Holocaust

Deborah E. Lipstadt follows her compelling book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005) with this articulate and efficient text—a volume in the Rutgers University Press Key Words in Jewish Studies series. This is a very good book for undergraduate courses on the Holocaust in American culture. I think that the plural “understandings” would work even better in the subtitle, for, as Lipstadt observes, scholarly and popular engagement with the Holocaust has so often involved lively, sometimes-bitter contestation: over numbers, over the role of the Judenräte, over the meanings of resistance, over the use or misuse of the Holocaust as historical analogy, over commercialization and other vexing issues of representation, over the uniqueness issue, over the significance of changing characterizations of, for example, “displaced persons,” “survivors,” “bystanders,” and “witnesses.” These particular topics do not all emerge out of Holocaust, but arguments about them assuredly take place in its pages

Analogy · Epistemology · Linguistics · Media studies · Plural · Political science · Representation (politics · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · The Holocaust · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy