Soci­ol­o­gist Arlene Stein — her­self the daugh­ter of a Holo­caust sur­vivor — mix­es mem­oir, his­to­ry, and soci­o­log­i­cal analy­sis to tell the sto­ry of the rise of Holo­caust con­scious­ness in the Unit­ed States from the per­spec­tive of sur­vivors and their descen­dants. If sur­vivors tend­ed to see Holo­caust sto­ry­telling as main­ly a pri­vate affair, their chil­dren— who reached adult­hood dur­ing the hey­day of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics — reclaimed their hid­den fam­i­ly his­to­ries and trans­formed them into pub­lic sto­ries. Reluc­tant Wit­ness­es doc­u­ments how a group of peo­ple who had pre­vi­ous­ly been unrec­og­nized and mis­un­der­stood man­aged to find its voice. It tells this sto­ry in rela­tion to the chang­ing sta­tus of trau­ma and vic­tim­hood in Amer­i­can cul­ture. At a time when a sense of Holo­caust fatigue seems to be set­ting in and when the remain­ing sur­vivors are at the end of their lives, it affirms that con­fronting trau­mat­ic mem­o­ries and cat­a­stroph­ic his­to­ries can help us make our world mean some­thing beyond ourselves.