Download or read book Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America written by Alan Mintz and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Holocaust took place far from the United States and involved few Americans, yet rather than receding, this event has assumed a greater significance in the American consciousness with the passage of time. As a window into the process whereby the Holocaust has been appropriated in American culture, Hollywood movies are particularly luminous. Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America examines reactions to three films: Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), The Pawnbroker (1965), and Schindler�s List (1992), and considers what those reactions reveal about the place of the Holocaust in the American mind, and how those films have shaped the popular perception of the Holocaust. It also considers the difference in the reception of the two earlier films when they first appeared in the 1960s and retrospective evaluations of them from closer to our own times. Alan Mintz also addresses the question of how Americans will shape the memory of the Holocaust in the future, concluding with observations on the possibilities and limitations of what is emerging as the major resource for the shaping of Holocaust memory�videotaped survivor testimony. Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America examines some of the influences behind the broad and deep changes in American consciousness and the social forces that permitted the Holocaust to move from the margins to the center of American discourse.

Download or read book The Holocaust In American Life written by Peter Novick and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2000-09-20 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prize-winning historian Peter Novick illuminates the reasons Americans ignored the Holocaust for so long -- how dwelling on German crimes interfered with Cold War mobilization; how American Jews, not wanting to be thought of as victims, avoided the subject. He explores in absorbing detail the decisions that later moved the Holocaust to the center of American life: Jewish leaders invoking its memory to muster support for Israel and to come out on top in a sordid competition over what group had suffered most; politicians using it to score points with Jewish voters. With insight and sensitivity, Novick raises searching questions about these developments. Have American Jews, by making the Holocaust the emblematic Jewish experience, given Hitler a posthumous victory, tacitly endorsing his definition of Jews as despised pariahs? Does the Holocaust really teach useful lessons and sensitize us to atrocities, or, by making the Holocaust the measure, does it make lesser crimes seem "not so bad"? What are we to make of the fact that while Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars for museums recording a European crime, there is no museum of American slavery?

Download or read book Holocaust vs Popular Culture written by Mahitosh Mandal and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holocaust vs. Popular Culture debates and deconstructs the binary responses to the representation of the Holocaust in European and non-European forms of Popular Culture. The binary is defined in terms of “incompatibility” between the Holocaust and Popular Culture on the one hand and the “universalization” of the Holocaust memory through Popular Culture on the other. The book does emphasize the anti-representation argument. Nevertheless, the authors make a case for a productive understanding of “Holocaust Popular Culture” as contributing to the expansion of Holocaust studies as well as cultural studies in the transnational context. The book theorizes Popular Culture in broad terms and highlights the diversity of Holocaust Popular Culture mainly but not exclusively produced in the twenty-first century. This interdisciplinary collection covers a wide variety of Popular Culture genres including language, literature, films, television shows, soap operas, music, dance, social media, advertisements, comics, graphic novels, videogames, and museums. It studies the (mis)representation of the Holocaust trauma, not only across genres but also across nations (Western and Asian) and generations (from testimonial remembrance to post-memory). This book will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines and subjects, including Popular Culture, Holocaust studies, cultural studies, genocide studies, postcolonial and transnational studies, media and film studies, visual culture, games studies, race and ethnicity studies, memory studies, and Jewish studies.

Download or read book Global Easts written by Jie-Hyun Lim and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Korean historian Jie-Hyun Lim, raised under an anticommunist dictatorship, turned to Marxian thought to explain his country’s development, even as he came to struggle with its Eurocentrism. As a transnational scholar working in postcommunist Poland, Lim recognized striking similarities between Korean and Polish history and politics. One realization stood out: Both Korea and Poland—at once the “West” for Asia yet “Eastern” Europe—had been assigned the role of “East.” This book explores entangled Easts to reconsider global history from the margins. Examining the politics of history and memory, Lim reveals the affinities linking Eastern Europe and East Asia. He draws out commonalities in their experiences of modernity, in their transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and in the shaping of collective memory. Ranging across Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea, Lim traces the global history of how notions of victimhood have become central to nationalism. He criticizes mass dictatorships of right and left in the Global Easts, considering Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereign dictatorship and the concept of decisionist democracy. Lim argues that nationalism is inherently transnational, critiquing how the nationalist imagination of the Global East has influenced countries across borders. Theoretically sophisticated and conceptually innovative, this book sheds new light on the transnational complexity of historical memory and imagination, the boundaries between democracy and mass dictatorship, and the fluidity of East and West.

