While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust / Edition 1

by Jeffrey Shandler

Overview

The Holocaust holds a unique place in American public culture, and, as Jeffrey Shandler argues in While America Watches, it is television, more than any other medium, that has brought the Holocaust into our homes, our hearts, and our minds.
Much has been written about Holocaust film and literature, and yet the medium that brings the subject to most people—television—has been largely neglected. Now Shandler provides the first account of how television has familiarized the American people with the Holocaust. He starts with wartime newsreels of liberated concentration camps, showing how they set the moral tone for viewing scenes of genocide, and then moves to television to explain how the Holocaust and the Holocaust survivor have gained stature as moral symbols in American culture. From early teleplays to coverage of the Eichmann trial and the Holocaust miniseries, as well as documentaries, popular series such as All in the Family and Star Trek, and news reports of recent interethnic violence in Bosnia, Shandler offers an enlightening tour of television history.
Shandler also examines the many controversies that televised presentations of the Holocaust have sparked, demonstrating how their impact extends well beyond the broadcasts themselves. While America Watches is sure to continue this discussion—and possibly the controversies—among many readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195139297
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/21/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	5.78(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.96(d)
Lexile:	1650L (what's this?)

About the Author

Jeffrey Shandler is currently a Dorot Teaching Fellow in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

"Shandler is a diligent and perceptive observer, and his book offers as comprehensive a review of a half century of flashing images as one could reasonably expect in a single volume."—Columbia Journalism Review

"In a first-rate scholarly study Shandler offers a fresh way of looking at the Holocaust...In bold and striking fashion, [he] begins the process of analyzing how TV has portrayed the Holocaust and launched a serious new tack in the study of television. His writing is both subtle and engaging at the same time. [The book] will rank with the best of the book-length studies in TV studies for many years to come."—American Jewish History

From the Publisher

Shandler is a diligent and perceptive observer, and his book offers as comprehensive a review of a half century of flashing inages as one could reasonably expect in a single volume.
— Columbia Journalism Review

Walter Goodman

This first book by Shandler, a teaching fellow in New York University's department of Judaic studies, examines one of the few relatively neglected areas of Holocaust scholarship-its treatment by American television. In recent years, as Shandler notes in his introduction, there's been much discussion of the Holocaust's so-called Americanization. With the success of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the subsequent opening of several others around the US, questions of cultural appropriation and appropriateness have emerged prominently in the debate over how best to remember the mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. Ironically, Shandler observes at several pivotal moments, the history of television and the history of Holocaust memory coincide rather neatly. He traces three stages in television's coverage of the Holocaust: the "[creation] of the viewer" in the 1950s; the emergence of the Holocaust as an important topic in the '60s and '70s, spurred by the Adolf Eichmann trial in1961 and by the TV miniseries Holocaust in 1978; and the 1980s and '90s, when the subject has come to seem almost omnipresent on our various screens. Shandler's most valuable contribution is that he has reviewed hours of footage until now unavailable to all but scholars. He recounts TV dramas from the 1950s, hosted or directed by such luminaries of the medium as Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky, and offers tantalizing bits of trivia, such as the fact that '30s radical documentarian Leo Hurwitz directed American television coverage of the Eichmann trial. But the author seems curiously reluctant to take a position on many key issues, and he allows quotations from others to speak in atediously balanced fashion. And his writing is the dullest and deadest of academic prose. A regrettably lifeless examination of a potentially charged topic. (28 photos, 2 illustrations, not seen) .

Kirkus Reviews