Slides accompanying the authors' presentation at the Digital Library Federation Forum in 2015.  The presentation was part of the Snapshots series on process.

Presentation abstract:  At UC Santa Cruz (UCSC), the Digital Initiatives team has been engaged in digitizing special collections materials for over a decade and is just now navigating the thorny process of making such services available for the entire campus. With both political and technical challenges in mind, we seek to ask: how can we leverage skills and expertise developed on our own collections in response to faculty projects and campus wide initiatives? In other words, how can we scale and support the kinds of digitization, OCR processing, hosting, and digital object preservation work we have done internally for faculty?

The insistence that American Jews did not respond to the Holocaust has long defined the postwar period as one of silence and inaction. In fact, American Jewish communal organizations waged a robust response to the Holocaust that addressed the immediate needs of survivors in the aftermath of the war and collected, translated, and transmitted stories about the Holocaust and its survivors to American Jews. Fundraising materials that employed narratives about Jewish persecution under Nazism reached nearly every Jewish home in America and philanthropic programs aimed at aiding survivors in the postwar period engaged Jews across the politically, culturally, and socially diverse American Jewish landscape. This study examines the fundraising pamphlets, letters, posters, short films, campaign appeals, radio programs, pen-pal letters, and advertisements that make up the material record of this communal response to the Holocaust and, in so doing, examines how American Jews came to know stories about Holocaust survivors in the early postwar period.

This kind of cultural history expands our understanding of how the Holocaust became part of an American Jewish discourse in the aftermath of the war by revealing that philanthropic efforts produced multiple survivor representations while defining American Jews as saviors of Jewish lives and a Jewish future. Paying particular attention to visual and material sources that both reflected and generated communal knowledge about the Holocaust, this work affirms how important the specific context of postwar America was in shaping this initial encounter. As such, American Jewish communal organizations integrated core American motifs such as thanksgiving, freedom, and hope into their narratives about Holocaust survivors, rendering stories of refuge and tragedy into accounts of survival and triumph. This work complicates historical assumptions about postwar silence and inaction by recognizing that philanthropy served as an important site of memory construction and a meaningful way for American Jews to respond to the Holocaust.