This book is the second in a series of studies published under the auspices of the Institute for Holocaust Studies of the Graduate School and U niver sity Center of The City University of New York. Like the first book, it is an outgrowth of the lectures and special studies sponsored by the institute during the 1981-82 and 1982-83 academic years. This volume is divided into five parts. Part I, Ethics and the Holocaust, contains a pioneering investigation of one of the most neglected areas in Holocaust studies. Francine Klagsbrun, a well-known writer and popular lecturer, provides an erudite overview of the value of life in Jewish thought and tradition. With full understanding of the talmudic scholars' position on Jewish ethics and using concrete examples of the life-and death dilemmas that confronted many Jews in their concentration camp experiences, Klagsbrun provides dramatic evidence of the triumph of moral and ethical principles over the forces of evil during the Holocaust, this darkest period in Jewish history. The next two chapters, grouped under the heading The Allies and the Holocaust, deal with the failure of the Western Allies to respond to the desperate needs of the persecuted Jews of Europe during the Second World War. The first is by Professor Bela Vago, an authority on the Holocaust and East Central European history at the University of Haifa.

Most Holocaust scholars and survivors contend that the event was so catastrophic and unprecedented that it defies authentic representation in feature films. Yet it is precisely the extremity of 'the Final Solution' and the issues it raised that have fueled the cinematic imagination since the end of World War II. Recognizing that movies reach a greater audience than eyewitness, historical, or literary accounts, Lawrence Baron argues that they mirror changing public perceptions of the Holocaust over time and place. After tracing the evolution of the most commonly employed genres and themes in earlier Holocaust motion pictures, he focuses on how films from the l990s made the Holocaust relevant for contemporary audiences. While genres like biographical films and love stories about doomed Jewish-Gentile couples remained popular, they now cast Jews or non-Jewish victims like homosexuals in lead roles more often than was the case in the past. Baron attributes the recent proliferation of Holocaust comedies and children's movies to the search for more figurative and age-appropriate genres for conveying the significance of the Holocaust to generations born after it happened. He contends that thematic shifts to stories about neo-Nazis, rescuers, survivors, and their children constitute an expression of the continuing impact the Holocaust exerts on the present. The book concludes with a survey of recent films like Nowhere in Africa and The Pianist.

This book is the second in a series of studies published under the auspices of the Institute for Holocaust Studies of the Graduate School and U niver sity Center of The City University of New York. Like the first book, it is an outgrowth of the lectures and special studies sponsored by the institute during the 1981-82 and 1982-83 academic years. This volume is divided into five parts. Part I, Ethics and the Holocaust, contains a pioneering investigation of one of the most neglected areas in Holocaust studies. Francine Klagsbrun, a well-known writer and popular lecturer, provides an erudite overview of the value of life in Jewish thought and tradition. With full understanding of the talmudic scholars' position on Jewish ethics and using concrete examples of the life-and death dilemmas that confronted many Jews in their concentration camp experiences, Klagsbrun provides dramatic evidence of the triumph of moral and ethical principles over the forces of evil during the Holocaust, this darkest period in Jewish history. The next two chapters, grouped under the heading The Allies and the Holocaust, deal with the failure of the Western Allies to respond to the desperate needs of the persecuted Jews of Europe during the Second World War. The first is by Professor Bela Vago, an authority on the Holocaust and East Central European history at the University of Haifa.

Teaching and learning about the Holocaust is central to school curriculums in many parts of the world. As a field for discourse and a body of practice, it is rich, multidimensional and innovative. But the history of the Holocaust is complex and challenging, and can render teaching it a complex and daunting area of work. Drawing on landmark research into teaching practices and students’ knowledge in English secondary schools, Holocaust Education: Contemporary challenges and controversies provides important knowledge about and insights into classroom teaching and learning. It sheds light on key challenges in Holocaust education, including the impact of misconceptions and misinformation, the dilemmas of using atrocity images in the classroom, and teaching in ethnically diverse environments. Overviews of the most significant debates in Holocaust education provide wider context for the classroom evidence, and contribute to a book that will act as a guide through some of the most vexed areas of Holocaust pedagogy for teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policymakers.

Impossible Images brings together a distinguished group of contributors, including artists, photographers, cultural critics, and historians, to analyze the ways in which the Holocaust has been represented in and through paintings, architecture, photographs, museums, and monuments. Exploring frequently neglected aspects of contemporary art after the Holocaust, the volume demonstrates how visual culture informs Jewish memory, and makes clear that art matters in contemporary Jewish studies. Accepting that knowledge is culturally constructed, Impossible Images makes explicit the ways in which context matters. It shows how the places where an artist works shape what is produced, in what ways the space in which a work of art is exhibited and how it is named influences what is seen or not seen, and how calling attention to certain details in a visual work, such as a gesture, a color, or an icon, can change the meaning assigned to the work as a whole. Written accessibly for a general readership and those interested in art and art history, the volume also includes 20 color plates from leading artists Alice Lok Cahana, Judy Chicago, Debbie Teicholz, and Mindy Weisel.

In the face of strong moral and aesthetic pressure to deal with the Holocaust in strictly historical and documentary modes, this book discusses why and how reenactment of the Holocaust in art and imaginative literature can be successful in simultaneously presenting, analyzing, and working through this apocalyptic moment in human history. In pursuing his argument, the author explores such diverse materials and themes as: the testimonies of Holocaust survivors; the works of such artists and writers as Charlotte Salomon, Christian Boltanski, and Armando; and the question of what it means to live in a house built by a jew who was later transported to the death camps. He shows that reenactment, as an artistic project, also functions as a critical strategy, one that, unlike historical methods requiring a mediator, speaks directly to us and lures us into the Holocaust. We are then placed in the position of experiencing and being the subjects of that history. We are there, and history is present--but not quite. A confrontation with Nazism or with the Holocaust by means of a re-enactment takes place within the representational realm of art. Our access to this past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness, by a narrator, by the eye of a photographer. We do not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it, and our response is direct or firsthand in a different way. That different way of "keeping in touch” is the subject of inquiry that propels this study.