany in the latter part of the decade by asking their parents’ generation what they had done during the Third Reich. It was not until a decade later, in fact, with the broadcast of the American miniseries Holocaust in West Germany in 1979, that the Final Solution finally entered popular consciousness there; it has since become a perennial source of public discussion.

That the reception of the Holocaust has a history that changed over time has generally become an accepted idea — one that has also come to be accepted with regard to the field of American sociology, as Adele Valeria Messina reminds us in this fine study, the first one-volume synthesis in English of the history of the sociology of the Holocaust in the United xiv | Preface

States. But, as the author shows, there was no “delay” in approaching the Holocaust: rather, it was a topic that attracted attention in American sociological circles immediately after 1945 - and even during the war itself. Drawing on an abundance of evidence, Messina not only debunks that misperception, but also persuasively describes the reasons how and why the idea of a “missing tradition” in American sociology came about. As a historian of modern Germany, there is another aspect of this review of American sociological studies of the Holocaust from the end of the Second World War through the present that I find especially attractive: by alerting us to a number of important studies that have unjustly been long neglected, it points to ways in which historians can better integrate the sociological tradition of Holocaust studies into their own field. And, as the author herself concludes, her monograph strongly suggests the need to revisit the sociological traditions of other countries as well, where the study of the Holocaust may very well have an equally rich heritage. By alerting us to this possibility, Messina has performed a valuable service to her own field, as well as to cognate ones such as my own.

Andrew I. Port Professor of History, Wayne State University Editor, Central European History

Introduction

Just as with many good things that happen by chance, this book has also come to be by happenstance: it is a bit associated with a fortunate event. When I started to approach the Holocaust topic, by reading Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) by Zygmunt Bauman, I sincerely knew almost nothing of what it really meant. In my mind, I thought I knew enough about the Holocaust: around 6 millions of Jews were killed. That’s all I needed to know. But in working with a feeling that I had upon trying to look at it more closely, I started to examine any writing related to the topic I could find. One day my eyes accidentally fell on an article by Burton P. Halpert: “Early American Sociology and the Holocaust: The Failure of a Discipline” (2007). I had never read such a thing: it was absolutely new for me. So I proceeded with the abstract, and then my eyes ran over this passage:

American sociology, established as an academic discipline in 1905, passed through two early developmental stages, Christian reformism and sociological positivism, together forming the basis for what was taught and researched in the academy. Topics not fitting this religious and positivistic paradigm were dismissed by the leaders of the discipline. Included among the neglected topics was the Holocaust, the paradigmatic genocide of the twentieth century. Permeated with religious ideology and anti-Semitism, American sociology as practiced in the leading universities in the United States institutionalized a professional milieu that precluded recognition of the Holocaust, even after World War IL.

1 Burton P. Halpert, “Early American Sociology and the Holocaust: The Failure of a Discipline,” Humanity & Society 31(2007): 6.

xvi | Introduction

I really understood that something was amiss in my mind and that the Holocaust was a more deeply felt question. Contemporaneously I was becoming fascinated with Italian book Auschwitz e gli intellettuali by Enzo Traverso.* These two works, like two heavy stones, were making room in my consciousness and thought, and “like a beacon in the night” they were starting to illuminate my research. Actually, I was finding myself facing a new perspective of study. This was my starting point: I wanted to have more knowledge of the scholars of sociology and about the failure of sociology concerning the Holocaust.

Halpert’s statement—that “American Sociology permeated with religious ideology and anti-Semitism institutionalized a professional milieu that precluded recognition of the Holocaust”—became a nagging, burdensome question for me: I continuously asked myself how Christian reformism and sociological positivism could be related to the Holocaust. Once more conscious of this, I commenced to peruse whatever Holocaust sources (symposium publications, papers, articles, books, essays, letters to the editor, reviews, and so on) and more and more to look at any writing about sociology and the destruction of the Jews. So, step by step, I was focusing on the approach sociology adopted in studying the Holocaust.

