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Author: David L. Worthington Publisher: ISBN: Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Languages : en Pages : 502
Book Description
This dissertation analyzes the rhetoric of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a site that constructs, articulates, and advances an ideology of American exceptionalism. The critical thrust of the project is to demonstrate how the museum produces a narrow set of terministic screens for understanding American connections to the European holocaust that make it difficult to productively engage problematic instances of U.S. history such as slavery and the genocide of the native Americans. To this end, the study focuses on public debates surrounding the founding and placement of the museum, the narrative of the museum's Permanent Exhibit, the physical exhibits that shape American exceptionalism, and the ways in which visitors respond to the museum story in comment books. The argument unfolds in 5 stages. The first stage examines the ways in which public debate during the museum's planning stages took up the issue of the propriety of a "Holocaust" museum in the U.S. and then addressed where the museum would be located and what kind of narrative would be consistent with placing the museum in close proximity to the National Mall. Stage two explores the museum's insistence on a strictly defined and overly simplistic narrative that marks the participants in the Shoah as victims, perpetrators, or liberators. Stage three focuses on the narrative of the museum's Permanent Exhibit, where the museum interpellates visitors as "witnesses" without providing a clear sense of what the act of witnessing entails. In the fourth stage "citizenship" is made passive by exhibits that evoke a sense of tragedy and atrocity that exists "over there" (in Europe) and whose victims are "other" and outside the bounds and protection of American style liberal democracy. Stage four shifts focus from the narrative as articulated by museum curators and towards the way visitors respond to the museum in comment books, and in particular on the most common response by museum visitors that they feel "sad." "Sadness," I argue, is a problematic public emotion that represses civic action. The project concludes in stage five by discussing ways in which exhibits might be added that would widen our terministic understanding of the past so as to allow for a more productive consideration of the ways in which and the topos of "atrocity" implicates the politics of genocide.
Author: David L. Worthington Publisher: ISBN: Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Languages : en Pages : 502
Book Description
This dissertation analyzes the rhetoric of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a site that constructs, articulates, and advances an ideology of American exceptionalism. The critical thrust of the project is to demonstrate how the museum produces a narrow set of terministic screens for understanding American connections to the European holocaust that make it difficult to productively engage problematic instances of U.S. history such as slavery and the genocide of the native Americans. To this end, the study focuses on public debates surrounding the founding and placement of the museum, the narrative of the museum's Permanent Exhibit, the physical exhibits that shape American exceptionalism, and the ways in which visitors respond to the museum story in comment books. The argument unfolds in 5 stages. The first stage examines the ways in which public debate during the museum's planning stages took up the issue of the propriety of a "Holocaust" museum in the U.S. and then addressed where the museum would be located and what kind of narrative would be consistent with placing the museum in close proximity to the National Mall. Stage two explores the museum's insistence on a strictly defined and overly simplistic narrative that marks the participants in the Shoah as victims, perpetrators, or liberators. Stage three focuses on the narrative of the museum's Permanent Exhibit, where the museum interpellates visitors as "witnesses" without providing a clear sense of what the act of witnessing entails. In the fourth stage "citizenship" is made passive by exhibits that evoke a sense of tragedy and atrocity that exists "over there" (in Europe) and whose victims are "other" and outside the bounds and protection of American style liberal democracy. Stage four shifts focus from the narrative as articulated by museum curators and towards the way visitors respond to the museum in comment books, and in particular on the most common response by museum visitors that they feel "sad." "Sadness," I argue, is a problematic public emotion that represses civic action. The project concludes in stage five by discussing ways in which exhibits might be added that would widen our terministic understanding of the past so as to allow for a more productive consideration of the ways in which and the topos of "atrocity" implicates the politics of genocide.
Author: Richard E. Frankel Publisher: ISBN: 9781032210162 Category : Antisemitism Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"This book examines the history of antisemitism in the United States and Germany in a novel way by placing the two countries side by side for a sustained comparison of the anti-Jewish environments in both countries from the 1880s to the end of the Second World War. Author Richard Frankel shatters the widely-held notion of exceptionalism in Germany and America: the belief that antisemitism in Germany was uniquely murderous and led inevitably to the Holocaust and that antisemitism in the United States was uniquely benign, making an American Holocaust all but unthinkable. In a series of new and previously published essays that have been revised, updated, and expanded, the book relates antisemitism to issues including Jewish and Chinese immigration, discrimination and exclusion, the First World War and its aftermath, Hitler and Henry Ford, Nazis, the American Right, and the Roosevelt Administration, and a German Ku Klux Klan. Taken together, these essays reveal that antisemitism in Germany was less aberrant than commonly believed and that American antisemitism was indeed dangerous and more similar to what existed in Germany during the same period. Antisemitism Before the Holocaust is an essential volume for students and scholars alike interested in European and American history, the history of the holocaust and the First World War"--
Author: Alvin Hirsch Rosenfeld Publisher: ISBN: Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Languages : en Pages : 62
Book Description
Contends that when Americanized, the Holocaust undergoes universalization and loses its specific Jewish character. This tendency can be seen in the expositions of museums such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, as well as in the art work "Holocaust Project" by Judy Chicago, where the Holocaust is equated with the sufferings of the Blacks in America and the abuse of women. Another tendency is the American reluctance to confront the brutal and horrific essence of the Holocaust. For instance, the play "The Diary of Anne Frank", by F. Goodrich and A. Hackett, and the film version both downplay Anne's Jewishness and the fact that all of the characters are doomed to death. The latter tendency led to the growing cult of survivors and rescuers as the bright side of the Holocaust, manifested in Spielberg's "Schindler's List" and the proliferation of books on Righteous Gentiles, as well as the founding of the Institute of the Righteous Acts and the Jewish Foundation of Christian Rescuers by R. Schulweis. Virtuous as they are, the Gentile rescuers cannot counterbalance the evil of the Nazi Holocaust.
