What was the impact of the holocaust on the shape of modern and postmodern form of Jewish life?

Answer 1

Prior to the Holocaust, Poland was a center of the Jewish world, with Yiddish spoken as a living language and a full range of Jewish lifestyles from Hassidic to Modern Orthodox, with a large Reform community in Germany. All of that is gone now. The Jews who successfully fled to the US, Canada, Argentina and Mexico largely blended into the Jewish communities of those countries. The Jews who fled east into Russia had to hide what little Jewish culture they preserved from Communist oppression. Those who made it to Palestine were urged by the Jewish community there to abandon their European Jewish traditions -- most did, except those mostly Hassidic Jews who joined the Yiddish speaking Heradi community. After the war, the Jewish institutions of the United States, once on the fringe of the Jewish world, found themselves to be a new center, and what were frontier-style institutions in Palestine, soon to be Israel, emerged as the second center of the surviving Jewish world. For some time, these had difficulty reaching the level of scholarship that was normal in the German, Polish and Lithuanian Jewish communities.

Postwar, Yiddish was all but dead, spoken as a native language only in the relatively small Hassidic communities of the United States and Palestine/Israel. German Modern Orthodoxy and the German Reform movement were all but destroyed. The Jewish culture of the US, dominated by the influx of dirt poor refugees from the Russian Pale of Settlement a generation before the war, was intellectually challenged compared to the rich urban Jewish culture of Germany and Poland, now entirely destroyed.