Download or read book History Memory and Public Life written by Anna Maerker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-06 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History, Memory and Public Life introduces readers to key themes in the study of historical memory and its significance by considering the role of historical expertise and understanding in contemporary public reflection on the past. Divided into two parts, the book addresses both the theoretical and applied aspects of historical memory studies. ‘Approaches to history and memory‘ introduces key methodological and theoretical issues within the field, such as postcolonialism, sites of memory, myths of national origins, and questions raised by memorialisation and museum presentation. ‘Difficult pasts‘ looks at history and memory in practice through a range of case studies on contested, complex or traumatic memories, including the Northern Ireland Troubles, post-apartheid South Africa and the Holocaust. Examining the intersection between history and memory from a wide range of perspectives, and supported by guidance on further reading and online resources, this book is ideal for students of history as well as those working within the broad interdisciplinary field of memory studies.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism written by Dana Evan Kaplan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-08-08 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides readers with a comprehensive introduction to the most important and interesting historical and contemporary facets of Judaism in America. Written by twenty-four leading scholars from the fields of religious studies, American history and literature, philosophy, art history, sociology, and musicology, the book adopts an inclusive perspective on Jewish religious experience. Three initial chapters cover the development of Judaism in America from 1654, when Sephardic Jews first landed in New Amsterdam, until today. Subsequent chapters include cutting-edge scholarship and original ideas while remaining accessible at an introductory level. A secondary goal of this volume is to help its readers better understand the more abstract term of 'religion' in a Jewish context. The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism will be of interest not only to scholars but also to all readers interested in social and intellectual trends in the modern world.

Download or read book American Jewish Identity Politics written by Deborah Dash Moore and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-12-18 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Displays the full range of informed, thoughtful opinion on the place of Jews in the American politics of identity." ---David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History, University of California, Berkeley "A fascinating anthology whose essays crystallize the most salient features of American Jewish life in the second half of the twentieth century." ---Beth S. Wenger, Katz Family Associate Professor of American Jewish History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania "A wonderful collection of important essays, indispensable for understanding the searing conflicts over faith, familial, and political commitments marking American Jewry's journey through the paradoxes of the post-Holocaust era." ---Michael E. Staub, Professor of English, Baruch College, CUNY, and author of Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America "This provocative anthology offers fascinating essays on Jewish culture, politics, religion, feminism, and much more. It is a must-read for all those interested in the intersection of Jewish life and identity politics in the modern period." ---Joyce Antler, Samuel Lane Professor of American Jewish History and Culture, Brandeis University "This collection of essays invites the reader to engage with some of the best writing and thinking about American Jewish life by some of the finest scholars in the field. Deborah Moore's introduction offers an important framework to understand not only the essays, but the academic and political contexts in which they are rooted." ---Riv-Ellen Prell, Professor and Chair, American Studies, University of Minnesota, and editor of Women Remaking American Judaism This collection of essays explores changes among American Jews in their self-understanding during the last half of the 20th century. Written by scholars who grew up after World War II and the Holocaust who participated in political struggles in the 1960s and 1970s and who articulated many of the formative concepts of modern Jewish studies, this anthology provides a window into an era of social change. These men and women are among the leading scholars of Jewish history, society and culture. The volume is organized around contested themes in American Jewish life: the Holocaust and World War II, religious pluralism and authenticity, intermarriage and Jewish continuity. Thus, it offers one of the few opportunities for students to learn about these debates from participant scholars. The book includes a dozen photographs of contemporary Jewish experience in the United States by acclaimed Jewish photographer Bill Aron. Like the scholars of the essays, Aron participated in struggles within the Jewish community and the Jewish counterculture in the 1970s and 1980s. His images reflect shifting perspectives toward spirituality, community, feminism, and memory culture. The essays reflect several layers of identity politics. On one level, they interrogate the recent past of American Jews, starting with their experiences of World War II. Without the flourishing of identity politics and the white ethnic revival, many questions about American Jewish history might never have been explored. Those who adopted identity politics often saw Jews as an ethnic group in the United States, one connected both to other Americans and to Jews throughout the world and in the past. On another level, these essays express ideas nourished in universities during the turbulent 1970s and 1980s. Those years marked the expansion of Jewish studies as a field in the United States and the establishment of American Jewish studies as an area of specialization. Taken together they reveal the varied sources of American Jewish studies. Finally, one must note that in many cases these essays anticipate major books on the subject. Reading them now reveals how ideas took shape within the political pressures of the moment. These articles teach us not only about their subject but also about how issues were framed and debated during what might be called our fin de siecle, the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first. The authors of these articles include several, most notably Arthur Green, Alvin Rosenfield, and the late Egon Mayer, who collectively could be thought of as the founding fathers of this new generation of Jewish scholars. Green in theology, Rosenfield in literature, and Mayer in sociology influenced younger academics such as Arnold Eisen. A slightly different relationship exists among the historians. Several come to their subject though the study of American history, including Hasia Diner, Stephen Whitfield, and Jonathan Sarna, while others approach through the portal of Jewish history, such as Paula Hyman and Jeffrey Gurock.

