| Abstract | My personal and professional engagement with the Holocaust began in the late 1980s when my father first told me the full story of his Holocaust survival, a story he had not told in any detail to anyone for over 40 years (Berger 1995). This was a powerful and moving experience for us both, and it had the additional impact of transforming my interests as a sociologist. I subsequently began an intensive program of retraining to develop expertise on the subject and started teaching a course and publishing about it. These experiences embedded me in the practice of "collective witness," a process by which survivors of a catastrophic event construct meaning for the event and attempt to persuade others of that meaning's legitimacy and authenticity (Couch 2001). In this article I examine the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as a site of collective witness. More specifically, I evaluate the narrative in the museum that indicts the United States as an indifferent bystander that was complicit in the murder of the European Jews. This bystander indictment has been invoked as an emotional reminder and symbolic warrant for U.S. intervention in global affairs to prevent genocide and comparable atrocities. I show how this accusatory rendition of the past ignores exculpatory evidence that softens the critique of U.S. policy and undermines the lesson it purports to teach.
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