Judaism and Film: Suggested Books

When representing the Holocaust, the slightest hint of narrative embellishment strikes contemporary audiences as somehow a violation against those who suffered under the Nazis.

See Chapter 18

Rage Is the Subtext: Readings in Holocaust Literature and Film charts the internal shifts of Holocaust survivors who tell their stories of suffering, loss, and endurance.

Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half-hour 1985 epic Shoah - its title is the Hebrew word for "catastrophe" - is the distillation of more than 350 hours of film gathered over 11 years...

.... Soon there will be no living survivors of the Holocaust, and therefore people not directly connected to the event must assume the full responsibility for representing it.

includes an essay on the Holocaust complex in Israeli cinema

See first essay

Film and Genocide brings together scholars of film and of genocide to discuss film representations, both fictional and documentary, of the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and genocides in Chile, Australia, Rwanda, and the United States.

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.

Includes an essay on Holocaust movies and the politics of collective memory and more...

What is history? How do we represent it? How do our notions of history change over time? understanding of historical events.

Includes a few chapters about cinema

...Overwhelmingly, wartime films were skewed to depict Soviet resistance, "Red funerals," and calls for vengeance, rather than the singling out of Jewish victims by the Nazis.