Download or read book Inspecting Jews written by Laurence Roth and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inthis book, Laurence Roth argues that the popular genre of Jewish detective stories offers new insights into the construction of ethnic and religious identity. Roth frames his study with the concept of "kosher hybridity" to look at the complex process of mediation between Jewish and American culture in which Jewish writers voice the desire to be both different from and yet the same as other Americans. He argues that the detective story, located at the intersection of narrative and popular culture in modern America, examines the need for order in a disorderly society, and thus offers a window into the negotiation of Jewish identity differing from that of literary fiction. The writers of these popular cultural texts, which are informed by contradiction and which thrive on intended and unintended ironies, formulate idioms for American Jewish identities that intentionally and unintentionally create social, ethnic, and religious syntheses in American Jewish life. Roth examines stories about American Jewish detectives--including Harry Kemelman's Rabbi Small, Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, Stuart Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman, and Rochelle Krich's Jessica Drake--not only as a genre of literature but also as a reflection of contemporary acculturation in the American Jewish popular arts.

Download or read book The Brooklyn Thrill Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s written by Mariah Adin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What caused four recently bar mitzvahed middle-class youths to go on a crime spree of assault and murder in 1954? This book provides a compelling narrative retelling of the boys, their crimes, and a U.S. culture obsessed with juvenile delinquency. After ongoing months of daily headlines about gang shootouts, stomp-killings, and millions of dollars worth of vandalism, by the summer of 1954, America had had enough of juvenile delinquency. It was in this environment that 18-year-old Jack Koslow and the other three teenage members of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers committed their heinous crimes and achieved notoriety. The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s exposes the underbelly of America's mid-century, the terrible price of assimilation, the uncomfortable bedfellows of comic books and juvenile delinquency, and the dystopia already in bloom amongst American youth well before the 1960s. Readers will be engrossed and horrified by the tale of the Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang whose shocking, front-page story could easily have been copy-pasted from today's online news sites. Author Mariah Adin takes readers along for a breathtaking moment-by-moment retelling of the crime spree, the subsequent interrogations, and the dramatic courtroom showdown, interspersed with expository chapters on juvenile delinquency, America's Jewish community in the post-Holocaust period, and the anti-comics movement. This book serves to merge the history of juvenile delinquency with that of the Great Comic Book Scare, highlights the assimilation of immigrants into America's white mainstream gone wrong, and complicates our understanding of America's "Golden Age."

