This first book by Shandler, a teaching fellow in New York
University's department of Judaic studies, examines one of the few
relatively neglected areas of Holocaust scholarship - its treatment
by American television. In recent years, as Shandler notes in his
introduction, there's been much discussion of the Holocaust's
so-called Americanization. With the success of the Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the subsequent opening of
several others around the US, questions of cultural appropriation
and appropriateness have emerged prominently in the debate over how
best to remember the mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis.
Ironically, Shandler observes at several pivotal moments, the
history of television and the history of Holocaust memory coincide
rather neatly. He traces three stages in television's coverage of
the Holocaust: the "[creation] of the viewer" in the 1950s; the
emergence of the Holocaust as an important topic in the '60s and
'70s, spurred by the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 and by the TV
miniseries Holocaust in 1978; and the 1980s and '90s, when the
subject has come to seem almost omnipresent on our various screens.
Shandler's most valuable contribution is that he has reviewed hours
of footage until now unavailable to all but scholars. He recounts
TV dramas from the 1950s, hosted or directed by such luminaries of
the medium as Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky, and offers
tantalizing bits of trivia, such as the fact that '30s radical
documentarian Leo Hurwitz directed American television coverage of
the Eichmann trial. But the author seems curiously reluctant to
take a position on many key issues, and he allows quotations from
others to speak in a tediously balanced fashion. And his writing is
the dullest and deadest of academic prose. A regrettably lifeless
examination of a potentially charged topic. (Kirkus Reviews)
Shandler provides the first account of how television has familiarized the American people with the Holocaust. He starts with wartime newsreels of liberated concentration camps, showing how they set the moral tone for viewing scenes of genocide, and then moves to television to explain how the Holocaust and the Holocaust survivor have gained stature as moral symbols in American culture. Shandler also examines the many controversies that televised presentations of the Holocaust have sparked, demonstrating how their impact extends well beyond the broadcasts themselves.
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