Since Halpert’s article seemed to confirm the thesis according to which the post-Holocaust sociology started with Modernity and the Holocaust by Bauman, I wanted to verify that. Thus this book resulted from two questions: Does post-Holocaust sociology only start with Modernity and the Holocaust by Bauman in 1989 and after the fall of Berlin Wall? This is a concern of my study. The second question has to do with the role Bauman’s book played in both American sociology and the wider Holocaust discussion, namely, should it be considered an exception in the field, as most scholars appear to think it is. In searching for an answer to these questions, I started to examine the sociology of the Holocaust and its related themes, and I ran into a set of unforeseen and astonishing outcomes beyond the Holocaust and concerned with academic realm.

I hope to make the reader aware of the “Jewish problem” of sociology and provide what this academic discipline urgently needs: a one-volume history

2 Enzo Traverso, Auschwitz e gli intellettuali: La shoah nella cultura del dopoguerra (Bologna: il Mulino, 2004 [1997]).

Introduction | xvii of the sociology of the Holocaust, that is, a single volume suited for a broad audience.* Moreover, although I run the clear risk of some omissions, I hope that my approach will be sufficient to point out the fundamental issues.

Since my original doubt occupied me with reviewing the history of sociology, this book is going to offer the first résumé in English of up-to-date research on the sociology surrounding the destruction of the Jews during World War II: a genocide that did not have its beginning in “mobile killing operations” and “killing center operations,’ as Raul Hilberg states. The destruction of the Jews, between 1933 and 1945, was prepared by certain steps: a definition by decree, concentration phases, and deportations.*

Even if this book affords a guide to the current state of knowledge, it does not aim to present itself as the last word on the subject. Filled with new elements and aspects that challenge contemporary and common scholarly theses, the volume tries to examine, as well as it can, the sociological literature that studied the Holocaust from the end of the conflict to the present day. Further, I will investigate the event of the Holocaust by retracing some stages of the sociological scholarship. Thus I am going to analyze sociology as academic corpus and as a discipline, namely, the sociological devices and concepts adopted by sociologists over the years in comprehending the Holocaust and the focus of sociological thoughts confronted by the event. Additionally, in rethinking the sociology of the Holocaust, the book will move across the history of the same sociology. However, the focus on almost every page is on the “alleged delay of sociology” in the comprehension of the Jewish genocide.

Before 1989, the year Modernity and the Holocaust by Bauman was published, scholars used to speak of a sociological problem, in the sense that the sociologists “have been reluctant to study the Holocaust” or “have so far failed to explore in full the consequence of the Holocaust.”

3 Ronald J. Berger, review of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas, ed. Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Wolf, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 27, no. 1 (2008): 151, accessed October 2, 2009, doi:10.1353/sho.0.0275.

4 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961),43-53, 106-635; David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949 (London: Macmillan, 2016).

5 Fred E. Katz, “A Sociological Perspective to the Holocaust; Modern Judaism 2, no. 3 (1982): 273.

6 Zygmunt Bauman, “Sociology after the Holocaust,” British Journal of Sociology 39, no. 4 (1988): 469.

xviii | Introduction

Briefly put, few sociological works dealt with the Holocaust, with the exception of, for example, Accounting for Genocide by Helen Fein in 1979.’ “The upshot of sociologists’ silence,’ in Fred Katz’s words, “is that distinctive sociological contributions to knowledge of the Holocaust remain relatively untapped?’ Hence, the exigency and urgency for a book on the sociology of the Holocaust that collects and analyzes sociological works (authors and their theories) that have dealt with the phenomenon, especially because things seem not to have changed much since Barry Dank stated in 1979 that “there is in essence no American sociological literature on the Holocaust.’ Therefore, this book attempts to solve the problem. I will start with an important conference, offering as balanced an outline of as many facets of its points as possible.

