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Indelible Shadows investigates questions raised by films about the Holocaust. How does one make a movie that is both morally just and marketable? Annette Insdorf provides sensitive readings of individual films and analyzes theoretical issues such as the 'truth claims' of the cinematic medium. The third edition of Indelible Shadows includes five additional chapters that cover recent trends, as well as rediscoveries of motion pictures made during and just after World War II. It addresses the treatment of rescuers, as in 'Schindler's List'; the controversial use of humor, as in 'Life is Beautiful'; the distorted image of survivors, and the growing genre of documentaries that return to the scene of the crime or rescue. The annotated filmography offers capsule summaries and information about another hundred Holocaust films from around the world, making this edition an extremely comprehensive discussion of films about the Holocaust, and an invaluable resource for film programmers and educators.

The Holocaust has been the focus of countless films in the United States, Great Britain, and Europe, and its treatment over the years has been the subject of considerable controversy. When finally permitted to portray the atrocities, filmmakers struggled with issues of fidelity to historical fact, depictions of graphic violence, and how to approach the complexities of the human condition on all sides of this horrific event. In Hollywood and the Holocaust, Henry Gonshak explores portrayals of the Holocaust from the World War II era to the present. In chapters devoted to films ranging from The Great Dictator to Inglourious Basterds, this volume looks at how these films have shaped perceptions of the Shoah. The author also questions if Hollywood, given its commercialism, is capable of conveying the Holocaust in ways that do justice to its historical trauma. Through a careful consideration of over twenty-five films across genres--including Life Is Beautiful, Cabaret, The Reader, The Boys from Brazil, and Schindler's List--this book provides an important look at the social, political, and cultural contexts in which these movies were produced. By also engaging with the critical responses to these films and their role in the public's ongoing fascination with the Holocaust, this book suggests that viewers take a closer look at how such films depict this dark period in world history. Hollywood and the Holocaust will be of interest to cultural critics, historians, and anyone interested in the cinema's ability to render these tragic events on screen.

Brilliant and wrenching, The Holocaust: History and Memory tells the story of the brutal mass slaughter of Jews during World War II and how that genocide has been remembered and misremembered ever since. Taking issue with generations of scholars who separate the Holocaust from Germany's military ambitions, historian Jeremy M. Black demonstrates persuasively that Germany's war on the Allies was entwined with Hitler's war on Jews. As more and more territory came under Hitler's control, the extermination of Jews became a major war aim, particularly in the east, where many died and whole Jewish communities were exterminated in mass shootings carried out by the German army and collaborators long before the extermination camps were built. Rommel's attack on Egypt was a stepping stone to a larger goal--the annihilation of 400,000 Jews living in Palestine. After Pearl Harbor, Hitler saw America's initial focus on war with Germany rather than Japan as evidence of influential Jewish interests in American policy, thus justifying and escalating his war with Jewry through the Final Solution. And the German public knew. In chilling detail, Black unveils compelling evidence that many everyday Germans must have been aware of the genocide around them. In the final chapter, he incisively explains the various ways that the Holocaust has been remembered, downplayed, and even dismissed as it slips from horrific experience into collective consciousness and memory. Essential, concise, and highly readable, The Holocaust: History and Memory bears witness to those forever silenced and ensures that we will never forget their horrifying fate.

"... a fresh critical model for students of Holocaust literature and historiography... " --B'nai B'rith Messenger "This is the first and most sophisticated attempt I have come across to apply modern literary theory to Holocaust material, and the act of mediation which it involves is worthy of praise." --Naomi Diamant, Prooftexts "This is an authoritative and comprehensive, critical study covering all aspects of the remembrance of the Holocaust. James E. Young has written an exhaustive work, analyzing the many forms in which the Holocaust has been dealt with... " --AJL Newsletter "The first truly critical as well as comprehensive study of Holocaust narratives.... No one has clarified so well the 'texture of memory'." --Geoffrey Hartman "... a fascinating study.... thought provoking and elegantly written... " --Holocaust and Genocide Studies "A brilliant performance." --The Book Reader "... meticulously crafted and documented... far outranks the multitude of new titles on Holocaust topics." --Choice

Featuring 300 alphabetically organized bio-critical essays on writers of memoirs, novels, poetry, short stories, and drama, ranging in length from 1,500 to 7,000 words, this comprehensive scholarly work presents a broad spectrum of voices remembering, interpreting, and reinterpreting one of the twentieth century's most politically and emotionally charged events. Including writers whose works first appeared in Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish, this reference provides wide international coverage, though its focus will be on writers whose work is available in English. It will prove a valuable resource to students, scholars, general readers, or to anyone interested in world history. Also includes maps. For a full list of entries, sample entries, and more, visit the website Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work website.