Download or read book Alleged Nazi Collaborators in the United States after World War II written by Christoph Schiessl and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book follows the story of suspected Nazi war criminals in the United States and analyzes their supposed crimes during World War II, their entry into the United States as war refugees in the 1940s and 1950s, and their prosecution in the 1970s and beyond by the U.S. government, specifically by the Office of Special Investigation (OSI). In particular, this book explains why and how such individuals entered the United States, why it took so long to locate and apprehend them, how the OSI was founded, and how the OSI has tried to bring them to justice. This study constitutes a thorough account of 150 suspects and examines how the search for them connects to larger developments in postwar U.S. history. In this latter regard, one major theme includes the role Holocaust memory played in the aforementioned developments. This account adds significantly to the historiographical debate about when and how the Holocaust found its way into American Jewish and also general American consciousness. In general, these suspected Nazi war criminals could come to the United States largely undetected during the early Cold War. In this atmosphere, they morphed from Nazi collaborators to ardent anti-Communists and, outside of some big fish, not even within the Jewish community was their role in the Holocaust much discussed. Only with the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s did interest in other Holocaust perpetrators increase, culminating in the founding of the OSI in the late 1970s. The manuscript makes use, among other documents, of declassified sources from the CIA and FBI, little used trial accounts, and hard to locate OSI records.

Download or read book Representations of Anne Frank in American Literature written by Rachael McLennan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores portrayals of Anne Frank in American literature, where she is often invoked, if problematically, as a means of encouraging readers to think widely about persecution, genocide, and victimisation; often in relation to gender, ethnicity, and race. It shows how literary representations of Anne Frank in America over the past 50 years reflect the continued dominance of the American dramatic adaptations of Frank’s Diary in the 1950s, and argues that authors feel compelled to engage with the problematic elements of these adaptations and their iconic power. At the same time, though, literary representations of Frank are associated with the adaptations; critics often assume that these texts unquestioningly perpetuate the problems with the adaptations. This is not true. This book examines how American authors represent Frank in order to negotiate difficult questions relating to representation of the Holocaust in America, and in order to consider gender, coming of age, and forms of inequality in American culture in various historical moments; and of course, to consider the ways Frank herself is represented in America. This book argues that the most compelling representations of Frank in American literature are alert to their own limitations, and may caution against making Frank a universal symbol of goodness or setting up too easy identifications with her. It will be of great interest to researchers and students of Frank, the Holocaust in American fiction and culture, gender studies, life writing, young adult fiction, and ethics.

Download or read book Public Culture written by Marguerite S. Shaffer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2008-08-06 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From medicine shows to the Internet, from the Los Angeles Plaza to the Las Vegas Strip, from the commemoration of the Oklahoma City bombing to television programming after 9/11, scholars examine issues of democracy, diversity, identity, community, citizenship, and belonging through the lens of American popular culture.

Download or read book Ethics of Evil written by Jon Mills and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today's world where every form of transgression enjoys a psychological motive and rational justification, psychoanalysis stands alone in its ability to uncover the hidden motives that inform individual and social collective behaviour. Both in theory and practice, it bears witness to the impact of anonymity on the potential for perpetration, especially when others are experienced as faceless, disposable objects whose otherness is, at bottom, but a projection, displacement, and denial of our own interiority-in short, the evil within. In keeping with this perspective, Ethics of Evil rejects facile rationalizations of violence; it also rejects the idea that evil, as a concept, is inscrutable or animated by demonic forces. Instead, it evaluates the moral framework in which evil is situated, providing a descriptive understanding of it as a plurality and a depth psychological perspective on the threat it poses for our well-being and ways of life. In so doing, it also fashions and articulates an ethical stance that recognizes the intrinsic link between human freedom and the potential for evil.