THE FAMOUS OCTOBER 2001 CONFERENCE: THE SOCIOLOGICAL TURNING POINT

An international conference on “Sociological Perspectives on the Holocaust and Post-Holocaust Jewish Life” took place at Rutgers University in New Jersey, October 25 to 27, 2001. In the working conference, sociologists and specialists well acquainted with Holocaust discourse and its familiar topics (from Jewish identity and migration to collective memory, by way of ethnicity and so on) participated.

What mattered, in the eyes of these academics, in those three days of the conference, was principally the analysis and the viewpoint of the situation, that is, sociology’s status in respect to the Holocaust. A big role in the satisfactory outcome of the symposium was played, particularly, by Judith M. Gerson—associate professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she is also an affiliate faculty

7 Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Response and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1979).

8 Katz, “A Sociological Perspective to the Holocaust,” 273.

9 Barry M. Dank, review of On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars, by Celia S. Heller, Contemporary Sociology 8, no. 1 (1979): 129. For example, Bauman speaks of a symposium on “Western Society after the Holocaust” summoned in 1978 by the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Social Problems, but it was only one episode. See Jack N. Porter, “The Holocaust as a Sociological Construct,’ Contemporary Jewry 14, no. 1(1993): 185.

Introduction | xix member of the Department of Jewish Studies and a recipient of a residential research fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—and by Diane L. Wolf, professor of sociology and a member of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of California, Davis.

Hosted by the Institute for Women’s Leadership of the Rutgers University, “Sociological Perspectives” aimed at favoring a scholarly dialogue and interchange between intellectuals and researchers working in Holocaust Studies and related fields for enhancing Holocaust research in sociology and called for a comparative analysis, as evident from invited papers and contributions.

Thanks to the support of several organizations (such as the American Sociological Association, the National Science Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, and the Research Council of Rutgers University) and the concrete and solid work by many scholars, the conference took place and, first and foremost, it was possible to address relevant questions surrounding why Holocaust Studies programs were considered marginal to most academic disciplines and why sociologists had not taken up this issue years before.

During the conference, scholars mostly agreed that there had been a delay of sociology in studying the genocide of the Jews—a recurring expression was “silence” (of sociology) in relation to the Holocaust—and that there was a “dearth of a sociological understanding of the Shoah?!

In almost a general scholarly consensus, it seemed that only Modernity and the Holocaust by Bauman had broken the silence of sociological studies on the Holocaust. And this was in 1989, after the fall of Berlin Wall,

10 Among numerous presentations, I mention the following: “Remembrance without Recognition: Jewish Life in Germany Today” by Y. Michal Bodemann; Post-Holocaust Identity Narratives: A Sociological Approach to Collective Consciousness, Memory and History” by Debra Renee Kaufman; “Availability, Proximity, and Identity in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Adding a Sociological Lens to Studies of Jewish Resistance” by Rachel L. Einwohner; “On Halloween We Dressed Up Like KGB Agents’: Identity Strategies of Second-Generation Soviet Jews” by Kathie Friedman-Kasaba; “The Holocaust and Jewish Identity and Identification in the United States” by Chaim I. Waxman; and “The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory” by Daniel Levy. See Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Wolf, eds., Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 3, 11.

xx | Introduction when the book was published. Indeed, the fall of the Berlin Wall constitutes a decisive moment in the history of Europe because next the collapse of communism, the resulting opening of the archives of the East, and the outbreak of civil war in ex-Yugoslavia (1991-95) all led several social scientists to reapproach, in their academic discussions and with new perspectives, the causes of the genocide of the Jews. It is not an accident that, in 1999, a workshop on “The Holocaust and Contemporary Genocide” took place at the University of Minnesota: almost as if in response to the genocide against Kosovar Albanians in 1998-99. The civil war in the ex-Yugoslavia awakened the “historical sociology of genocide?! This will be more evident in Chapter 3.

