A Case for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

A Case for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum PDF Author: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Campaign (Organization)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 23

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Book Description

A Case for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

A Case for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum PDF Author: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Campaign (Organization)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 23

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Book Description


Figures of Memory

Figures of Memory PDF Author: Michael Bernard-Donals
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438460783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Figures of Memory examines how the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, uses its space and the design of its exhibits to "move" its visitors to memory. From the objects and their placement to the architectural design of the building and the floor plan, the USHMM was meant to teach visitors about the Holocaust. But what Michael Bernard-Donals found is that while they learn, and remember, the Holocaust, visitors also call to mind other, sometimes unrelated memories. Partly this is because memory itself works in multidirectional ways, but partly it's because of decisions made in the planning that led to the creation of the museum. Drawing on material from the USHMM's institutional archive, including meeting minutes, architectural renderings, visitor surveys, and comments left by visitors, Figures of Memory is both a theoretical exploration of memory—its relation to identity, space, and ethics—and a practical analysis of one of the most discussed memorials in the United States. The book also extends recent discussions of the rhetoric of memorial sites and museums by arguing that sites like the USHMM don't so much "make a case for" events through the act of memorialization, but actually displace memory, disturbing it—and the museum visitor—so much so that they call it into question. Memory, like rhetorical figures, moves, and the USHMM moves its visitors, figuratively and literally, both to and beyond the events the museum is meant to commemorate.

Daniel's Story

Daniel's Story PDF Author: Carol Matas
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 9780590465885
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Daniel, whose family suffers as the Nazis rise to power in Germany, describes his imprisonment in a concentration camp and his eventual liberation.

European Mennonites and the Holocaust

European Mennonites and the Holocaust PDF Author: Mark Jantzen
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487525540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
European Mennonites and the Holocaust is one of the first books to examine Mennonite involvement in the Holocaust, sometimes as rescuers but more often as killers, accomplices, beneficiaries, and bystanders.

Exhibiting Atrocity

Exhibiting Atrocity PDF Author: Amy Sodaro
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813592178
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Today, nearly any group or nation with violence in its past has constructed or is planning a memorial museum as a mechanism for confronting past trauma, often together with truth commissions, trials, and/or other symbolic or material reparations. Exhibiting Atrocity documents the emergence of the memorial museum as a new cultural form of commemoration, and analyzes its use in efforts to come to terms with past political violence and to promote democracy and human rights. Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global examination of the trend: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world.

American Exceptionalism and the Shoah

American Exceptionalism and the Shoah PDF Author: David L. Worthington
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description
This dissertation analyzes the rhetoric of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a site that constructs, articulates, and advances an ideology of American exceptionalism. The critical thrust of the project is to demonstrate how the museum produces a narrow set of terministic screens for understanding American connections to the European holocaust that make it difficult to productively engage problematic instances of U.S. history such as slavery and the genocide of the native Americans. To this end, the study focuses on public debates surrounding the founding and placement of the museum, the narrative of the museum's Permanent Exhibit, the physical exhibits that shape American exceptionalism, and the ways in which visitors respond to the museum story in comment books. The argument unfolds in 5 stages. The first stage examines the ways in which public debate during the museum's planning stages took up the issue of the propriety of a "Holocaust" museum in the U.S. and then addressed where the museum would be located and what kind of narrative would be consistent with placing the museum in close proximity to the National Mall. Stage two explores the museum's insistence on a strictly defined and overly simplistic narrative that marks the participants in the Shoah as victims, perpetrators, or liberators. Stage three focuses on the narrative of the museum's Permanent Exhibit, where the museum interpellates visitors as "witnesses" without providing a clear sense of what the act of witnessing entails. In the fourth stage "citizenship" is made passive by exhibits that evoke a sense of tragedy and atrocity that exists "over there" (in Europe) and whose victims are "other" and outside the bounds and protection of American style liberal democracy. Stage four shifts focus from the narrative as articulated by museum curators and towards the way visitors respond to the museum in comment books, and in particular on the most common response by museum visitors that they feel "sad." "Sadness," I argue, is a problematic public emotion that represses civic action. The project concludes in stage five by discussing ways in which exhibits might be added that would widen our terministic understanding of the past so as to allow for a more productive consideration of the ways in which and the topos of "atrocity" implicates the politics of genocide.

Warsaw Ghetto Police

Warsaw Ghetto Police PDF Author: Katarzyna Person
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501754092
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In Warsaw Ghetto Police, Katarzyna Person shines a spotlight on the lawyers, engineers, young yeshiva graduates, and sons of connected businessmen who, in the autumn of 1940, joined the newly formed Jewish Order Service. Person tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corruption, and the degradation and humiliation of their own people, these policemen found it virtually impossible to exercise individual agency. While some saw the Jewish police as fellow victims, others viewed them as a more dangerous threat than the German occupation authorities; both were held responsible for the destruction of a historically important and thriving community. Person emphasizes the complexity of the situation, the policemen's place in the network of social life in the ghetto, and the difficulty behind the choices that they made. By placing the actions of the Jewish Order Service in historical context, she explores both the decisions that its members were forced to make and the consequences of those actions. Featuring testimonies of members of the Jewish Order Service, and of others who could see them as they themselves could not, Warsaw Ghetto Police brings these impossible situations to life. It also demonstrates how a community chooses to remember those whose allegiances did not seem clear. Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Holocaust and North Africa

The Holocaust and North Africa PDF Author: Aomar Boum
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503607062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
The Holocaust is usually understood as a European story. Yet, this pivotal episode unfolded across North Africa and reverberated through politics, literature, memoir, and memory—Muslim as well as Jewish—in the post-war years. The Holocaust and North Africa offers the first English-language study of the unfolding events in North Africa, pushing at the boundaries of Holocaust Studies and North African Studies, and suggesting, powerfully, that neither is complete without the other. The essays in this volume reconstruct the implementation of race laws and forced labor across the Maghreb during World War II and consider the Holocaust as a North African local affair, which took diverse form from town to town and city to city. They explore how the Holocaust ruptured Muslim–Jewish relations, setting the stage for an entirely new post-war reality. Commentaries by leading scholars of Holocaust history complete the picture, reflecting on why the history of the Holocaust and North Africa has been so widely ignored—and what we have to gain by understanding it in all its nuances. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Unwanted

The Unwanted PDF Author: Michael Dobbs
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1524733199
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
"The powerfully told story of a group of German Jews desperately seeking American visas to escape the Nazis, and an illuminating account of America's struggle with the refugee crisis caused by the rise of Hitler. Official tie-in to the U.S. Holocaust Museum multi-year exhibit"--

Drunk on Genocide

Drunk on Genocide PDF Author: Edward B. Westermann
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501754203
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated "performative masculinity," expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. Such inebriated exhibitions extended from meetings of top Nazi officials to the rank and file, celebrating at the grave sites of their victims. Westermann argues that, contrary to the common misconception of the SS and police as stone-cold killers, they were, in fact, intoxicated with the act of murder itself. Drunk on Genocide highlights the intersections of masculinity, drinking ritual, sexual violence, and mass murder to expose the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Its surprising and disturbing findings offer a new perspective on the mindset, motivation, and mentality of killers as they prepared for, and participated in, mass extermination. Published in Association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.