Defying comprehension, the tragic history of the Holocaust has been alternately repressed and canonized in postmodern Western culture. Recently our interpretation of the Holocaust has been the center of bitter controversies, from debates over Paul de Man's collaborationist journalism and Martin Heidegger’s Nazi past to attempts by some historians to downplay the Holocaust’s significance. A major voice in current historiographical discussions, Dominick LaCapra brings a new clarity to these issues as he examines the intersections between historical events and the theory through which we struggle to understand them.In a series of essays—three published here for the first time—LaCapra explores the problems faced by historians, critics, and thinkers who attempt to grasp the Holocaust. He considers the role of canon formation and the dynamic of revisionist historiography, as well as critically analyzing responses to the discovery of de Man’s wartime writings. He also discusses Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism, and he sheds light on postmodernist obsessions with such concepts as loss, agora, dispossession, deferred meaning, and the sublime. Throughout, LaCapra demonstrates that psychoanalysis is not merely a psychology of the individual but that its concepts have sociocultural dimensions and can help us perceive the relationship between the present and the past. Many of our efforts to comprehend the Holocaust, he shows, continue to suffer from the traumatizing effects of its events and require a "working through" of that trauma if we are to gain a more profound understanding of the meaning of the Holocaust.

Writing about the Holocaust and writing for young readers evoke two quite separate sets of concerns which are not always mutually compatible. The first half of Representing the Holocaust focuses on how literary material can present historically verifiable material. The second half examines how such materials will be perceived by young readers; whether they will be able to determine any boundaries between fictionality and factuality, and what motivates young readers to keep reading. The work concludes by placing the study in the context of Holocaust education.

This book explores the diverse ways in which Holocaust representations have influenced and structured how other genocides are understood and represented in the West. Rebecca Jinks focuses in particular on the canonical 20th century cases of genocide: Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Using literature, film, photography, and memorialisation, she demonstrates that we can only understand the Holocaust's status as a 'benchmark' for other genocides if we look at the deeper, structural resonances which subtly shape many representations of genocide. Representing Genocide pursues five thematic areas in turn: how genocides are recognised as such by western publics; the representation of the origins and perpetrators of genocide; how western witnesses represent genocide; representations of the aftermath of genocide; and western responses to genocide. Throughout, the book distinguishes between 'mainstream' and other, more nuanced and engaged, representations of genocide. It shows how these mainstream representations – the majority – largely replicate the representational framework of the Holocaust, including the way in which mainstream Holocaust representations resist recognising the rationality, instrumentality and normality of genocide, preferring instead to present it as an aberrant, exceptional event in human society. By contrast, the more engaged representations – often, but not always, originating from those who experienced genocide – tend to revolve around precisely genocide's ordinariness, and the structures and situations common to human society which contribute to and become involved in the violence.

These essays analyze representations of the Holocaust perpetrators. In doing so, they explore what has until now held critics back from this topic, including moral and emotional distaste, the dangers of confusing understanding with exculpation, and the possibility of problematic identification.

Can the story be told? Jorge Semprun asked after his liberation from Buchenwald. The question is addressed from many angles in this volume of essays on teaching about the Holocaust. In their introduction, Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes argue that Semprun's question is as vital now, and as difficult and complex, as it was for the survivors in 1945. The thirty-eight contributors to Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust come from various disciplines (history, literary criticism, psychology, film studies) and address a wide range of issues pertinent to the teaching of a subject that many teachers and students feel is an essential part of a liberal arts education. This volume offers approaches to such works as Jurek Becker's Jacob the Liar, Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, Anne Frank's diary, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, Dan Pagis's "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car," Art Spiegelman's Maus, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Elie Wiesel's Night, and Abraham Yehoshua's Mr. Mani. To the challenge "How do we transmit so hurtful an image of our own species without killing hope and breeding indifference?" posed by Geoffrey Hartman in this volume, the editors respond, "Only in the very human context of classroom interaction can we hope to avoid either false redemption or unending despair."

German memory, judicial interrogation, and historical reconstruction : writing perpetrator history from postwar testimony / Christopher R. Browning -- Historical emplotment and the problem of truth / Hayden White -- On emplotment : two kinds of ruin / Perry Anderson -- History, counterhistory, and narrative / Amos Funkenstein -- Just one witness / Carlo Ginzburg -- Of plots, witnesses, and judgments / Martin Jay -- Representing the Holocaust : reflections on the historians' debate / Dominick LaCapra -- Historical understanding and counterrationality : the Judenrat as epistemological vantage / Dan Diner -- History beyond the pleasure principle : some thoughts on the representation of trauma / Eric L. Santner -- Habermas, enlightenment, and antisemitism / Vincent P. Pecora -- Between image and phrase : progressive history and the "final solution" as dispossession / Sande Cohen.; Science, modernity, and the "final solution" / Mario Biagioli -- Holocaust and the end of history : postmodern historiography in cinema / Anton Kaes -- Whose story is it, anyway? : ideology and psychology in the representation of the Shoah in Israeli literature / Yael S. Feldman -- Translating Paul Celan's "Todesfuge" : rhythm and repetition as metaphor / John Felstiner -- "The grave in the air" : unbound metaphors in post-Holocaust poetry / Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi -- The dialectics of unspeakability : language, silence, and the narratives of desubjectification / Peter Haidu -- The representation of limits / Berel Lang -- The book of the destruction / Geoffrey H. Hartman.

Laughter After will appeal to a number of audiences—from students and scholars of Jewish and Holocaust studies to academics and general readers with an interest in media and performance studies.