Now, Bauman’s wake-up call for sociology’s involvement with the Holocaust essentially meant two things: first, that before Modernity and the Holocaust only a few sociological works dealing with the topic existed, and, second, that these few sociological studies did not contain appropriate sociological tools or a formulation of a theoretical system that analytically treated the extermination of the Jews. After the publication of Bauman’s study, Gerald E. Markle in 1995 and Debra Kaufman in 1996, for instance, tackled the problem.”

“A glaring paucity’ of sociological scholarship exists on the Holocaust” (as stated in the opening pages of Modernity and the Holocaust [xiii]) became a kind of call to action for some sociologists:'’ thus in the 1990s, Jack N. Porter dealt with the presumed delay of the sociological discipline. According to Martin Oppenheimer’s speculations, there are specific reasons for the lack of sociological studies on the Holocaust. Briefly,

1.that sociologists avoid “deviant cases”—because these incline them to description more than to analysis; 2. that grand narratives lead their authors astray methodologically, and evoke harsher-than-usual reactions from competing paradigms (as some of the historians have

11 Michael Freeman, “Genocide, Civilization and Modernity,’ British Journal of Sociology 46, no. 2 (1995): 207.

12 See Jack N. Porter, “Toward a Sociology of the Holocaust,’ Contemporary Jewry, 17 (1996): 145-48.

13 Cf. Gerson and Wolf, Sociology Confronts the Holocaust, 11.

Introduction | xxi learned); 3. that “big” subjects like these are a poor fit for journal publication; 4. that American sociologists do not command the relevant languages; 5. that there is an uneasy fear of being academically ghettoized; 6. or worse, that there is fear of being labeled opportunist, for climbing onto the bandwagon of the Holocaust Industry (“shoah-business”).'4

The October 2001 conference rightly represents a turning point in sociological studies related to the Holocaust: it brought to fruition a productive and fertile scholarly movement; since that time the number of academic courses and scholarships, in several universities, have grown at great speed: indirectly, most of them are a consequence and product of that conference. Examples of course offerings included Sociology and the Holocaust (fall 2005 at New York University), Sociology of the Holocaust (spring 2007 at the University of Nebraska), Holocaust and Genocide Studies (in 2009 at Keene State College), and Sociology of the Holocaust at the University of Warwick in the same year.

The papers given in 2001 to the scholars of that conference were original contributions and resulted in a book: Sociology Confronts the Holocaust (2007). However, the contributions to the book are not simply from the 2001 conference proceedings: rather, that conference had invited, or compelled, a review of the sociological literature, categories, and methods and forced scholars to think of the Holocaust in terms of sociological devices.'* The book edited by Gerson and Wolf is rooted in this context.

“Whether sociology itself has a ‘Jewish problem; or its scholars lack the language skills, historical background, or mere interest to study it,

14 Elihu Katz, review of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas, ed. Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Wolf, Social Forces 87, no. 4 (2009): 2222, accessed October 2, 2009, doi:10.1353/sof.0.0 198.

15 See the list of scholars “who have read at least one paper in 2007,” http://www.jstor.org/ stable/10.1086/590978?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents (accessed September 28, 2015). The conference was in 2001,and the book came from that conference in 2007. The 2001 conference has compelled many sociologists to deal with or face the Holocaust: for instance, just the simple assessment of the papers, by referees, becomes an occasion to speak of the sociology of the Holocaust. In reviewing the papers there is already a kind of dissemination of the sociology of the Holocaust.

xxii | Introduction

Sociology Confronts the Holocaust attempts to ‘bring the study of the Holocaust and its aftermath up to speed in sociology,” —so Lynn Rapaport began her review of the volume edited by Gerson and Wolf, one year after its release." For the editors, and not only them, it was necessary to heal and to recover the lost time, just as had Bauman and Fein, who were greatly appreciated by the academic community for their “heroic efforts to approach the horror of the Holocaust sociologically.”

