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6 Imagining the Holocaust The Holocaust in American Culture: The History Before I wrote the first word of this book, I instinctively knew that my discussion of Schindler’s List would constitute its final chapter, for personal and professional reasons. This film remains the single most important work in Steven Spielberg’s long career, the one that advocates claim catapults him across the perceptual canyon separating gifted entertainer from serious artist; it also remains his most critically praised and persistently attacked creative endeavor. More than any of Spielberg’s movies, Schindler’s List sits within an intricate web of intersecting historical, cultural, theoretical, and aesthetic issues that range far beyond the borders of any movie screens. My personal responses can best be summed up with the oxymoronic concept of passionate ambivalence. As a Jew who lost grandparents in the Holocaust, I am deeply moved each time I watch Schindler’s List, sincerely admire Spielberg’s courage in making the film, and applaud his willingness to challenge himself technically, thematically, and emotionally. Yet as a film scholar trained to analyze moving images and the reasons those images affect audiences, I find it difficult to embrace the film uncritically. To understand the pivotal role of Schindler’s List in Spielberg’s career, therefore, I needed to have his other works laid out before me, to see the spread of the forest before intently fixing my gaze on one of its tallest trees. So let me begin this final chapter with some personal history. I grew up in Port Jervis, a town located at the point where New York, New Jersey,and Pennsylvania converge,as a thoroughly assimilated,second- “Control Is Power”: imagining the holocaust · 291 generation American Jew. With a population of about ten thousand and a Jewish community of roughly a hundred families composed mostly of the town’s merchants,my high school graduating class contained only two other Jews. I had a Bar Mitzvah and regularly attended Sunday school classes at the Conservative Temple Beth El, but my sense of religious obligation never came close to my intense commitment to playing sports during those years. I had barely heard of the Holocaust. It was probably mentioned somewhere during my religious classes, but no days were set aside to commemorate its victims, and no survivors were invited to speak at my school or even at my synagogue. Years later, my father revealed what happened to his parents: in the waning days of War World II, returning Nazi soldiers and sympathizers marched his mother, father, and sister across the snowy fields outside their small Czechoslovakian village of Rachov until they died. Growing up, however , we never spoke about this. I arrived at Alfred University, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, in September 1963. Soon I heard rumors about Dr. Melvin Bernstein. “Whatever you do,” my peer advisor told me with a slight roll of his eyes, “don’t miss his Six Million Dead lecture.He cries during it.He actually cries.” Bernstein,one of the university’s few Jewish professors,taught in the English department and ran the local Hillel. On the day of his scheduled lecture, I trudged through knee-deep snow drifts, sat down in one of the classroom’s unforgiving wooden chairs, and waited for the show to begin. I can’t recall exactly what he told us about the Holocaust that chilly morning,but I clearly remember that my reaction was neither sympathetic nor compassionate. It was embarrassment—deep shame liberally sprinkled with anger. Who were these people he was telling us about? How could these gutless sheep be herded into lines and walk passively to their deaths without defending themselves, their wives, or their children? Better to die at the point of a bayonet or from a bullet to the brain, I thought indignantly, than to be shoved into ovens like loaves of bread. I looked nervously around at my classmates, wondering if they associated me with these cowards. I recount this biographical sliver because my upbringing during this time was not aberrational; Spielberg reports never hearing the word “Holocaust” until he was in college in 1965 (Ansen 114). Nor, I suspect, were my initial responses upon first hearing about the European Jews who perished in the death camps uncommon. My narrative also marks the changing role of the Holocaust in American life since the 1960s. According to the historian Tim Cole, “the Holocaust has emerged in the Western World as the most talked...

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