Suchergebnisse

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age examines the nexus of new media and memory practices through an in-depth study of the Shoah Visual History Archive, the world's largest and most widely available collection of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, to understand how advances in digital technologies impact the practice of Holocaust remembrance

Queer Yiddishkeit—a cluster of works in literature, journalism, filmmaking, and performance art—constitutes one of the most revealing and provocative developments in contemporary Jewish culture. These works all juxtapose queerness and Yiddish in some way and do so as a means of challenging some cultural status quo. Queer Yiddishkeit epitomizes how, a half-century since the Holocaust, cultural engagements with Yiddish have been reconceiving the possibilities of the language and its relationship to culture and peoplehood. Several examples of Queer Yiddish culture are examined herein, especially performances that link Yiddish with drag, focusing on the different ways that they interrelate Yiddishness and queerness. This essay then considers what the practices of Queer Yiddishkeit suggest for the theorizing of Yiddish now, at a crucial juncture in the language's history, marked, on one hand, by the imminent passing of the last speakers who used Yiddish as a vernacular before World War II, and, on the other hand, by the expansion of what the author terms postvernacular engagements with Yiddish.

Abstract
The appearance of Hanna Bloch Kohner on a 1953 episode of the series This Is Your Life is among the earliest presentations of a Holocaust survivor's personal history on American television. Analysis of the program explores how television—a collaborative, corporate medium—shapes the telling of an individual's life story, and how the program relates the story of the Holocaust in terms of personal history. The article also examines how the program's producers employed television's distinctive characteristics to enable, limit, or otherwise shape the presentation of the Holocaust, and how the episode indicates that its creators understood its subject as being somehow singular, even as the conceptualization of the Holocaust was emerging, before the term Holocaust entered American public discourse. The article also considers how the program reflects the social and political context of post-World War II America in general and postwar American Jewish life in particular. Finally, the article considers how analysis of this program offers insight into other, later presentations of the Holocaust on American television, especially those dealing with the life story of an individual survivor. (Yiddish Studies/Jewish ethnology)

As millions of people around the world who have read her diary attest, Anne Frank, the most familiar victim of the Holocaust, has a remarkable place in contemporary memory. Anne Frank Unbound looks beyond this young girl's words at the numerous ways people have engaged her life and writing. Apart from officially sanctioned works and organizations, there exists a prodigious amount of cultural production, which encompasses literature, art, music, film, television, blogs, pedagogy, scholarship, religious ritual, and comedy. Created by both artists and amateurs, these responses to Anne Frank range from veneration to irreverence. Although at times they challenge conventional perceptions of her significance, these works testify to the power of Anne Frank, the writer, and Anne Frank, the cultural phenomenon, as people worldwide forge their own connections with the diary and its author.

Distilling more than ten years of ethnographic research, Don Seeman depicts the rich culture of the group, as well as their social and cultural vulnerability, and addresses the problems that arise when immigration officials, religious leaders, or academic scholars try to determine the legitimacy of Jewish identity or Jewish religious experience.