Tagged: holocaust

Watching “Shoah” for the 22nd time

Tomorrow I’ll be watching Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah for the 22nd time. It’s 9.5 hours long. People sometimes watch the film in two sittings. In a way, we dont have time to schedule two different viewing days. But, more, the film’s power is one of a kind of mesmerization. Watching...

Symposium in memory of Terrence Des Pres — five video clips

The symposium in memoriam Terrence Des Pres at the Kelly Writers House honoredthe 40th anniversary of the publication of his influential study of survivorship and writing (bearing witness), The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976), a major work on Holocaust testimony. Much contemporary scholarly and journalistic...

Representations of the holocaust

Today in “Representations of the Holocaust” we discussed Spiegelman’s Maus and were visited by the family of one of the students (including her survivor grandmother) and also by Diane & Jerry Rothenberg. It was an intense session and ended with Jerry’s preface to Khurbn in which he turns around Adorno’s...

Nabokov’s post-Holocaust story

Currently David Roberts and I are co-leading an online discussion group. We’re discussing two stories; one is Vladimir Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs,” first published in the New York in May of 1948. I believe this is Nabokov’s post-Holocaust story. I asked the group (80 or so people from around the...

On Primo Levi’s “The Periodic Table”

When I teach my course on representations of the holocaust, I don’t lecture (for what it’s worth, it’s an ethical stance for me—but that’s for another comment sometime) and I rarely if ever record our sessions. As can be imagined—since, as I say, these are discussions, not lectures—the sessions are intense...

“The Believer” (2002) — about a Jewish skinhead

At my holocaust site (which includes many materials dating from the mid-1990s in particular — but which I haven’t added to much lately) there is a good review dated 2002 of the film The Believer, winner of the grand jury prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, in which a young Jew...