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Only two speakers before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous ''I have a dream'' speech in 1963, Newark-based Rabbi Joachim Prinz detailed the ''nightmare'' of Nazi Germany.

Jewish leaders' activism in the Civil Rights movement was just one example of how, contrary to popular belief, American Jews were anything but silent on the subject of the Holocaust in the years following the tragedy, Prof. Hasia Diner said at Kean University in Union on April 15.

Diner, author of ''We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962'' and director of Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University, spoke on the subject of her award-winning 2009 book as part of Kean's Jewish Studies Lecture Series.

While most historians and literary critics came out with statements that American Jews had, according to one account, a ''conspiracy of silence'' on the Holocaust until the 1970s, Diner ventured to prove otherwise. Without any cultural and ethnic models in America and without any direction from authorities, Jews organized original ceremonies and compiled their own liturgies on the Holocaust ''from scratch,'' Diner said.

''With the destruction of European Jewry, American Jews now had to pick up where the martyrs left off,'' she said.

American Jews' memorial culture for the Holocaust ''had no central metaphor, no central symbols,'' Diner said. The term we know today as Holocaust, she explained, wasn't the lingo American Jews used; their terms included ''Hitler's dark reign of terror,'' ''catastrophe,'' ''our recent national tragedy,'' ''our great destruction,'' and ''the third destruction,'' among others.

Holocaust remembrance spanned all strands of American Jewish life, Diner said, with participating organizations including B'nai B'rith, American Jewish Congress, Hadassah, American Jewish Committee, local cultural clubs, and Jewish Community Centers.

''They all constructed a repertoire of words and deeds that took as inspiration the 6 million [Jews who died],'' Diner said.

Beyond memorialization, the efforts of American Jews -- springing from political and communal concerns -- included practical tasks like raising money to aid survivors in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Only American Jewry had the financial resources to do so in what amounted to be the largest non-government humanitarian endeavor in history, Diner said. Radio appeals and television commercials disseminated the image of the tragedy to the American public, she said, and Jewish leaders spent much of their energy making sure Americans knew Germany was the perpetrator, warning of the dangers posed by so-called ''rehabilitated Nazis.''

Diner proved her point by reading from documents like Jewish Labor Committee leader Adolph Held's 1955 letter to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, warning Dulles of vendors who sold outspoken Nazi literature. Leaders like Prinz used the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, and issues like immigration as opportunities to bring up -- and speak out against -- the Holocaust in public discourse, as a frame of reference to events more fresh in the American mind, she said.

Memorial programs for the Holocaust usually featured public officials and prominent American Jews, Diner said. Leaders also linked the Holocaust to the struggle to create a Jewish state, she noted, to help gain U.S. support for Israel.

''The two events, they believed, had to be connected,'' Diner said.

For American Jews, Diner said, the Holocaust also represented a desire to increase observance and religious education, because they considered the Jews who died ''pillars of authentic Judaism.''

Regarding historical narratives that the Holocaust was ''incubated below the surface of American public Jewish life'' and ''shrouded in taboo,'' Diner said that ''needless to say, I disagreed.'' Out of a sense of obligation to both remember the deceased and aid victims, American Jews created a template for greater memorial programs in the future and ''could also have done no more,'' she said.

Asked about the perception that young Holocaust survivors in America didn't dwell on the tragedy and wanted to simply get on with life, Diner responded that ''the historic record is very different.'' In 1959, a group of survivors in New York created ''Camp Hemshekh'', she noted, in which each bunk was named after a hero of the Holocaust like Hannah Senesh.

''[Young survivors] were not silent, either within their own circles or in their interactions with other American Jews, and quite frankly, with other Americans,'' Diner said.