Download or read book Framing Law and Crime written by Caroline Joan "Kay" S. Picart and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cutting-edge edited collection brings together 17 scholarly essays on two of cinema and television’s most enduring and powerful themes: law and crime. With contributions by many of the most prominent scholars in law, sociology, criminology, and film, Framing Law and Crime offers a critical survey of a variety of genres and media, integrating descriptions of technique with critical analysis, and incorporating historical and socio-political critique. The first set of essays brings together accounts of the history of the Law and Cinema Movement; the groundbreaking genre of “post-apocalyptic fiction;” and the policy-setting genesis of a Canadian documentary. The second section of the book turns to the examination of a range of international or global films, with an eye to assessing the strengths, frailties, and possible functions of law, as depicted in fictional cinema. After an international focus in the second section, the third section focuses on law and crime in American film and television, inclusive of both fictional and documentary modes of narration. This section’s expansion beyond film narratives to include television series attempts to broaden the scope of the edited collection, in terms of media discussed; it is also a nod to how the big screen, although still a dominant force in American popular culture, now has to compete, to some extent, with the small screen, for influence over the collective American popular cultural imaginary. The fourth section, titled brings together various chapters that attempt to instantiate how a “Gothic Criminology” could be useful, as an interpretative framework in analyzing depictions of law and crime in film and television. The fifth and final section covers issues of pedagogy, epistemology, and ethics in relation to moving images of law and crime. Merging wide-ranging analyses with nuanced scholarly interpretations, Framing Law and Crime examines key concepts and showcases original research reflecting the latest interdisciplinary trends in the scholarship of the moving image. It addresses, not only scholars, but also fans, and will heighten the appreciation of connoisseurs and newcomers to these topics alike.

Download or read book Deleuze and Memorial Culture written by Adrian Parr and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deleuze and Memorial Culture is a detailed study of contemporary forms of public remembrance. Adrian Parr considers the different character traumatic memory takes throughout the sphere of cultural production and argues that contemporary memorial culture has the power to put traumatic memory to work in a positive way. Drawing on the conceptual apparatus of Gilles Deleuze, she outlines the relevance of his thought to cultural studies and the wider phenomenon of traumatic theory and public remembrance. This book offers a revision of trauma theory that presents trauma not simply as a definitive experience and implicitly negative, but an experience that can foster a sense of hope and optimism for the future.

Download or read book The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture written by Samantha Baskind and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-02-28 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto staged a now legendary revolt against their Nazi oppressors. Since that day, the deprivation and despair of life in the ghetto and the dramatic uprising of its inhabitants have captured the American cultural imagination. The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture looks at how this place and its story have been remembered in fine art, film, television, radio, theater, fiction, poetry, and comics. Samantha Baskind explores seventy years’ worth of artistic representations of the ghetto and revolt to understand why they became and remain touchstones in the American mind. Her study includes iconic works such as Leon Uris’s best-selling novel Mila 18, Roman Polanski’s Academy Award–winning film The Pianist, and Rod Serling’s teleplay In the Presence of Mine Enemies, as well as accounts in the American Jewish Yearbook and the New York Times, the art of Samuel Bak and Arthur Szyk, and the poetry of Yala Korwin and Charles Reznikoff. In probing these works, Baskind pursues key questions of Jewish identity: What links artistic representations of the ghetto to the Jewish diaspora? How is art politicized or depoliticized? Why have Americans made such a strong cultural claim on the uprising? Vibrantly illustrated and vividly told, The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture shows the importance of the ghetto as a site of memory and creative struggle and reveals how this seminal event and locale served as a staging ground for the forging of Jewish American identity.

Download or read book Toward the Visualization of History written by Mark Howard Moss and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the impact of visuals on the study of history by examining visual culture and the future of print, providing an analysis of photography, film, television, and computer culture. The author shows how the visualization of history can become a driving social an...