The Holocaust stands as the twentieth century’s most hideous outburst of evil. Since then, civilization’s challenge is to remember the tragedy, to keep it from becoming clichéd, and to recount specifics of the act. Literature has been one of the primary means of attempting to meet this challenge.

In Music in the Holocaust Shirli Gilbert provides the first large-scale, critical account of the role of music amongst communities imprisoned under Nazism. She documents a wide scope of musical activities, ranging from orchestras and chamber groups to choirs, theatres, communal sing-songs, andcabarets, in some of the most important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe, including Auschwitz and the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos. Gilbert is also concerned with exploring the ways in which music - particularly the many songs that were preserved - contribute to our broader understanding ofthe Holocaust and the experiences of its victims. Music in the Holocaust is, at its core, a social history, taking as its focus the lives of individuals and communities imprisoned under Nazism. Music opens a unique window on to the internal world of those communities, offering insight into how theyunderstood, interpreted, and responded to their experiences at the time.

Recounts the author's experiences during the Holocaust, from the time of the Nazi invasion of Poland to the liberation of the Theresienstadt concentration camp by the Red Army in 1945.

In 1986, Elie Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his victory over “the powers of death and degradation, and to support the struggle of good against evil in the world.” Soon after, he and his wife, Marion, created the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. A project at the heart of the Foundation’s mission is its Ethics Prize—a remarkable essay-writing contest through which thousands of students from colleges across the country are encouraged to confront ethical issues of personal significance. The Ethics Prize has grown exponentially over the past twenty years. “Of all the projects our Foundation has been involved in, none has been more exciting than this opportunity to inspire young students to examine the ethical aspect of what they have learned in their personal lives and from their teachers in the classroom,” writes Elie Wiesel. Readers will find essays on Bosnia, the genocide in Rwanda, sweatshops and globalization, and the political obligations of the mothers of Argentina’s Disappeared. Other essays tell of a white student who joins a black gospel choir, a young woman who learns to share in Ladakh, and the outsize implications of reporting on something as small as a cracked windshield. Readers will be fascinated by the ways in which essays on conflict, conscience, memory, illness (Rachel Maddow’s essay on AIDS appears), and God overlap and resonate with one another. These essays reflect those who are “sensitive to the sufferings and defects that confront a society yearning for guidance and eager to hear ethical voices,” writes Elie Wiesel. “And they are a beacon for what our schools must realize as an essential component of a true education.”

SS ideology was the expression of an apparently philosophical self-containing system of thought, articulated around a systematic body of knowledge claiming to integrate humanity inside a global vision of Being. Using ontology and anthropology as foundations, SS thinking developed essentially in the field of ethics. It portrayed itself as a global approach to society and civilization, based on eugenics and ethnic cleansing. It accomplished the fusion of the modern biological paradigm with the cultural shock brought about by World War I and promoted total war for the sake of total health. And since institutional philosophy largely ignores SS theory and praxis, Holocaust memorial institutions may represent an alternative for the development of understanding and reflection. Within the context of Nazism, SS thinking did much to work out the theory for which the Holocaust would be the ultimate accomplishment. It intended to provide the Holocaust with legitimacy, from the viewpoints of ontology, anthropology, politics, and ethics, whence the importance of studying the theoretical framework that gave sense to the most terrible form of SS praxis.

The major essays of Dan Diner, who is widely read and quoted in Germany and Israel, are finally collected in an English edition. They reflect the author’s belief that the Holocaust transcends traditional patterns of historical understanding and requires an epistemologically distinct approach. One can no longer assume that actors as well as historians are operating in the same conceptual universe, sharing the same criteria of rational discourse. This is particularly true of victims and perpetrators, whose memories shape the distortions of historical narrative in ways often diametrically opposed. The essays are divided into three groups. The first group talks about anti-Semitism in the context of the 1930s and the ideologies that drove the Nazi regime. The second group concentrates on the almost unbelievably different perceptions of the "Final Solution," with particularly illuminating discussions of the Judenrat, or Jewish council. The third group considers the Holocaust as the subject of narrative and historical memory. Diner focuses above all on perspectives: the very notions of rationality and irrationality are seen to be changeable, depending on who is applying them. And because neither rational nor irrational motives can be universally assigned to participants in the Holocaust, Diner proposes, from the perspective of the victims, the idea of the counterrational. His work is directed toward developing a theory of Holocaust historiography and offers, clearly and coherently, the highest level of reflection on these problems.

Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem In 1939, the Nazi regime's plans for redrawing the demographic map of Eastern Europe entailed the expulsion of millions of Jews. By the fall of 1941, these plans had shifted from expulsion to systematic and total mass murder of all Jews within the Nazi grasp. The Origins of the Final Solution is the most detailed and comprehensive analysis ever written of what took place during this crucial period--of how, precisely, the Nazis' racial policies evolved from persecution and "ethnic cleansing" to the Final Solution of the Holocaust. Focusing on the months between the German conquest of Poland in September 1939-which brought nearly two million additional Jews under Nazi control--and the beginning of the deportation of Jews to the death camps in the spring of 1942, Christopher R. Browning describes how Poland became a laboratory for experiments in racial policies, from expulsion and decimation to ghettoization and exploitation under local occupation authorities. He reveals how the subsequent attack on the Soviet Union opened the door for an immense radicalization of Nazi Jewish policy--and marked the beginning of the Final Solution. Meticulously documenting the process that led to this fatal development, Browning shows that Adolf Hitler was the key decision-maker throughout, approving major escalations in Nazi persecution of the Jews at victory-induced moments of euphoria. Thoroughly researched and lucidly written, this groundbreaking work provides an essential chapter in the history of the Holocaust.

Fathoming the Holocaust represents the culmination of a singular effort to attempt to explain the Final Solution to the "Jewish Problem" in terms of a general theory of social problems construction. The book is comprehensive in scope, covering the origins and emergence of the Final Solution, wartime reaction to it, and the postwar memory of the genocide. It does so within the framework of a social problems construction, a perspective that treats social problems not as a condition but as an activity that identifies and defines problems, persuades others that something must be done about them, and generates practical programs of remedial action. Berger holds that social problems have a "natural history," that is, they evolve through a sequence of stages that entail the development and unfolding of claims about problems and the formulation and implementation of solutions. Fathoming the Holocaust is therefore a book that aims to advance sociological understanding of the Holocaust, not simply to describe its history, but to examine its social construction, that is, to understand it as a consequence of concerted human activity. In doing so, Berger hopes to encourage the teaching of the Holocaust in the social scientific curricula of higher education. In contrast to the extensive historical literature on the Holocaust, Berger offers a distinctly sociological approach that examines how the Holocaust was constructed--first as a social policy designed by the Nazis, implemented by functionaries, and resisted by its victims and opponents; later as several varying layers of historical memory. The scope of this book extends from the prewar through the contemporary periods, focusing on the societal issues governing the interpreting of these events in Israel, the German Federal Republic, and the United States. Berger's is a text with both large general interest and essential material for courses in social problems, European history, and Jewish studies.

Applies the perspectives of gender and ethnicity in a feminist analysis of the Eichmann controversy and offers a wholly new interpretation of Arendt's work, from Eichmann in Jerusalem to The Life of the Mind.

Rescuing the Children is the memoir of Vivette Samuel, who at age twenty-two began working for the OEuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE, or Society for Assistance to Children). The OSE and similar organizations saved 86 percent of Jewish children in France from deportation to Nazi concentration and extermination camps.

Research Award in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education In his examination of the ways in which theatre participates in the ongoing representations of and debates about the past, Freddie Rokem concentrates on the ways in which theatre after World War II has presented different aspects of the French Revolution and the Holocaust, showing us that by “performing history” actors bring the historical past and the theatrical present together.

Contemporary Asylum Narratives marks a transition from traditional modes of diasporic belonging to the need for identifications that encompass the statelessness of refugees and asylum seekers. This book explores representations of asylum seekers and refugees in twenty-first century literature, film and theatre.

