Memorializing the Holocaust

The title of the essay alludes to Friedländer's Holocaust memoir of 1979. Lamentunabashedly lachrymoseevoked by the memory of Auschwitz resists and implicitly questions the politicization of Holocaust commemoration. Furthermore, lamentation defies both theological and secular explanations of the Holocaust as defiling and vitiating the depth of our grief, and paradoxically our hopeagainst-hope that the evil that continues to haunt the human family will be ultimately vanquished. KEYWORDS Commemoration; Tisha b-'av; the chimera of explanation; hope-against-hope Cry with a bitter voice over your unhappiness and pain, perhaps he will remember the love of your betrothal. Gird yourself on a sack cloth … .-Medieval Lamentation We Jewsas all caring human beingsare beckoned to regard ourselves as survivors of Auschwitz and to live our lives with all the burdens of survival. These burdens are first and foremost to mourn, to rend our garments in grief as we recall the victims of Auschwitz, the six million human beings exterminated during the Holocaust merely for being born of Jewish parents, not to speak of millions morehomosexuals, mentally and physically impaired those of Sinti and Roma ethnicity, etc.who were condemned to elimination because of putative ontological defects. To forget, to proceed with our lives without the tears of remembrance would not only desecrate their memory but also paradoxically vitiate hope, a hope-against-hope of a world free of the scourge of inhumanity, of the banality of human evil. 1 As an anguished identification with the victims of Hitler's satanic fury, remembrance is a multivalent moral duty. In the first instance, as Paul Ricoeur points out, we remember lest we allow forgetfulness to kill the victims twice over. 2 'We owe a debt to the victims of Auschwitz. And the most humble way of paying our debt is to tell and to retell what happened at Auschwitz.' 3 The story of what took place in those dark chambers of inhumanity, the brute tale

This book is a collection of seventeen scholarly articles which analyze Holocaust testimonies, photographs, documents, literature and films, as well as teaching methods in Holocaust education. Most of these essays were originally presented as papers at the Millersville University Conferences on the Holocaust and Genocide from 2010 to 2012. In their articles, the contributors discuss the Holocaust in concentration camps and ghettos, as well as the Nazis’ methods of exterminating Jews. The authors analyze the reliability of photographic evidence and eyewitness testimonies about the Holocaust. The essays also describe the psychological impact of the Holocaust on survivors, witnesses and perpetrators, and upon Jewish identity in general after the Second World War. The scholars explore the problems of the memorialization of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and the description of the Holocaust in Russian literature. Several essays are devoted to the representation of the Holocaust in film, and trace the evolution of its depiction from the early Holocaust movies of the late 1940s – early 1950s to modern Holocaust fantasy films. They also show the influence of Holocaust cinema on feature films about the Armenian Genocide. Lastly, several authors propose innovative methods of teaching the Holocaust to college students. The younger generation of students may see the Holocaust as an event of the distant past, so new teaching methods are needed to explain its significance. This collection of essays, based on new multi-disciplinary research and innovative methods of teaching, opens many unknown aspects and provides new perspectives on the Holocaust

Visual Studies

Bolinger 2 through the lens of a predetermined narrative. 3 This narrative is eerily similar to the United States' preexisting, singular Holocaust narrative which arose in the 1960s, where specific, oversimplified tropes of victims, perpetrators, and heroes were favored in the United States' medial depictions of the Holocaust. 4 These memorialization methods make up the American interpretation of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the concept typically applied to how Germans deal with or face the aftermath of the Second World War. Many sources have informed my research but this project leans heavily on the work of a few key texts that form the structure and method of my approach. Extensive research has been done in the fields of Trauma, Memory, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, and many scholars reference the works of experts like Émile Durkheim and Walter Benjamin to inform their theories. Works by experts such as Maurice Halbwachs and Marianne Hirsch, as well as others, provide the background information needed for this project. 5 My research on the topic of Holocaust memorialization comes from both the extensive study of experts, and from my own experience. I visited the USHMM in Washington, D.C. in fall 2021, in order to see, in person, the memorial techniques which I had read so much about. While there, I took nearly 600 pictures of various artifacts and framing techniques, several of which can be found in Appendix A. 6 I also brought a journal, in which to record the thoughts and impressions I might have along the way, as well as to document the less tangible, more sensorial framing devices, like sound or smell, 6 See Appendix A.

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2010

This essay examines the relationship between contemporary racialized subjects in Germany and the process of Holocaust memorialization. I ask why youths from these contexts fail to see themselves in the process of Holocaust memorialization, and why that process fails to see them in it. My argument is not about equivalences, but instead I examine the ways in which the monumentalization of Holocaust memory has inadvertently worked to exclude both relevant subjects and potential participants from the process of memorialization. That process as a monumental enterprise has also worked to sever connections between racialist memory and contemporary racism. The monumental display of what presents itself, at times, as moral superiority does not adequately attend to the everyday, mundane, repeatable qualities of racialized exclusion today, or in the past.

Reviews in Religion & Theology, 1994

Nordisk Judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies, 2017

2016