Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (review)

If I had to place myself into one of the two categories Alan Mintz posits in Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America, I would take the constructivist, as opposed to the exceptionalist position. According to Mintz, I am to be labeled constructivist because I believe that historical events, even and especially the Holocaust, possess no inherent meanings, but that their meaning is constructed by communities of interpretation. Exceptionalists, on the other hand, take the Holocaust as a unique and incomparable event, not privy to the privileges of artistic representations, or any other manner of reproduction that is not appropriately "bleak and unadorned" (p. 39). Mintz is quite correct in categorizing these two camps of critics active in the politics of Holocaust representation. While his observation does not constitute a news bulletin for those of us who work in Holocaust studies, I am nonetheless grateful to Mintz for naming the players in this dispute; it seems helpful to have the problem laid out so clearly and carefully.

Mintz has made another useful choice when he locates the problem within the domain of popular culture; because not only is this the site of widest controversy, it is also the sphere of widest influence. In popular culture Americans encounter a variety of representations of the Holocaust, and if we are interested in their reactions and their relations to Holocaust memory, critics should pay less attention to the pages of Critical Inquiry and more attention to the Diary of Anne Frank, or Life is Beautiful. By looking at the current focus of many Holocaust scholars, one can surmise a tacit admission of this. Mintz joins a long list of other scholars who are working in similar terrain. Most famously, of course, Peter Novick has done it in the provocative The Holocaust in American Life (1999); Tim Cole has done it in Selling the Holocaust (1999). In Mintz's scheme, both Novick and Cole, would be considered constructivist critics. The exceptionalist critics, however, have not been caught napping. Lawrence Langer, the most prominent of these, has focused on oral testimony, publishing most recently, Preempting the Holocaust (1998).

Mintz contributes to an argument that is loud and well underway; even the films he chooses to analyze have been thoroughly discussed. For instance, most of us who work in Holocaust studies are fully versed in the furor over Schindler's List. But that observation stuns lay people and students: To tell a roomful of lay people or students that some people (Jewish people) did not like (no, they hated) Spielberg's movies is to encounter real consternation and concern. I wish I had a dollar for every student that looked at me in complete bewilderment and asked me "why?"

The answer to their question is complicated, although not particularly satisfying to my students, most of whom had deeply emotional and important experiences when watching the film. That previous statement, alone, by the way, would incite anger in a prototypical excpetionalist critic; Claude Lanzmann has famously said that no one should cry, "have a cathartic experience while viewing the Holocaust. One must experience the Holocaust dry-eyed." ¹ My students are dissatisfied because when I answer their questions, I explain the politics of Holocaust representation, resonant (though not particularly persuasive) to me as an academic, but petty and absurd to them. They are, of course, unwitting constructivists, and despite their distaste for exceptionalists, they would be well-educated by Mintz's discussion of Schindler's List, which summarizes and explains the positions of those critics that dislike the movie, and then does the same thing for those that praised it. This too has been done before (most comprehensively in Yosefa Loshitzky, ed., Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List, 1997); yet the cogency of this overview is still helpful. To say that little of what Mintz has...