Research Catalog

Title

While America watches : televising the Holocaust / Jeffrey Shandler.

Author

Shandler, Jeffrey.

Publication

New York : Oxford University Press, 1999.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xviii, 316 pages : illustrations; 25 cm

Summary

"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."--Jacket.

Subjects

• 1939-1945
• USA
• United States
• Holocaust
• Televisie
• Judenvernichtung > Motiv
• Fernsehsendung
• Fernsehen
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) on television
• Television broadcasting > United States
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), on television

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-295) and index.

Contents

pt. 1. Creating the Viewer (1945-1960). 1. The Image as Witness. 2. "This Is Your Life" 3. The Theater of Our Century -- pt. 2. Into the Limelight (1961-1978). 4. The Man in the Glass Box. 5. A Guest in the Wasteland. 6. The Big Event -- pt. 3. A Household Word (1979-1995). 7. The Rise of the Survivor. 8. The Master Paradigm.

ISBN

• 0195119355
• 9780195119350
• 0195139291
• 9780195139297

LCCN

98004377

OCLC

• ocm38910561
• 38910561
• SCSB-14252723

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library