Jeffrey Shandler

The Holocaust holds a unique place in American public culture, and, as Jeffrey Shandler argues in While America Watches, it is television, more than any other medium, that has brought the Holocaust into our homes, our hearts, and our minds. Much has been written about Holocaust film and literature, and yet the medium that brings the subject to most people--television--has been largely neglected. Now Shandler provides the first account of how television has familiarized the American people with the Holocaust. He starts with wartime newsreels of liberated concentration camps, showing how they set the moral tone for viewing scenes of genocide, and then moves to television to explain how the Holocaust and the Holocaust survivor have gained stature as moral symbols in American culture. From early teleplays to coverage of the Eichmann trial and the Holocaust miniseries, as well as documentaries, popular series such as All in the Family and Star Trek, and news reports of recent interethnic violence in Bosnia, Shandler offers an enlightening tour of television history. Shandler also examines the many controversies that televised presentations of the Holocaust have sparked, demonstrating how their impact extends well beyond the broadcasts themselves. While America Watches is sure to continue this discussion--and possibly the controversies--among many readers.

Televising the Holocaust

While America Watches

Discusses how media technology impacts the Jewish experience. This title explores mid-twentieth-century ecumenical radio and television broadcasting, video documentation of life cycle rituals, and museum displays and tourist practices as means for engaging the Holocaust as a moral touchstone

Religion and Media in America

Jews, God, and Videotape

"This book provides an introduction to Yiddish, the foundational vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, both as a subject of interest in its own right and for the distinctive issues that Yiddish raises for the study of languages generally, including language diaspora, language fusion, multilingualism, language ideologies, and postvernacularity. By approaching the study of Yiddish through the rubric of a biography, rather than following a more conventional chronological, geographical, or ideological approach, this book examines the story of Yiddish thematically. Each chapter addresses a different "biographical" topic concerning the character of the language and how it has been conceptualized, ranging across time, space, and speech communities. These chapters interrelate discussions of the language's origins, characteristics, and development with the dynamics of its implementation in Ashkenazi culture from the Middle Ages to the present. These thematic chapters also examine the symbolic investments that both Jews and others have made in Yiddish over time, which are key to understanding both general perceptions and scholarly analyses of the language, especially in the modern period"--

Biography of a Language

Yiddish

In Yiddish, shtetl simply means “town.” How does such an unassuming word come to loom so large in modern Jewish culture, with a proliferation of uses and connotations? By examining the meaning of shtetl, Jeffrey Shandler asks how Jewish life in provincial towns in Eastern Europe has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship from the early modern era in European history to the present. In the post-Holocaust era, the shtetl looms large in public culture as the epitome of a bygone traditional Jewish communal life. People now encounter the Jewish history of these towns through an array of cultural practices, including fiction, documentary photography, film, memoirs, art, heritage tourism, and political activism. At the same time, the shtetl attracts growing scholarly interest, as historians, social scientists, literary critics, and others seek to understand both the complex reality of life in provincial towns and the nature of its wide-ranging remembrance. Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History traces the trajectory of writing about these towns—by Jews and non-Jews, residents and visitors, researchers, novelists, memoirists, journalists and others—to demonstrate how the Yiddish word for “town” emerged as a key word in Jewish culture and studies. Shandler proposes that the intellectual history of the shtetl is best approached as an exemplar of engaging Jewish vernacularity, and that the variable nature of this engagement, far from being a drawback, is central to the subject’s enduring interest.

A Vernacular Intellectual History

Shtetl

Smart Family Fellow at the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for Study of Jewish Life Jeffrey Shandler

"Shandler takes a wide-ranging look at Yiddish culture, including language learning, literary translation, performance, and material culture. He examines children's books, board games, summer camps, klezmer music, cultural festivals, language clubs, Web sites, cartoons, and collectibles - all touchstones of the meaning of Yiddish as it enters its second millennium. Rather than mourn the language's demise, Adventures in Yiddishland calls for taking an expansive approach to the possibilities for the future of Yiddish. Shandler's conceptualization of postvernacularity sheds important new light on contemporary Jewish culture generally and offers insights into theorizing the relation between language and culture."--BOOK JACKET.

Postvernacular Language and Culture

Adventures in Yiddishland

The most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it is a language of daily life to avant-garde performers, political activists, and LGBTQ writers turning to Yiddish for inspiration. Yiddish: Biography of a Language presents the story of this centuries-old language, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the present. Jeffrey Shandler tells the multifaceted history of Yiddish in the form of a biographical profile, revealing surprising insights through a series of thematic chapters. He addresses key aspects of Yiddish as the language of a diasporic population, whose speakers have always used more than one language. As the vernacular of a marginalized minority, Yiddish has often been held in low regard compared to other languages, and its legitimacy as a language has been questioned. But some devoted Yiddish speakers have championed the language as embodying the essence of Jewish culture and a defining feature of a Jewish national identity. Despite predictions of the demise of Yiddish-dating back well before half of its speakers were murdered during the Holocaust-the language leads a vibrant, evolving life to this day.

