While America watches

The Holocaust holds a unique place in American public culture, and, as Jeffrey Shandler demonstrates, television has played a strategic role in establishing the Holocaust as a powerful moral paradigm in the United States. And while much has been written about Holocaust literature and film, the medium that has brought the subject to most people - television - has been largely neglected. Now Shandler provides the first account of how television has enabled so many Americans to feel familiar with this remote and deeply disturbing subject. In America, where mediations have always provided most people with their primary encounter with the Holocaust, television has helped transform watching into the morally charged act of "witnessing" the Holocaust. By tracing the course of Holocaust television over the past half century, While America Watches reveals how Americans have come to embrace this subject as a model for responding to other moral crises, from domestic racial strife to "ethnic cleansing" operations in Bosnia.

First sentence: Holocaust remembrance is a dynamic phenomenon, shaped by the unfolding relationship between the rememberers and the object of recall.

Year

1999

Language

English

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Editions

4

Pages

336

ISBN

9780195139297

Data source: Wikidata