Library Guides: Holocaust In Film & Lit JWST-3440-01: Home

Important Holocaust films owned by Library

Castaways by Sławomir Grünberg & Tomasz Wiśniewski.
Call Number: DVD 2013- 0353
Publication Date: 2013
A Day in Warsaw by Dir. Yitshak Goskind
Call Number: DVD 2011- 0109
Publication Date: 2005 [1938]
A portrayal of Warsaw, Poland in 1938, emphasizing the buildings, institutions and neighborhoods associated with the 400,000 Jews living in Warsaw at that time.
The Eternal Jew by E. Taübert
Call Number: DVD 2013- 0259
Publication Date: 2004 [1988]
A visit to the Lodz ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, recorded by German cameramen with the naïve cooperation of the Jewish community, is combined with rare archival footage, clips from international newsreels and excerpts from related cultural films to portray the world's Jews as swindlers and parasites. This pseudo-logical, uncomfortably realistic and genuinely frightening documentary interprets Jewish life and history from the viewpoint of traditional European anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology.
Irena Sendler: In the Name of Their Mothers by Mary Skinner
Call Number: DVD 2013-0359
Publication Date: 2010
In the Name of Their Mothers tells the remarkable story of Irena Sendler and the group of young Polish women who risked their lives to save thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during WWII. In 1943 Irena Sendler was captured, imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo. Whe she refused to reveal anything about her liaisons in the Polish Resistance, she was sentenced to death. At least 2500 of the children they had hidden survived the war and many were later re-united with their Jewish families. But for decades they could not tell their stories. Silenced by Communist authorities in post-war Poland, many endured Soviet prisons or were forced into exile. This film features Irena Sendler at the age of 95--in the last long interviews she gave--along with several of her co-workers and the children they saved.
The Last Witness by Michal Nekanda-Trepka
Call Number: DVD 2013- 0354
Publication Date: 2007
Holocaust survivor Samuel Willenberg returns to his native Poland to visit the places where he lived during World War II, beginning with Opatow. He recalls the events of the war and the Holocaust and describes his part in the revolt of prisoners in the Treblinka concentration camp on August 2, 1943. He tells how he was one of 400 inmates to escape from Treblinka, and retraces the route he took to Warsaw.
The Legacy of Jedwabne by Slawomir Grünberg
Call Number: DVD 2013- 0356
Publication Date: 2005
Feature-length documentary that tells the story of a pogrom in 1941 in Jedwabne, Poland, and explores the implications of the past for present constructions and negotiations of personal, national and religious identity.
Warsaw Ghetto a film by TPS Studio Filmowe & ZIH.
Call Number: DVD 2013-0355
Publication Date: 2005
Created for the Jewish Historical Institute as part of its permanent exhibit on the fate of Warsaw's Jews during the period from 1939 to 1945. They present the daily lives and deaths of those imprisoned in the ghetto, their hopes and efforts to survive, their armed resistance and struggle, and finally their total extermination"

Important Holocaust Literature (selections)

