The Visuality of the Holocaust Today
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14738/assrj.68.6937Keywords:
Holocaust Studies; Museology; Film and TV, HistoryAbstract
The Visuality of the Holocaust Today
By invoking the term Visuality, I am quite intentionally referring to the optical encounter with Holocaust representation in today’s world.This notion is a reaction to the common adage that states, people don’t want to read the book, they want to see the movie. Holocaust representation in this visual sense is primarily encountered in museums, the cinema, and the fine arts such as painting and sculpture. This latter category, by its virtuality as a highly subjective presentation, is better left for another discussion. On the other hand, and while acknowledging the primary significance of Holocaust historical literature, there is little argument that in the present times the most frequent encounter by the public in regards to this subject matter occurs most often in a museum or at the cinema. Therefore it behooves us to examine the public’s experience and compare it to the historical realities.
The purpose of this work is to examine the historical evolution of the current state of affairs, and it is a challenging task. The final goal is to contribute to the preservation of honesty, historical accuracy, and, most of all the integrity of the memory of the Holocaust.
References
References
Azaryahu, Maoz & Donner, Batia. Beit Lohamei Haghetaot. 1949-1999 50th Jubilee. Israel: Kal Press, 2000.
Bauer, Yehuda. The Memory of the Holocaust in the 21st Century : The Second International Conference on the Holocaust and Education. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1999.
Baumel, Judith Tydor. "“In Everlasting Memory”: Individual and Communal Holocaust Commemoration in Israel." Israel Affairs 1, no. 3 (1995): 146-70.
———. "" In Perfect Faith": Jewish Religious Commemoration of the Holocaust." Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 30, no. 1 (2001): 5-21.
Bayfield, Tony. Churban: The Murder of the Jews of Europe. Vol. 3: Michael Goulston Educational Foundation, 1981.
Bentwich, Norman. "Jewish Life in British South Africa." Jewish Social Studies (1942): 73-84.
Bloxham, Donald, and A Dirk Moses. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Brog, Mooli. "In Blessed Memory of a Dream: Mordechai Shenhavi and Initial Holocaust Commemoration Ideas in Palestine, 1942–1945." Yad Vashem Studies 30 (2002): 297-336.
Chapman, James. "Re-Presenting War: British Television Drama-Documentary and the Second World War." European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (2007): 13-33.
Cohn, Nechama. "Interview: Recollections of Rabbi Kahana and Martef Hashoah." By G. Mayer (2015, October 13).
Cole, Tim. "Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway: Survivors' Return Visits to the Memory Landscapes of Auschwitz." History & Memory 25, no. 2 (2013): 102-31.
Council, Jewish People's. " the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel." 1948.
Diner, Hasia R. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962. nyu Press, 2010.
Dinur, Benzion. "Problems Confronting'yad Vashem'in Its Work of Research." Yad Vashem Studies 1 (1957): 7-30.
Douglas, Lawrence. "Film as Witness: Screening Nazi Concentration Camps before the Nuremberg Tribunal." The Yale Law Journal 105, no. 2 (1995): 449-81.
Engel, David. "Crisis and Lachrymosity: On Salo Baron, Neobaronianism, and the Study of Modern European Jewish History." Jewish History 20, no. 3-4 (2006): 243-64.
———. Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Evans, Matt. "Exacerbating Social Cleavages: The Media's Role in Israel's Religious-Secular Conflict." The Middle East Journal 65, no. 2 (2011): 234-50.
Farbstein, Esther. Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah and Leadership During the Holocaust. Vol. 1: Feldheim Publishers, 2007.
Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. Sage, 2007.
Gartner, Lloyd P. "Salo Wittmayer Baron (1895–1989)." Jewish History 4, no. 1 (1989): 5-10.
Goldstein, Leah. "The Voice of the Individual: The New Holocaust History Museum." Yad Vashem Magazine 36, no. 7 (2005).
Gustman, Samuel, Dagobert Soergel, Douglas Oard, William Byrne, Michael Picheny, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, and Douglas Greenberg. "Supporting Access to Large Digital Oral History Archives." Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, 2002.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Harel, Dorit. Facts and Feelings. Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem, 2013.
Hebard, Andrew. "Disruptive Histories: Toward a Radical Politics of Remembrance in Alain Resnais's Night and Fog." New German Critique (1997): 87-113.
Hinton, Alexander L. "Critical Genocide Studies." In Genocide Matters, 52-68: Routledge, 2013.
Hirsch, Joshua. "Posttraumatic Cinema and the Holocaust Documentary." Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 32, no. 1 (2002): 9-21.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Harvard University Press, 1997.
Insdorf, Annette. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Klein, Kerwin Lee. "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse." Representations 69 (2000): 127-50.
Knesset. "Martyrs' and Heroes Remembrance (Yad Vashem) Law 5713-1953." (https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/pdf/YV_law.pdf).
Kremer, S Lillian. "Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation." JSTOR, 1991.
Levinson, Julian. "The Maimed Body and the Tortured Soul: Holocaust Survivors in American Film." The Yale Journal of Criticism 17, no. 1 (2004): 141-60.
Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. "The Institutionalization of Cosmopolitan Morality: The Holocaust and Human Rights." Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 2 (2004): 143-57.
———. "Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory." European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 87-106.
Levy, PRIMO. "If This Is a Man/the Truce." Penguin Modern Classics, 1979.
Liberles, Robert. Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History. Vol. 5: NYU Press, 1995.
Lüdtke, Alf. "" Coming to Terms with the Past": Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany." The Journal of Modern History (1993): 542-72.
Mayer, G;. Holocaust Museums: Artifacts Linking History and Culture. Saarbrucken, Germany: Scolars' Press, 2016.
Mayer, G. "Interview: Shalev, Avner." (Aug. 30, 2015).
Mayer, Gabriel. "Holocaust Cinema: Agency, Authenticity, and the Limits of Representation." (2016).
———. "Holocaust Cinema: Agency, Authenticity, and the Limits of Representation." International Journal of Arts andHumanities 1, no. 10 (2016): 891-99.
———. "Polity and Changing of Holocaust Memory." IJASSH (2019).
Mechoulan, Eric. "What Is the Meaning of Jewish History?" Mosaic, 2018.
Michman, Dan. "Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective: Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues." (2003).
Myers, David N. Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought. Princeton University Press, 2010.
Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire." Representations (1989): 7-24.
Prawer, Siegbert Salomon. Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910-1933. Vol. 3: Berghahn Books, 2005.
Rotem, Stephanie Shosh. Constructing Memory : Architectural Narratives of Holocaust Museums. Bern ; New York: Peter Lang, 2013. still image.
Roth, Cecil. The Record of European Jewry. Vol. 16: F. Muller, 1950.
Salmons, Paul. "Artifacts in Holocaust Education." Yad Vashem, 2014.
———. Unesco: Artifacts in Holocaust Education. Podcast audio. UNESCO Holocaust Education2013.
Saxton, L. "Haunted Images: Film, Ethics and the Holocaust." London: Wallflower Press, 2008.
Schorske, Carl E. Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Vintage, 2012.
Shandler, Jeffrey. "Heritage and Holocaust on Display: New York City's Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust." JSTOR, 1999.
———. While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Varga, Somogy and Guignon, Charles. "Authenticity." In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/authenticity/>. The Stanford Enclycopedia of Philosophy@In Collection (Authenticity), 2014.
Von Dassanowsky, Robert. Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metacinema. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2012.
Wiesel, Elie. "Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory." New York Times 11 (1989): 123.
———. Report to the President: President's Commission on the Holocaust 1979. Commission on the Holocaust, United States Commission on the Holocaust.
Wiesel, Elie, and Richard D Heffner. Conversations with Elie Wiesel. Schocken, 2009.
Yadin, Azzan. "Rabbi Akiva's Youth." The Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 4 (2010): 573-97.
Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. "Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. 1982." The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies. Seattle: U of Washington P (1996).
Azaryahu, Maoz & Donner, Batia. Beit Lohamei Haghetaot. 1949-1999 50th Jubilee. Israel: Kal Press, 2000.
Bauer, Yehuda. The Memory of the Holocaust in the 21st Century : The Second International Conference on the Holocaust and Education. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1999.
Baumel, Judith Tydor. "“In Everlasting Memory”: Individual and Communal Holocaust Commemoration in Israel." Israel Affairs 1, no. 3 (1995): 146-70.
———. "" In Perfect Faith": Jewish Religious Commemoration of the Holocaust." Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 30, no. 1 (2001): 5-21.
Bayfield, Tony. Churban: The Murder of the Jews of Europe. Vol. 3: Michael Goulston Educational Foundation, 1981.
Bentwich, Norman. "Jewish Life in British South Africa." Jewish Social Studies (1942): 73-84.
Bloxham, Donald, and A Dirk Moses. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Brog, Mooli. "In Blessed Memory of a Dream: Mordechai Shenhavi and Initial Holocaust Commemoration Ideas in Palestine, 1942–1945." Yad Vashem Studies 30 (2002): 297-336.
Chapman, James. "Re-Presenting War: British Television Drama-Documentary and the Second World War." European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (2007): 13-33.
Cohn, Nechama. "Interview: Recollections of Rabbi Kahana and Martef Hashoah." By G. Mayer (2015, October 13).
Cole, Tim. "Crematoria, Barracks, Gateway: Survivors' Return Visits to the Memory Landscapes of Auschwitz." History & Memory 25, no. 2 (2013): 102-31.
Council, Jewish People's. " the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel." 1948.
Diner, Hasia R. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962. nyu Press, 2010.
Dinur, Benzion. "Problems Confronting'yad Vashem'in Its Work of Research." Yad Vashem Studies 1 (1957): 7-30.
Douglas, Lawrence. "Film as Witness: Screening Nazi Concentration Camps before the Nuremberg Tribunal." The Yale Law Journal 105, no. 2 (1995): 449-81.
Engel, David. "Crisis and Lachrymosity: On Salo Baron, Neobaronianism, and the Study of Modern European Jewish History." Jewish History 20, no. 3-4 (2006): 243-64.
———. Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Evans, Matt. "Exacerbating Social Cleavages: The Media's Role in Israel's Religious-Secular Conflict." The Middle East Journal 65, no. 2 (2011): 234-50.
Farbstein, Esther. Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah and Leadership During the Holocaust. Vol. 1: Feldheim Publishers, 2007.
Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. Sage, 2007.
Gartner, Lloyd P. "Salo Wittmayer Baron (1895–1989)." Jewish History 4, no. 1 (1989): 5-10.
Goldstein, Leah. "The Voice of the Individual: The New Holocaust History Museum." Yad Vashem Magazine 36, no. 7 (2005).
Gustman, Samuel, Dagobert Soergel, Douglas Oard, William Byrne, Michael Picheny, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, and Douglas Greenberg. "Supporting Access to Large Digital Oral History Archives." Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, 2002.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Harel, Dorit. Facts and Feelings. Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem, 2013.
Hebard, Andrew. "Disruptive Histories: Toward a Radical Politics of Remembrance in Alain Resnais's Night and Fog." New German Critique (1997): 87-113.
Hinton, Alexander L. "Critical Genocide Studies." In Genocide Matters, 52-68: Routledge, 2013.
Hirsch, Joshua. "Posttraumatic Cinema and the Holocaust Documentary." Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 32, no. 1 (2002): 9-21.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Harvard University Press, 1997.
Insdorf, Annette. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Klein, Kerwin Lee. "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse." Representations 69 (2000): 127-50.
Knesset. "Martyrs' and Heroes Remembrance (Yad Vashem) Law 5713-1953." (https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/pdf/YV_law.pdf).
Kremer, S Lillian. "Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation." JSTOR, 1991.
Levinson, Julian. "The Maimed Body and the Tortured Soul: Holocaust Survivors in American Film." The Yale Journal of Criticism 17, no. 1 (2004): 141-60.
Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. "The Institutionalization of Cosmopolitan Morality: The Holocaust and Human Rights." Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 2 (2004): 143-57.
———. "Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory." European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 87-106.
Levy, PRIMO. "If This Is a Man/the Truce." Penguin Modern Classics, 1979.
Liberles, Robert. Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History. Vol. 5: NYU Press, 1995.
Lüdtke, Alf. "" Coming to Terms with the Past": Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany." The Journal of Modern History (1993): 542-72.
Mayer, G;. Holocaust Museums: Artifacts Linking History and Culture. Saarbrucken, Germany: Scolars' Press, 2016.
Mayer, G. "Interview: Shalev, Avner." (Aug. 30, 2015).
Mayer, Gabriel. "Holocaust Cinema: Agency, Authenticity, and the Limits of Representation." (2016).
———. "Holocaust Cinema: Agency, Authenticity, and the Limits of Representation." International Journal of Arts andHumanities 1, no. 10 (2016): 891-99.
———. "Polity and Changing of Holocaust Memory." IJASSH (2019).
Mechoulan, Eric. "What Is the Meaning of Jewish History?" Mosaic, 2018.
Michman, Dan. "Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective: Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues." (2003).
Myers, David N. Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought. Princeton University Press, 2010.
Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire." Representations (1989): 7-24.
Prawer, Siegbert Salomon. Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910-1933. Vol. 3: Berghahn Books, 2005.
Rotem, Stephanie Shosh. Constructing Memory : Architectural Narratives of Holocaust Museums. Bern ; New York: Peter Lang, 2013. still image.
Roth, Cecil. The Record of European Jewry. Vol. 16: F. Muller, 1950.
Salmons, Paul. "Artifacts in Holocaust Education." Yad Vashem, 2014.
———. Unesco: Artifacts in Holocaust Education. Podcast audio. UNESCO Holocaust Education2013.
Saxton, L. "Haunted Images: Film, Ethics and the Holocaust." London: Wallflower Press, 2008.
Schorske, Carl E. Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Vintage, 2012.
Shandler, Jeffrey. "Heritage and Holocaust on Display: New York City's Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust." JSTOR, 1999.
———. While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Varga, Somogy and Guignon, Charles. "Authenticity." In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/authenticity/>. The Stanford Enclycopedia of Philosophy@In Collection (Authenticity), 2014.
Von Dassanowsky, Robert. Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metacinema. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2012.
Wiesel, Elie. "Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory." New York Times 11 (1989): 123.
———. Report to the President: President's Commission on the Holocaust 1979. Commission on the Holocaust, United States Commission on the Holocaust.
Wiesel, Elie, and Richard D Heffner. Conversations with Elie Wiesel. Schocken, 2009.
Yadin, Azzan. "Rabbi Akiva's Youth." The Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 4 (2010): 573-97.
Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. "Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. 1982." The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies. Seattle: U of Washington P (1996).
Downloads
Published
2019-08-19
How to Cite
Mayer, G. (2019). The Visuality of the Holocaust Today. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 6(8), 67–80. https://doi.org/10.14738/assrj.68.6937
Issue
Section
Articles
License
Authors wishing to include figures, tables, or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.
