HOLOCAUST STUDIES / POLITICS / URBAN STUDIES

NEVER TOO LATE TO REMEMBER

The Politics Behind New York City's
Holocaust Museum

Why did New York City, the largest center of Jewish culture and home to more survivors than any other city in the United States, take more than half a century to finalize plans for its Holocaust memorial? Because the process of memorializing any historical event is inevitably political, Rochelle Saidel explains, and she gives a detailed analysis of how various groups within the American Jewish community, local power brokers, real estate developers, and major political players have all influenced the memorial's progress.

Never Too Late To Remember traces the history of the numerous attempts to create a Holocaust memorial in New York City that began in 1946–47, and focuses on the present project, initiated by Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1981, which is scheduled to open in 1997. A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, the Museum of Jewish Heritage stands on the shore of the Hudson River, facing the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Saidel is frank in attributing the many false starts and delays to conflicting political agendas, tensions among project organizers, and broken promises and commitments. More than a story of back-room politics, Never Too Late To Remember places New York City's project in the broader framework of Holocaust memorialization, thereby examining the dynamic between memory, ideology, politics, and representation.

Rochelle G. Saidel, a political scientist and journalist, is the author of The Outraged Conscience: Seekers of Justice for Nazi War Criminals in America (1984) and has written extensively and lectured widely on the Holocaust for nearly twenty years. She was awarded the prestigious National Foundation for Jewish Culture Musher Publication Prize in 1994 for her work on Never Too Late To Remember.

"Rochelle G. Saidel has written an intriguing work detailing the many stages in the attempts to memorialize the Holocaust in New York. The threads of the story are complex and wide-ranging. Rochelle Saidel's carefully researched account covers this broad canvas, reflecting a fascinating slice of social and political history."
—Geoffrey Wigoder

"Through her own efforts to help found New York's Holocaust Memorial, and now through this lively account of the Memorial's establishment, Rochelle Saidel has, by word and deed, shown us that it is Never Too Late To Remember."
—Ruth Messinger