Holocaust Discourse Research Articles

The Holocaust, Second-Generation Witness, and the Voluntary Covenant in American Judaism

Widespread discourse about the Holocaust entered American popular culture in the seventies in two main ways: a series of television shows that purportedly focused on the destruction of European Judaism and two books that dealt specifically with the children of survivors. The television miniseries, Gerald Green's Holocaust (1978), suited the national need for simplified history and melodrama. Moreover, given the American penchant for ethnic identifiers, Holocaust became known as the Jewish Roots. The networks soon aired other Holocaust programs, including Herman Wouk's far less commercially successful The Winds of War. The resultant Holocaust discourse was frequently poorly informed and historically naive. On the one hand, it reflected a tendency in Western culture to think that the Holocaust ended definitively in 1945. On the other hand, this discourse frequently neutralized the evil of nazism.

The Holocaust, Second-Generation Witness, and the Voluntary Covenant in American Judaism

Widespread discourse about the Holocaust entered American popular culture in the seventies in two main ways: a series of television shows that purportedly focused on the destruction of European Judaism and two books that dealt specifically with the children of survivors. The television miniseries, Gerald Green's Holocaust (1978), suited the national need for simplified history and melodrama. Moreover, given the American penchant for ethnic identifiers, Holocaust became known as the Jewish Roots. The networks soon aired other Holocaust programs, including Herman Wouk's far less commercially successful The Winds of War. The resultant Holocaust discourse was frequently poorly informed and historically naive. On the one hand, it reflected a tendency in Western culture to think that the Holocaust ended definitively in 1945. On the other hand, this discourse frequently neutralized the evil of nazism.

The Holocaust and Public Discourse

As I walk to the gate, I have the same fear as I had 50 years ago. It is in me. It is still the same fear. (Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate, on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.)There was, in fact, nothing metaphorical about the Germans' systematic murder of six million Jews, nothing metaphysical or literary. The Jews were terrorized, humiliated, herded, enslaved, tortured, shot, gassed and burned; then their bones were ground up, mingled with their ashes and dumped into ponds or pits. There was nothing uplifting about any of this, no saving grace, no redeeming human nobility.