As stated by Martin Oppenheimer, in their twenty-three-page contribution, Gerson and Wolf outline “some of the strands of research that do exist” Oppenheimer’s “critique” of Gerson and Wolf’s edition weaves a series of relevant issues. "°

If the October 2001 conference represents a turning point and if that conference came out of the aim to reconsider the status of sociology, the 2007 book, as a result of that symposium, may be properly conceived as the volume opening and inaugurating the sociological scholarship confronting the genocide of the Jews.

So, what more can be added to Gerson and Wolf’s work? Is it possible to say something not yet said? The present book accepts the invitation by the two editors, in 2007, and by Berenbaum” in 2010, to “bring together what until now have been distant fields of knowledge.” At this point, the reader might ask: Which questions does this volume intend to answer?

Actually, I will ask myself a series of questions, of which the first is this: Does a book on English-speaking sociologists tackling the Holocaust exist? Or better: Do we know of a volume that collects and criticizes and at the same time, as a compendium, gathers the history of post-Holocaust sociology from 1945 to 2016? In other words, is there a book on “sociology

16 Lynn Rapaport, review of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas, ed. Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Wolf, American Journal of Sociology, 113, w. 6 (2008): 1794. See Gerson and Wolf, Sociology Confronts the Holocaust.

17 Katz, review of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust, 1.

18 Martin Oppenheimer, “The Sociology of Knowledge and the Holocaust: A Critique,” in Gerson and Wolf, Sociology Confronts the Holocaust, 331-3. See Gerson and Wolf, Sociology Confronts the Holocaust, 11-3.

19 Michael Berenbaum, review of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas, ed. Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Wolf, Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 2 (2010): 505-7, doi:10.1177/002200941004500201 D.

20 Gerson and Wolf, Sociology Confronts the Holocaust, 9.

Introduction | xxiii and the Holocaust” criticizing the discipline from within (i.e., sociologists who studied the event; concepts, categories, and methods applied to analyze it; theoretical system elaborated and so on)? It seems not. Thus, this book seeks to fill a gap or to provide a kind of missing link in the history of sociology. But, I hope it will also deepen and enhance Holocaust Studies (because herein the destruction of the Jews is illustrated differently, namely, with sociological tools not used previously). Finally, it links disciplines, such as history and sociology, that often diverge.

Other questions still arise in my mind—a kind of doubt, such as, has sociology really had a “Jewish problem”?”' Has it “been slow to ‘confront’ the topic,” as affirmed by most scholars? I naively ask myself: Is all this really true? And more profoundly: Was there really a delay? Have the scholars arguing that there was a delay read the entire sociological literature since 1945 connected with the Holocaust? This book intends to be a kind of response to Gerson and Wolf’s volume and to the common assumption that there was a delay in post-Holocaust sociology. Therefore, at this point the matter is simple: if sociologists did not analyze the entire post-Holocaust sociological literature, the problem does not exist (in the sense that they only need to read the literature). On the contrary, if they have read everything, there may be a problem, because there may not have been a delay. In this case, I asked myself why these authors did not realize or recognize, reviewing the sociological literature, that there was not a delay. And yet: Did they not ask what caused the alleged delay? That is, why have scholars been led to speak of “delay; and even to arguing this thesis? Did they not attempt to theorize systematically the origins of this alleged delay in any publications? To these and other questions, this book tries to give the answer that the delay could be half true.

I will attempt to explain why authors who did indeed study the Holocaust were not considered by other scholars, in their own time and later; why observers, over the years, have come to speak of an absence of sociology in the study of the Holocaust; and why this sociological tradition is omitted, ignored to the point of creating, for most scholars, “a missing

21 Berger, review of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust, 151. 22 Rapaport, review of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust, 1794.

xxiv | Introduction tradition.” Thus, I endeavor to show in what way we can speak of a missing sociological tradition.

METHODOLOGY

The methodological ways with which I approached these matters were conceived as a tool that aims principally to answer my questions, and the method I adopted shows the liaison between the world of scientific research and the construction and dissemination of sociological knowledge in a dynamic context profoundly modified by new online multimedia devices.