Engaging media has been an ongoing issue for American Jews, as it has been for other religious communities in the United States, for several generations. Jews, God, and Videotape is a pioneering examination of the impact of new communications technologies and media practices on the religious life of American Jewry over the past century. Shandler’s examples range from early recordings of cantorial music to Hasidic outreach on the Internet. In between he explores mid-twentieth-century ecumenical radio and television broadcasting, video documentation of life cycle rituals, museum displays and tourist practices as means for engaging the Holocaust as a moral touchstone, and the role of mass-produced material culture in Jews’ responses to the American celebration of Christmas. Shandler argues that the impact of these and other media on American Judaism is varied and extensive: they have challenged the role of clergy and transformed the nature of ritual; facilitated innovations in religious practice and scholarship, as well as efforts to maintain traditional observance and teachings; created venues for outreach, both to enhance relationships with non-Jewish neighbors and to promote greater religiosity among Jews; even redefined the notion of what might constitute a Jewish religious community or spiritual experience. As Jews, God, and Videotape demonstrates, American Jews’ experiences are emblematic of how religious communities’ engagements with new media have become central to defining religiosity in the modern age.

In the first study of its kind, the author traces the process by which television has shaped the American public's consciousness of the Holocaust, helped to turn the Holocaust survivor into a moral symbol, and sparked controversies over its presentations. UP.

Barbara Kishenblatt-Gimblett

“A brilliantly conceived and long overdue opening up [or deconstruction] of the Anne Frank story.” —James Clifford, Professor Emeritus, History of Consciousness Department, University of California As millions of people around the world who have read her diary attest, Anne Frank, the most familiar victim of the Holocaust, has a remarkable place in contemporary memory. Anne Frank Unbound looks beyond this young girl’s words at the numerous ways people have engaged her life and writing. Apart from officially sanctioned works and organizations, there exists a prodigious amount of cultural production, which encompasses literature, art, music, film, television, blogs, pedagogy, scholarship, religious ritual, and comedy. Created by both artists and amateurs, these responses to Anne Frank range from veneration to irreverence. Although at times they challenge conventional perceptions of her significance, these works testify to the power of Anne Frank, the writer, and Anne Frank, the cultural phenomenon, as people worldwide forge their own connections with the diary and its author. “This collection of brilliant essays offers fascinating and unexpected insights into the significance of Anne Frank’s iconic Holocaust-era diary from many disciplinary perspectives in the arts and humanities.” —Jan T. Gross, the Norman B. Tomlinson Professor of War and Society, Princeton University “This volume is a major contribution to scholarship regarding Anne Frank's diary and its cultural influence . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “Engrossing . . . The overall aim is to provide a greater understanding of the general and particular engagement with Anne Frank as a person, a symbol, an icon, an inspiration, and perhaps most polarizing, as one victim, not the victim of the Nazi holocaust.” —Broadside

Media, Imagination, Memory

Anne Frank Unbound

Adventures in Yiddishland examines the transformation of Yiddish in the six decades since the Holocaust, tracing its shift from the language of daily life for millions of Jews to what the author terms a postvernacular language of diverse and expanding symbolic value. With a thorough command of modern Yiddish culture as well as its centuries-old history, Jeffrey Shandler investigates the remarkable diversity of contemporary encounters with the language. His study traverses the broad spectrum of people who engage with Yiddish—from Hasidim to avant-garde performers, Jews as well as non-Jews, fluent speakers as well as those who know little or no Yiddish—in communities across the Americas, in Europe, Israel, and other outposts of "Yiddishland."

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

"This volume of essays was developed from ... a colloquium convened in 2005 by the Working Group on Jews, Media, and Religion of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University"--Intr.

Jacob Glatstein

Yankev Glatshteyn

Set in Vienna shortly after the Nazi occupation of 1938, Emil and Karl explores the friendship of two young boys-Karl (a Christian, with Socialist parents) and Emil (a Jew). The boys are inseparable friends whose fathers have been killed, and who have only each other after both their mothers are dragged away by the authorities. Yankev Glatshteyn's novel reflects the climate of fear he encountered on a visit to Europe in 1934. His depiction of how the two young boys survive, and the stories of those who aid them in their plight, adds new depth and insight into our understanding of an oft-depicted time. Emil and Karl is a wrenching story laced with humiliation, horror, love and incredible courage. Initially published in Yiddish, and first published in English in 2006, Emil and Karl has been beautifully translated by Jeffrey Shandler, who has also written an elucidating Introduction.

Jeffrey Shandler

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