These letters to a beloved son and his family tell the poignant story of one woman's life in Nazi-occupied Prague and help explain why some Jews stayed behind. Henriette Pollatschek was 69 years old when the Nazis marched into Prague, where she and her daughter had sought refuge after fleeing their German-held homeland in northern Bohemia. Henriette's son and his family had already escaped to Switzerland and later to Cuba and the United States. At each step of the way, her family urged Henriette to join them. But in the face of what was then only a vague and, to many, unbelievable threat of danger, she was unwilling to abandon her financial independence, her accustomed way of life, and the familial objects she had gathered over a lifetime. As living conditions for Jews worsened in Nazi-occupied Prague, however, Henriette began to have second thoughts. Her letters to her son and his family in Havana reveal an increasingly desperate situation as the obstacles to escape mounted while living conditions eroded. Ultimately both Henriette and her daughter perished. Henriette Pollatschek's letters provide a detailed picture of the lives of Jews in Prague during the war years: the evictions, the food shortages, the worries about livelihood, and the increasing prohibitions and regulations, as well as the brave and cheerful attempts to maintain a normal life and bear hardships. Henriette's letters also help explain why more Jews did not escape. As Renata Polt, Henriette's granddaughter, concludes, "Who could imagine a Holocaust?" Translated, edited, and annotated by Polt and illustrated with intimate family snapshots, this book brings the horrors and dilemmas of the Holocaust alive in a moving, personal account while answering pertinent historical questions about the motives of Jews who stayed behind. Renata Polt is a free-lance writer and film critic living in Berkeley, California.

Institutions that have collected video testimonies from the few remaining Holocaust survivors are grappling with how to continue their mission to educate and commemorate. Noah Shenker calls attention to the ways that audiovisual testimonies of the Holocaust have been mediated by the institutional histories and practices of their respective archives. Shenker argues that testimonies are shaped not only by the encounter between interviewer and interviewee, but also by technical practices and the testimony process. He analyzes the ways in which interview questions, the framing of the camera, and curatorial and programming preferences impact how Holocaust testimony is molded, distributed, and received.

No documentation of National Socialism can be undertaken without the explicit recognition that the "German Renaissance” promised by the Nazis culminated in unprecedented horror--World War II and the genocide of European Jewry. With The Third Reich Sourcebook, editors Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman present a comprehensive collection of newly translated documents drawn from wide-ranging primary sources, documenting both the official and unofficial cultures of National Socialist Germany from its inception to its defeat and collapse in 1945. Framed with introductions and annotations by the editors, the documents presented here include official government and party pronouncements, texts produced within Nazi structures, such as the official Jewish Cultural League, as well as documents detailing the impact of the horrors of National Socialism on those who fell prey to the regime, especially Jews and the handicapped. With thirty chapters on ideology, politics, law, society, cultural policy, the fine arts, high and popular culture, science and medicine, sexuality, education, and other topics, The Third Reich Sourcebook is the ultimate collection of primary sources on Nazi Germany.

The Holocaust has been the subject of countless books, works of art, and memorials. Fifty-five years after the fact the world still ponders the enormity of this disaster. The Holocaust Encyclopedia is the only comprehensive single-volume work of reference providing both a reflective overview of the subject and abundant detail concerning major events, policy decisions, cities, and individuals. Up-to-date and designed for easy access, the encyclopedia presents information on the major aspects of the Holocaust in essays by scholars from eleven countries who draw on a number of sources--including recently uncovered evidence from the former Soviet bloc--to provide in-depth studies on the political, social, religious, and moral issues of the Holocaust as well as short entries identifying events, sites, and individuals. The book also has more than 250 photographs, many of them rare, and 19 maps. The volume includes: * Raul Hilberg on concentration camps and Gypsies * Ruth Bondy, Israel Gutman, and Dina Porat on major ghettoes * Roger Greenspun on the Holocaust in cinema and television * Richard Breitman on American policy * Michael Berenbaum on theological and philosophical responses * Saul Friedl#65533;nder on Nazi policy * Michael Hagemeister on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion * Michael R. Marrus on historiography * Christopher R. Browning on the Madagascar Plan * Robert S. Wistrich on Holocaust denial * James E. Young on Holocaust literature

Two powerful modern classics from #1 New York Times bestselling author Markus Zusak. The Book Thief affirms the ability of books to feed the soul even in the bleakest of times in a story the New York Times described as “brilliant.... the kind of book that can be life-changing.” I Am the Messenger is a cryptic journey filled with laughter, fists, and love, which School Library Journal called “unpretentious, well conceived, and appropriately raw” in a starred review. Markus Zusak is the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for his significant and lasting contribution to writing for teens, and together, these two stories form an extraordinary collection to showcase the intensity and heart inherent in his storytelling.