Author: Alan Mintz Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 029580369X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 222
Book Description
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.
Author: Lila Corwin Berman Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691242119 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
The first comprehensive history of American Jewish philanthropy and its influence on democracy and capitalism For years, American Jewish philanthropy has been celebrated as the proudest product of Jewish endeavors in the United States, its virtues extending from the local to the global, the Jewish to the non-Jewish, and modest donations to vast endowments. Yet, as Lila Corwin Berman illuminates in The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex, the history of American Jewish philanthropy reveals the far more complicated reality of changing and uneasy relationships among philanthropy, democracy, and capitalism. With a fresh eye and lucid prose, and relying on previously untapped sources, Berman shows that from its nineteenth-century roots to its apex in the late twentieth century, the American Jewish philanthropic complex tied Jewish institutions to the American state. The government’s regulatory efforts—most importantly, tax policies—situated philanthropy at the core of its experiments to maintain the public good without trammeling on the private freedoms of individuals. Jewish philanthropic institutions and leaders gained financial strength, political influence, and state protections within this framework. However, over time, the vast inequalities in resource distribution that marked American state policy became inseparable from philanthropic practice. By the turn of the millennium, Jewish philanthropic institutions reflected the state’s growing investment in capitalism against democratic interests. But well before that, Jewish philanthropy had already entered into a tight relationship with the governing forces of American life, reinforcing and even transforming the nation’s laws and policies. The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex uncovers how capitalism and private interests came to command authority over the public good, in Jewish life and beyond.
Author: Peter Novick Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0547349610 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 387
Book Description
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?
Author: David B. MacDonald Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134085729 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
In an era of globalization and identity politics, this book explores how Holocaust imagery and vocabulary have been appropriated and applied to other genocides. The author examines how the Holocaust has impacted on other ethnic and social groups, asking whether the Holocaust as a symbol is a useful or destructive means of reading non-Jewish history. This volume: explains the rise of the Holocaust as a gradual process, charting how its importance as a symbol has evolved, providing a theoretical framework to understand how and why non-Jewish groups choose to invoke ‘holocausts’ to apply to other events explores the Holocaust in relation to colonialism and indigenous genocide, with case studies on America, Australia and New Zealand analyzes the Holocaust in relation to war and genocide, with case studies on the Armenian genocide, the Rape of Nanking, Serbia and the Rwandan genocide examines how the Holocaust has been used to promote animal rights. Demonstrating both the opportunities and pitfalls the Holocaust provides to non-Jewish groups who seek to represent their collective histories, this book fills a much needed gap on the use of the Holocaust in contemporary identity politics and will be of interest to students and researchers of politics, the Holocaust and genocide.
Author: John-Paul Himka Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1496210204 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 946
Book Description
Despite the Holocaust's profound impact on the history of Eastern Europe, the communist regimes successfully repressed public discourse about and memory of this tragedy. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, however, this has changed. Not only has a wealth of archival sources become available, but there have also been oral history projects and interviews recording the testimonies of eyewitnesses who experienced the Holocaust as children and young adults. Recent political, social, and cultural developments have facilitated a more nuanced and complex understanding of the continuities and discontinuities in representations of the Holocaust. People are beginning to realize the significant role that memory of Holocaust plays in contemporary discussions of national identity in Eastern Europe. This volume of original essays explores the memory of the Holocaust and the Jewish past in postcommunist Eastern Europe. Devoting space to every postcommunist country, the essays in Bringing the Dark Past to Light explore how the memory of the "dark pasts" of Eastern European nations is being recollected and reworked. In addition, it examines how this memory shapes the collective identities and the social identity of ethnic and national minorities. Memory of the Holocaust has practical implications regarding the current development of national cultures and international relationships.
Author: David E. Stannard Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199838984 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 408
Book Description
For four hundred years--from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s--the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched--and in places continue to wage--against the New World's original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. At once sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate.
Author: David L. Worthington
Author: David L. Worthington
Author: Richard E. Frankel
Author: Alvin Hirsch Rosenfeld
Author: Alan Mintz
Author: Shaul Magid
Author: Lila Corwin Berman
Author: Peter Novick
Author: David B. MacDonald
Author: John-Paul Himka
Author: David E. Stannard