Description
Book SynopsisAn interdisciplinary study examining the diverse meanings of the Warsaw Ghetto in American culture. Looks at how the ghetto has been represented in fine art, book illustrations, film, television, radio, theater, fiction, poetry, and comics.
Trade Review“This vivid approach to an important event will be appreciated by students and scholars of the Holocaust as well as general readers.”
—Marcia G. Welsh Library Journal
“As she painstakingly draws the map of American culture produced against the backdrop of the Warsaw Ghetto, Baskind analyzes the broader contours that all the individual projects in various media reveal in tandem about this corner of the American art scene. . . . . Baskind has produced a daring work of scholarship on American art.”
—Maya Balakirsky Katz H-Judaic
“A profound, broad-ranging, multimedia analysis of American responses to the armed Jewish uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw. . . . Baskind provides insightful interpretation grounded in meticulous research and supported by detailed, elegant, and illuminating visual analysis.”
—Andrew Bush Studies in American Jewish Literature
“Her open and nonjudgmental treatment of many different artists who have depicted the ghetto over the past seventy years is a welcome addition to the historical discussion of the Holocaust in American culture. Future scholars should build on this book’s success, adding to Baskind’s wide-ranging guide to American art and literature on the Warsaw Ghetto with more historical consideration and discussion.”
—Kirsten Fermaglich American Historical Review
“The Warsaw Ghetto uprising has long captured the imagination of novelists, poets, and artists. Samantha Baskind's wide-ranging and highly original study of the uprising's impact on American art and culture is a major contribution to our understanding of Holocaust memory.”
—Samuel Kassow,author of Who Will Write Our History?
“In her penetrating exploration of how the Warsaw Ghetto has been represented in American culture over a seventy-year arc, Samantha Baskind reveals the ever-evolving significance of the ghetto and its uprising in real political and aesthetic time. With grace, a keen eye, and deep insight, she traces how new and changing media shape and reshape these events for contemporary audiences. Brilliantly illustrated, this is an excellent contribution to discussions of ‘the Americanization of the Holocaust’ and the Holocaust in visual culture—highly and warmly recommended!”
—James E. Young,author of The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between
“[An] admirably readable account.”
—Brad Prager Holocaust and Genocide Studies
“The Warsaw Ghetto uprising has resonated for more than seven decades with American Jews, looming in their consciousness ever since those wrenching days of April 1943. In spoken words, graphic images, and dramatic presentations it has played a powerful role in how they communicate among themselves about the great catastrophe of the Nazi era and how they present that cataclysm to the larger American public. A singular contribution, Samantha Baskind's book deftly and richly links the uprising to the inner politics of American Jewry and to its complex engagements with U.S. politics more broadly.”
—Hasia R. Diner,author of The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000
“Baskind’s book is a tour de force: eloquent, wide-ranging, and engaging. This is important work, taking up a necessary challenge to document the cultural representations and refractions of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising over more than seventy years, showing it to be a rolling marker of postwar Jewish American identity.”
—Oren B. Stier,author of Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory
“Baskind creates a midrashic exploration of the ongoing story of the uprising, its relevance to future generations, and the ways in which it has come to inform Jewish cultural identity.”
—Victoria Aarons Journal of Modern Jewish Studies
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. “You Must Be Prepared to Resist, Not Give Yourselves Up like Sheep to Slaughter”: Heroism, the Muscular Jew, and the Warsaw Ghetto, 1943–1950
2. “I Was Responsible to the People Who Had Played Out That Terrible Hour in History”: Rod Serling, Millard Lampell, and Familial Conflict Behind the Walls
3. “I Am a Jew and What Am I Going to Do About It”: Leon Uris, Mila 18, and Muscular Judaism
4. “I Would Like to Paint One Million Jewish Icons”: Samuel Bak’s Painted Memorials and the Traumatic Loss of the Youngest Generation
5. “Our Children, Our Children Must Live”: Joe Kubert, Comics, and the Saving Remnant
Epilogue: “Will the World Know of Us? Will the World Know?”: The Warsaw Ghetto in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Notes
Bibliography
Index
