What is the role of survivor testimony in Holocaust remembrance? Today such recollections are considered among the most compelling and important historical sources we have, but this has not always been true. In The Era of the Witness, a concise, rigorously argued, and provocative work of cultural and intellectual history, Annette Wieviorka seeks to answer this surpassingly complex question. She analyzes the conditions under which survivor testimonies have been produced, how they have been received over time, and how the testimonies shaped the construction of history and collective memory. Wieviorka discerns three successive phases in the evolution of the roles and images of the Holocaust witness. The first phase is marked by the testimony left by those who did not survive the Holocaust but managed nevertheless to record their experiences. The second, most important, phase is centered on the Eichmann trial, which for Wieviorka is the moment (1961 1962) when a broad cultural deafness to survivors' stories was replaced by the image of the witness as "bearer of history." The author follows the changing nature of the witness into a third phase, which she calls "the era of the witness." Especially concerned with the pedagogical and political uses to which survivor testimony has been put, Wieviorka examines factors that determine when and how survivor testimonies are incorporated into the larger narrative of the Holocaust, according it a privileged place in our understanding. By exploring the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered, The Era of the Witness also deepens our understanding of how testimony can help to define not only twentieth-century history but also more recent episodes of mass killing that are only now "becoming history."

The 141st volume of Yale French Studies examines the life and work of Claude Lanzmann following his masterpiece, Shoah   This volume of Yale French Studies charts the different paths the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018) took after the release of Shoah in 1985. These paths are explored through a consideration of his late films—Tsahal (1994), A Visitor from the Living (1997), Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001), Light and Shadows (2008), The Karski Report (2010), The Last of the Unjust (2013), Napalm (2017), and Four Sisters (2018)—and of his memoir, The Patagonian Hare. The volume also includes an English translation of his last major interview, “Self-Portrait at Ninety.� The original essays collected here show that Lanzmann’s late films and writing stand as something more than mere footnotes to his 1985 masterpiece. Continuing to wrestle with questions of cinematic transmission and the relationship among film, history, and testimony, they confront anew and in a variety of approaches the challenge of representing the Holocaust, and of living in its aftermath.

"You know, a lot of people like to talk about it, and I'm always pushing, pushing away, you know, I'm always pushing. I hate to remember, I hate to talk about it." But in the wake of her husband's death, and afraid that the story would never be told, Alina Bacall-Zwirn, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and four Nazi concentration camps, decided to remember and to bear witness to the history she and her husband suffered together. In a unique format that combines personal testimony, photographs, letters, legal documents and contributions from Alina's family; No Common Place interweaves a survivor's story with her reflections on the impact of her traumatic past on herself and her family.As it follows Alina through conversations with Jared Stark and with interviewers at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and as it records her participation in the dedication ceremonies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the books speaks to the importance of the individual's voice in shaping collective memory of the Holocaust. The supporting materials-chronology, maps, and notes-allow the survivor's voice to serve as a guide to the study of the Holocaust and its aftermath.Alina Bacall-Zwirn was born Alinka Handszer in Warsaw, Poland, in 1922. Married in the Warsaw ghetto and a survivor of four Nazi concentration camps, she immigrated to the United States with her husband in 1949. Alina died in 1997, one month after completing her testimony. Jared Stark is Assistant Professor of Literary Cultures at the John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University.

To be or not to be - who asks this question today, and how? What does it mean to issue, or respond to, an appeal for the right to die? In A Death of One's Own, the first sustained literary study of the right to die, Jared Stark takes up these timely questions by testing predominant legal understandings of assisted suicide and euthanasia against literary reflections on modern death from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rigorously interdisciplinary and lucidly argued, Stark's wide-ranging discussion sheds critical light on the disquieting bioethical and biopolitical dilemmas raised by contemporary forms of medical technology and legal agency. More than a survey or work of advocacy, A Death of One's Own examines the consequences and limits of the three reasons most often cited for supporting a person's right to die: that it is justified as an expression of personal autonomy or self-ownership; that it constitutes an act of self-authorship, of "choosing a final chapter" in one's life; and that it enables what has come to be called "death with dignity. Probing the intersections of law and literature, Stark interweaves close discussion of major legal, political, and philosophical arguments with revealing readings of literary and testimonial texts by writers including Balzac, Melville, Benjamin, and Amery. A thought-provoking work that will be of interest to those concerned with law and humanities, biomedical ethics, cultural history, and human rights, A Death of One's Own opens new and suggestive paths for thinking about the history of modern death as well as the unsettled future of the right to die.