This book is a contribution to the emerging field of research-based performance, which seeks to gain a wider audience for issues that are crucial to our understanding of history and to informing our future actions. The book examines the role of theater in portraying the Shoah in France, the French Resistance, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Each of the three chapters consists of an original dramatic work by the author and an accompanying critical essay.

This book is a contribution to the emerging field of research-based performance, which seeks to gain a wider audience for issues that are crucial to our understanding of history and to informing our future actions. The book examines the role of theater in portraying the Shoah in France, the French Resistance, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Each of the three chapters consists of an original dramatic work by the author and an accompanying critical essay. Inez Hedges is Emerita Professor of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. Her play "Children of Drancy" was performed in 2007 as part of an advanced undergraduate learning community. She wrote "Kafka in Palestine" in 2017-19 while a Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, Waltham. Her previous books include Framing Faust: 20th Century Cultural Struggles (2005); and World Cinema and Cultural Memory (2015).

Employing interviews with nine daughters of Holocaust survivors and an analysis of Zionist discourse, the Israeli-born Lentin (Trinity College, Dublin) explores the ways that the relationship between Israel and the Shoah has been gendered--the Shoah becoming "feminized" and Israel "masculinized." The myths and silences that have been built up around the Shoah in Israeli society had deep implications for the formation of her own generation, Lentin writes. They also have had a profound impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "This book is a personal act of reckoning, and of mourning the loss of life that was the Shoah, and the inability, or unwillingness, to mourn that very loss by an Israeli society absorbed in acts of survival," she writes. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

'To portray the Holocaust, one has to create a work of art', says Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah. However, can the Holocaust be turned into theatre? Is it possible to portray on stage events that, by their monstrosity, defy human comprehension? These are the questions addressed by the playwrights and the scholars featured in this book. Their essays present and analyse plays performed in Israel, America, France, Italy, Poland and, of course, Germany. The style of presentation ranges from docudramas to avant-garde performances, from realistic impersonation of historical figures to provocative and nightmarish spectacles. The book is illustrated with original production photographs and some rare drawings and documents; it also contains an important descriptive bibliography of more than two hundred Holocaust plays.

Plunka argues that drama is the ideal art form to revitalize the collective memory of Holocaust resistance. This comparative drama study examines a variety of international plays - some quite well-known, others more obscure - that focus on collective or individual defiance of the Nazis.

For the last decade scholars have been questioning the idea that the Holocaust was not talked about in any way until well into the 1970s. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence is the first collection of authoritative, original scholarship to expose a serious misreading of the past on which, controversially, the claims for a ‘Holocaust industry’ rest. Taking an international approach this bold new book exposes the myth and opens the way for a sweeping reassessment of Jewish life in the postwar era, a life lived in the pervasive, shared awareness that Jews had narrowly survived a catastrophe that had engulfed humanity as a whole but claimed two-thirds of their number. The chapters include: an overview of the efforts by survivor historians and memoir writers to inform the world of the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe an evaluation of the work of survivor-historians and memoir writers new light on the Jewish historical commissions and the Jewish documentation centres studies of David Boder, a Russian born psychologist who recorded searing interviews with survivors, and the work of philosophers, social thinkers and theologians theatrical productions by survivors and the first films on the theme made in Hollywood how the Holocaust had an impact on the everyday life of Jews in the USA and a discussion of the different types, and meanings, of ‘silence’. A breakthrough volume in the debate about the ‘Myth of Silence’, this is a must for all students of Holocaust and genocide.

Despite Adorno's famous dictum, the memory of the Shoah features prominently in the cultural legacy of the 20th century and beyond. It has led to a proliferation of works of representation and re-memorialization which have brought in their wake concerns about a 'holocaust industry' and banalization. This volume sheds fresh light on some of the issues, such as the question of silence and denial, of the formation of contemporary identities — German, East European, Jewish or Israeli, the consequences of the legacy of the Shoah for survivors and for the 'second generation,' and the political, ideological, and professional implications of Shoah historiography. One of the conclusions to be drawn from this volume is that the 'Auschwitz code,' invoked in relation to all 'unspeakable' catastrophes, has impoverished our vocabulary; it does not help us remember the Shoah and its victims, but rather erases that memory.