Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (review)

As a middle school teacher engaging my students in a unit on the Holocaust, I often struggled with the limitations of my own knowledge. Impossible Images: Contemporary Art After the Holocaust reminded me of how I, like many teachers, wrestled to comprehend the murderous history of this era and to find meaningful ways to engage my students in a critical exploration of both history and their own budding viewpoints. This essay collection, which grew out of an interdisciplinary conference of Jewish scholars and artists, raises questions about our seemingly firm perceptions of the Holocaust. What do works of Holocaust art make visible to us? How do they challenge our prior perceptions of the Holocaust? How do geography and cultural background affect our interpretations? Who in today's world has the right to create these images? The reader will encounter many more difficult and important questions, some of which are mentioned in the brief overview that follows.

Impossible Images is organized into four conceptual clusters. In "Geography of the Heart," the essays confront the implications of Holocaust art in places far removed from the actual events of the past. How do we as Americans remember the Holocaust from these distances? In "Haunted By Memory: American Jewish Transformations," Michelle A. Friedman examines the work of American artists Shimon Attie and Steve Reich. Whether examining Attie's Between Dreams and History or studying Reich's musical composition, Different Trains, we are reminded that the history of the Holocaust does not really belong to this country and that the experiences of Jews in Europe and Jews in America are quite different. Julian Bonder, author and director of the controversial Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University, contributes a fascinating essay addressing the relation between memory and commemoration. In "A House for a Uninhabitable Memory," he recalls the intentions of the designers as well as the many sensitive issues raised by the very nature of the project itself. How can this seemingly innocent site in Massachusetts become a "Holocaust site"? We learn that this structure was not designed to serve as a memorial or a museum but rather as a place where the present generation must ". . . negotiate the twilight zone between the Holocaust as a recollected background and the Holocaust as a historical event."

The second section examines "Israel and the Politics of Memory." In "The Return of the Repressed," Ariella Azoulay examines the ways in which several Israeli artists have begun to incorporate images of Hitler in a culture where these representations have been traditionally repressed. And in "Don't Touch My Holocaust—Analyzing the Barometer of Responses: Israeli Artists Challenge the Holocaust Taboo," Tami Katz-Freiman helps us navigate the tricky waters surrounding the representation of the Holocaust in modern-day Israel. She first examines the 1980s movement to break the taboo of silencing the Holocaust with particular attention to the notions of "Holocaust and Heroism" and "Negation of Exile" as they relate to the ethos of the Zionist movement. Katz-Freiman then turns discusses a number of artistic approaches (estrangement, humor, and identification with the victim) to specific recent artistic projects that challenge the national discourse of the Holocaust as well as the range of reactions from Israeli citizens. What kinds of Holocaust art cause people to protest?

"Transgressing Taboos" is the third section. Adi Ophir's "On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise" reminds the reader of "the dangers that result from sacralizing the Holocaust and its visual representations." Norman Kleeblatt's "The Nazi Occupation of the 'White Cube'" asks us to reconsider the ways in which the media and other forms of popular culture portray images of Nazi culture. Perhaps most provocative is Ernst van Alphen's piece "Holocaust Toys: Pedagogy of Remembrance through Play." Is it proper for us to deal with remembrance through toys in a playful manner? The relatively new genre of Holocaust toys, created by later generations of survivors, takes the reader...