Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (review)

"Holocaust memory matters." This recurring phrase of the opening page announces the subject and objective of Oren Baruch Stier's book. Stier sets out to investigate different venues by and through which the historical events of the Holocaust are remembered and represented. No doubt there is an abundance of memory occasions at this particular moment in history waiting to be analyzed, explained, and deconstructed: new museums and educational centers are built, events are commemorated, scholarly symposia are organized, popular and academic publications flood the market, movies and documentaries are produced on a regular basis, and curricula are instituted in schools, colleges, and travel programs. Committed to Memory discusses these methods of transmitting and memorializing the Holocaust, not only because they are simply there (like found objects), but also because they contain memory that is meaningful in the present. Memory matters because of the ways it materializes in the present (as narrative, space, memorial, liturgy, or tourism) and because it tells us perhaps less about the historical events themselves than about the identity and identification of contemporary social groups. Stier aims at unpacking some of memory's meanings and how they are "mediated" (his preferred term) through the media and cultural activities. Memory, for him, is "a social phenomenon built out of material bequeathed by history" (p. 2). It matters "because it is made to matter by and through the cultural forms and institutions that mediate the Holocaust in the present day" (p. 1).

As memorial culture has become ubiquitous, steadily increasing numbers of publications have appeared in the past fifteen years. Eva Hoffman, in After Such Knowledge,¹ has aptly described these works as a "body of secondary or even tertiary critique, in which it is the responses to the Holocaust (or its 'memory') that are the subject of disputation" (p. 157). Given this growing corpus, we can ask whether Committed to Memory adds anything new to the existing literature on the phenomenon of Holocaust memory. The answer is yes. Stier not only engages the reader in a painstaking cultural critique but, as a scholar of religious studies, also brings a fruitful religious dimension to his investigation. Some of the grounds of his study (such as Art Spiegelman's Maus, the role of video testimony, and the spatial and visual arrangements of Holocaust museums) have already been covered extensively in other works, but Stier probes them anew with concepts and terminology lifted from the vocabulary of religious studies.

For example, in chapter 2 he introduces the terms "idolatry" and "religious relics" as a way of analyzing the reverence with which one encounters Holocaust objects. Borrowing an idea from James Young's The Texture of Memory (1993), Stier differentiates between icons and idols in order to discuss possibilities of proper engagement with material representations of the Holocaust such as camp photographs or "authentic Holocaust-era" objects (p. 34). A case in point is the railway cars that were shipped overseas from Europe to be exhibited in museums such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, the Dallas Holocaust Memorial Center, and the sculpture park of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. These icons are potent not just because they symbolize the Holocaust, but because they engage the museum visitor viscerally and performatively. In the Permanent Exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, visitors can literally walk through a railway car. Such iconic representation, however, is not without its problems. The object can be domesticated (literally, forcibly accustomed to reside inside the domus, Latin for "house") or further removed from its iconic quality by being turned into a replica, as in the Florida Holocaust Museum, where a miniature railway car is available for purchase as a tsedakah (charity) box at the museum's gift shop. No longer a religious relic, the miniature railway car has become a "curious mix of consumer kitsch and Jewish memorialism" (p. 35).

Another fascinating example of...