After Representation? by R. Clifton Spargo (Editor, Introduction by); Erin McGlothlin (Contribution by); Sara Horowitz (Contribution by); Petra Schweitzer (Contribution by); Berel Lang (Contribution by); James Young (Contribution by); Robert M. Ehrenreich (Editor); Michael Bernard-Donals (Contribution by); Sidney Bolkosky (Contribution by); Robert Eaglestone (Contribution by); Geoffrey H. Hartman (Contribution by); Sara R. Horowitz (Contribution by); Robert Ehrenreich (Editor); Michael Rothberg (Contribution by)
Call Number: E-Book Project Muse
ISBN: 9780813548159
Publication Date: 2009-11-11
After Representation? explores one of the major issues in Holocaust studiesùthe intersection of memory and ethics in artistic expression, particularly within literature. As experts in the study of literature and culture, the scholars in this collection examine the shifting cultural contexts for Holocaust representation and reveal how writersùwhether they write as witnesses to the Holocaust or at an imaginative distance from the Nazi genocideùarticulate the shadowy borderline between fact and fiction, between event and expression, and between the condition of life endured in atrocity and the hope of a meaningful existence. What imaginative literature brings to the study of the Holocaust is an ability to test the limits of language and its conventions. After Representation? moves beyond the suspicion of representation and explores the changing meaning of the Holocaust for different generations, audiences, and contexts.
The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film by Judith B. Kerman (Editor); John Edgar Browning (Editor)
Call Number: PN56.F34 F3555 2015
ISBN: 9780786458745
Publication Date: 2014-11-04
When reality becomes fantastic, what literary effects will render it credible or comprehensible? To respond meaningfully to the surreality of the Holocaust, writers must produce works of moral and emotional complexity. One way they have achieved this is through elements of fantasy. Covering a range of theoretical perspectives, this collection of essays explores the use of fantastic story-telling in Holocaust literature and film. Writers such as Jane Yolen and Art Spiegelman are discussed, as well as the sci-fi television series V (1983), Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil (1982), Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and Martin Scorsese's dark thriller Shutter Island (2010).
History, Literature, Critical Theory by Dominick LaCapra
Call Number: PN50 .L33 2013
ISBN: 9780801451973
Publication Date: 2013-05-14
In History, Literature, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, here considering history as both process and representation. A trio of chapters at the center of the volume concern the ways in which history and literature (particularly the novel) impact and question each other. In one of the chapters LaCapra revisits Gustave Flaubert, pairing him with Joseph Conrad. Other chapters pair J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, and Saul Friedlander's two-volume, prizewinning history Nazi Germany and the Jews. A recurrent motif of the book is the role of the sacred, its problematic status in sacrifice, its virulent manifestation in social and political violence (notably the Nazi genocide), its role or transformations in literature and art, and its multivalent expressions in "postsecular" hopes, anxieties, and quests. LaCapra concludes the volume with an essay on the place of violence in the thought of Slavoj Zizek. In LaCapra's view Zizek's provocative thought "at times has uncanny echoes of earlier reflections on, or apologies for, political and seemingly regenerative, even sacralized violence."
Jewish American and Holocaust Literature by Alan L. Berger (Editor); Gloria L. Cronin (Editor)
Call Number: Howard-Tilton e-book
ISBN: 0791462099
Publication Date: 2004-09-22
Deepens and enriches our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah.
Memory Work by Nina Fischer
Call Number: PN56.H55 F57 2015
ISBN: 9781137557612
Publication Date: 2016-03-06
Memory Work makes a contribution to our understanding of the intimate effects of the Holocaust on victims' families, and the significant role of "memory work" by survivors' children within the broader frame of cultural memory in the English-speaking countries of post-war Jewish diasporas. It studies how these authors explore the past in their literary texts – primarily life writing. By identifying key areas where memory manifests and can be traced – family objects, given names, bodies, food, the memorial uses of the Passover Seder, and the attacks of 9/11 – it shows how the Second Generation engages with the pre-Holocaust family and their parents' survival. Departing from prevailing trauma studies approaches, Nina Fischer builds an argument for the positive achievements of memory work by Second Generation writers in reconnecting with their family's pre-Holocaust life, a "usable past", in spite of horrific loss.
Night - Elie Wiesel
Call Number: PQ2683.I32 N8534 2010
ISBN: 9781604138672
Publication Date: 2010-05-01
Night, a memoir by concentration camp survivor and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel, is a key work of Holocaust literature. It bears witness to the horrors endured by a teenage boy whose freedom and family are taken from him. This invaluable new study guide contains a selection of the finest contemporary criticism on Night, plus a bibliography, a chronology of Wiesel's life, an index, and an introduction by revered scholar Harold Bloom.
Rage Is the Subtext by Susan Derwin
Call Number: PN56.H55 D47 2012
ISBN: 9780814211847
Publication Date: 2012-04-18
Rage Is the Subtext charts the internal shifts of Holocaust survivors who tell their stories of suffering, loss, and endurance. Susan Derwin locates the healing effect of literary testimony in its capacity to represent the reactions of survivors to traumatic experience, while concealing other more unsettling responses from view. Beneath the explicit concerns of works by Primo Levi, Saul Friedländer, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Imre Kertész and Liliana Cavani, Derwin uncovers unspoken reserves of rage, which then become legible as formal properties of the text. Drawing upon the analytic writings of D. W. Winnicott, Jean Améry, and others, Derwin identifies the volatile affect encrypted in testimonial narrative with experiences of social abandonment. She argues that, after liberation, many survivors were beset by an irresolvable ambivalence: on one side, they bitterly blamed their communities for abandoning them during the Holocaust; on the other, they desperately needed reconciliation with those communities in order to heal. For this reason, bearing witness became a crucial activity that contained and metabolized the survivor's rage so that an engaged life could become possible.
Reconstructing Jewish Identity in Pre- and Post-Holocaust Literature and Culture by Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pedich (Editor); Malgorzata Pakier (Editor)
Call Number: PN842 .R436 2012
ISBN: 9783631622292
Publication Date: 2012-10-18
The volume aims to illuminate the issue of Jewish identity in the context of its pre-Holocaust European origins and post-Holocaust American and Israeli settings. Jewish experience and identity construction in Europe, America and Israel are presented through diverse perspectives: Merchant of Venice in the light of Levinas’ ethics, Italian Jews in the 20th century, German-speaking Jewish authors in the Nazi 1930s, the Hassidic culture of learning, the representation of contemporary Poland in Jewish photography, Jewish life in America in a kashrut observing Orthodox neighbourhood, Kaballah in feminist cyberpunk fiction by Marge Piercy, constructing Jewish identity in British fiction in novels by Will Self and Muriel Spark, and Israeli films focusing on ethical solutions to political problems.
Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film by Jenni Adams (Editor); Sue Vice (Editor)
Call Number: PN56.H55 R48 2013
ISBN: 9780853038269
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
The majority of books on Holocaust literature and film focus on its victims or survivors. The essays in this collection, by established academics as well as newer voices, take the more unusual method of analyzing 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. Acknowledging and moving beyond these concerns, the contributors develop instead a range of innovative approaches and conclusions, emphasizing the ethical and aesthetic challenges of representing evil and the ways in which these are negotiated by writers, filmmakers, and others. The ethics of such representation are explored by a series of cases studies, analyzing, for instance, how the Nazis and Nazism are shown in: German museums; in fiction, such as Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones and Muriel Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate; in films, including Downfall and Shoah; in ghetto diaries; and in the paintings of Francis Bacon.

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Beginning in the Fall of 2012 Jewish Studies will be a stand-alone department within the School of Liberal Arts.

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The Tulane program uses methods of history to gain accurate insights into the Jews' past; sociological analysis to find the larger patterns of Jewish behavior and social interaction; and the study of philosophy to examine the comprehensive understandings of humanity and nature proposed by Jewish thinkers.

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Holocaust In Film & Lit JWST-3440-01

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Important Holocaust films owned by Library

Important Holocaust Literature (selections)

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