The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture by Samantha Baskind (review)

The history of the Warsaw Ghetto has been used as a "recurrent tool" for "fashioning and refashioning" Jewish identity (p. 13), according to Baskind, who begins her study by exploring 1940s radio dramas that spotlighted the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and depicted the Ghetto's Jews as armed and ready to fight. This same combative posture has contributed to the advancement of the model of the "muscular Jew," imagery that has been closely aligned with the foundation and protection of Israel. Baskind's book, with its five splendidly illustrated chapters, deals mainly with the depiction of the Warsaw Ghetto in the visual arts, and, to a lesser extent, in popular literature. Her study is weighted toward representations of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and in that sense it is also a history of images of armed Jews, or, one might say, of rebellious Jews after Warsaw.

The book's earliest examples are drawn from the artwork of Arthur Szyk, whose pre-Holocaust painting of settlers at Tel Hai echoes Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830). Delacroix's famous work serves as only one of the numerous historical reference points from which Szyk and others drew inspiration. Baskind's narrative addresses how American and European Jews, as well as Israelis, filtered narratives of Warsaw Ghetto heroism through the history of art. Taking a long view permits Baskind to include in her account figures as diverse as Rembrandt and Georg Grosz, among others. While not every antecedent mentioned in Baskind's study was consciously drawn upon, and some of the links are speculative, the many resonances cited throughout this informed study show how art objects inform one another, conditioning us to explore how one image flows from the next. A portrait of a muscular Jew with his arms elevated in defiance has more predecessors than we may have imagined, as does the recurring image of a Jewish boy with his arms raised in surrender.

The chapter devoted to Rod Serling is one of this study's highlights. Many readers will be familiar with episodes of the Twilight Zone that directly or indirectly introduce Holocaust premises, but Baskind looks closely at a 1960 episode of Playhouse 90 entitled "In the Presence of Mine Enemies," in which Serling dramatized life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto. Baskind is thorough enough to closely read even the content of the commercials with which CBS's telecast was ineptly interrupted. She also researches Serling's original scripted ending, which concluded with a distressing moral dilemma that anticipated Styron's Sophie's Choice (1979). The ending was changed and softened before the episode aired, which is consistent with Baskind's overarching thesis about the general tendency to point Warsaw Ghetto narratives toward redemptive closure. The revised ending was a bit tidier, but the version that aired created no shortage of controversy: Leon Uris penned a strongly worded open letter to CBS in which he asserted that Goebbels himself could not have produced such a piece of "Nazi apologetics," adding that CBS ought to burn the negative of the film. Uris's diatribe is fascinating, and it becomes more so when we learn, in the subsequent chapter, about his own contribution to the canon of Warsaw Ghetto depictions.

Where Uris's popular writings are concerned, Baskind explores Mila 18 (1961) and includes a discussion of Uris's Exodus (1958) in which the author attempts to present "counter essentialist versions of Jewishness," while creating "a version of 'the Jew' that is just as essentialist" (p. 110). Baskind unearths a lot of valuable primary research from materials held at the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas including, for example, Uris's plan for a trilogy, and she, throughout her reading, is appropriately critical of Uris's tendency to privilege fighting and combat above all else. A picture, "a lithograph or drawing" (p. 137) that Uris kept above his writing desk, which is reproduced in Baskind's...