In the beginning of my research, there was a timely and simple interrogative: Were there any sociological writings related to the Holocaust before the publication of Modernity and the Holocaust by Bauman in 1989? In order to clear up my doubts, I decided to peruse everything. To verify if, before Bauman’s book, there really was no sociological work dealing with the destruction of the Jews and related topics, I poured over—as much as I could—the entire sociological literature since 1945.

I did not just look for great theories or eminent names of good reputation, that is, those known to most or all of the academic community. Rather, I looked at any book, essay, article, doctoral dissertation, book review, paper, letter to the editor, conference announcement, and fellow list surrounding and related to the Holocaust. For example, I also investigated the list of the names of the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) board and read annotations to the names of the directors of the journal. At this point, the reader might ask why I did this. I'd answer by saying that the reading of academic positions together with scholarly publications allows me to enter into the academic realm and to inter-read the scientific context that accounts for the conditions for the dissemination of research topics: this will be a key point in understanding the alleged delay of sociology.

Therefore, some readers may still ask how the research has been carried out. I literally browsed and considered all the online academic sociological journals: I used EBSCOhost databases, particularly since 1945, in order to, I repeat, see which authors have written on the genocide of the Jews of Europe and its related themes.

This means that I utilized key concepts typical of the sociological discipline and those concerned with the Holocaust (such as “movement,”

Introduction | xxv

“bureaucracy, “totalitarianism,” “political violence”). With different combinations accommodated by Boolean operators, I researched abstracts, titles, articles, reviews of articles, and so on, or I looked for the related names of the authors in editorial contributions, letters to the director, and conference proceedings.

I’ve stated that I started with 1945 and the end of World War II, but actually I went back to 1933 (the year of Hitler’s assumption of power) and even to the 1920s to acquaint myself with the academic realm of sociological research and its research funding.

I chose to adopt the method of online academic reviews for two reasons: first, because it is highly innovative and accurate—in the field of history, this method has recently brought significant relevant results, as demonstrated by the researches of Gisella Fidelio, Christian Fleck, Maurizio Ridolfi, and Carlo Spagnolo.” Through the online scientific reviews it is possible to contribute to writing history or, in other words, it is possible to do history through the reviews. Second, the method of online academic reviews provided me innovative interfaces with an optimization of the value of my work along with the breadth and depth of contents. In other words, to resolve my doubts and satisfy my curiosity, I had to sift post-Holocaust sociology: only such a research method could allow for “premium online information resources, primary sources, and open access to full-text searches, in short, a scientific, well-equipped knowledge.”

There was a conference that showed how this method is a fertile and useful tool of investigation that took place in Viterbo, Italy, May 25-26, 2006, promoted by the faculty of the Department of Political Science at the University of Tuscia and under the aegis of the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History (Sissco), with the organization of the Centre of Studies for the History of Mediterranean Europe.” I imagined that sociologists could take advantage of this new historical approach. Hence my choice to adopt it for the present work: I pored over writings, articles, and dissertations in sociology. However, I have to inform the

23 See also http://www.technologysource.org/article/free_online_scholarship_movement/ (accessed October 28, 2015).

24 See https://www.ebscohost.com/ (accessed February 13, 2016).

25 See http://www.sissco.it/articoli/la-storia-contemporanea-attraverso-le-riviste-549/ (accessed June 28, 2016).

xxvi | Introduction reader of an important aspect: in going through the literature, I have tried to always keep in mind some guidelines that oriented my research: when a sociological work was written; who is the author of the piece; to which school of thought the author belongs; what is the content of the study; which sociological tools have been adopted (such as totalitarianism, movement, etc.); was is published after World War II? (in which year? and under which masthead?); and, finally, who was the author and when did he or she emigrate after Hitler’s rise—keeping in mind the impact of the scholarly production of refugee sociologists on American culture.