4. Shoah and memory

Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans

“Shoah and memory” looks at the Holocaust through the lens of Jewish literature worldwide, focusing on the differences between the works of Anne Frank (Diary of a Young Girl), Elie Wiesel (Night), Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem), and others, studying the reception each of these works received in Jewish and non-Jewish milieus. There is a connection between memory and testimonial literature, which can especially be seen in fiction as it intersects with the anti-Semitic trend known as “Holocaust denial." We have cases such as “invented” memoirs, for example, The Painted Bird by Jerzy Koziński. There are also a number of nonliterary Holocaust narratives such as the films Shoah and Schindler’s List and the graphic novel Maus.

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-127
Author(s):  
Anca-Simina Martin

Jews as a collective have long served as scapegoats for epidemics and pandemics, such as the Bubonic Plague and, according to some scholars, the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic. This practice reemerged in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when more and more fake news outlets in the US and Europe started publishing articles on a perceived linkage between Jewish communities and the novel coronavirus. What this article aims to achieve is to facilitate a dialogue between the observations on the phenomenon made by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania and the latest related EU reports, with a view to charting its beginnings in Romania in relation to other European countries and in an attempt to see whether Romania, like France and Germany, has witnessed the emergence of “grey area” discourses which are not fully covered by International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-64
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Brittingham

From his pulpit at Faithful Word Baptist Church (Independent Fundamental Baptist) in Tempe, AZ, fundamentalist preacher Steven L. Anderson launches screeds against Catholics, LGBTQ people, evolutionary scientists, politicians, and anyone else who doesn't share his political, social, or theological views. Anderson publishes clips of his sermons on YouTube, where he has amassed a notable following. Teaming up with Paul Wittenberger of Framing the World, a small-time film company, Anderson produced a film about the connections between Christianity, Judaism, and Israel, entitled Marching to Zion (2015), which was laced with antisemitic stereotypes. Anderson followed Marching to Zion with an almost 40-minute YouTube video espousing Holocaust denial, entitled “Did the Holocaust Really Happen?” In this article, I analyze Anderson's Holocaust denial video in light of his theology, prior films, and connections to other Christian conspiracists, most notably Texe Marrs, I particularly show how Anderson frames the “Holocaust myth,” as he calls it, in light of a deeper spiritual warfare that negatively impacts the spread of Christianity.


Author(s):  
Kevin Haworth

This chapter discusses Modan's second graphic novel, The Property, which embeds a taboo love affair within a quest to identify Jewish property lost in Warsaw during the Holocaust. The chapter explores the unresolved narratives around the war that envelop both Poles and Jews, and shows how Modan's book distances itself from both Israeli literature about Poland and from other contemporary Holocaust graphc novels. The chapter reveals Modan's process for creating the book, which involved hiring actors to stage each panel of the book's script.


2019 ◽  
pp. 162-189
Author(s):  
William vanden Heuvel

This chapter presents Ambassador vanden Heuvel's views on American immigration policies towards Jews before and during WWII. In response to a documentary by the historian David Wyman criticizing Roosevelt and his administration, vanden Heuvel began his own research to set the record straight. He demonstrates that American policy toward refugees was more generous than any other country at the time and that efforts by FDR to encourage Congress to revise refugee quotas would have resulted in a reduction of those quotas by an isolationist Congress. He refutes the idea that the exact details of the death camps were widely known at the time and thus could have prompted a military plan to save the Jews. He also recalls his intervention with President Jimmy Carter to challenge such claims by Elie Wiesel and others.


2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 968-997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly A. Arkin

AbstractDrawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the “European” Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, which divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new pedagogical narratives relied on a very different historicity, or way of reckoning time and causality, than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. By reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, they offered an expansive and homogenously “European” Jewishness. This argument works against a growing postcolonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing “Jewishness” as transparently either “European” or “French.” It also highlights the role played by historicity—not just history—in producing what counts as group “identity.”


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