The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination explains, without condemning, the responses and reactions of the democratic world to the attempted destruction of European Jewry. Concentrating on the impact of the Holocaust on ordinary people in Western democracies it examines the actions of the nation-state in the light of popular responses. The disciplines of social, cultural, gender and labor history, previously marginalized in Holocaust studies, are employed to add a vital new dimension to the existing literature.
The approach is comparative, especially with regard to the Britain and the US, and adopts a secular chronology covering the sixty-year period from the Nazi rise to power to the present day. This powerful study argues that the Holocaust is not simply a German, Jewish or continental history but a neglected part of the experience of many countries. It is consequently an important contribution to Anglo-American social and cultural history as well as an account of the Holocaust.