Bøger i Warsaw Studies in Jewish History and Memory serien

Photographs taken in today's Poland by professional Jewish photographers tend not to be documentary; they are dominated by historical trauma and post-war politics. Poland is construed as synonymous with Auschwitz and the Shoah, and the Poles with hitlerite Nazi Germans. Long-term photographic projects, though, yield more actualized representations.

Is a common European Holocaust memory possible? The author approaches this question by analyzing Polish and German cinema after 1989, and the public debates on the past that have surrounded the filmic narratives. Furthermore the author shows how cinema opened hitherto taboo aspects to discussion.

The volume aims to illuminate the issue of Jewish identity in the context of its pre-Holocaust European origins and post-Holocaust American and Israeli settings. Jewish experience and identity construction in Europe, America and Israel are presented through diverse perspectives.

New archival materials have provided the basis for rethinking the dynamic of the Holocaust in Poland. These historical sources consist primarily of court papers from postwar trials of Polish citizens. This book deals with this topic.

The book is a study of references to Poles, Poland and Polishness in Jewish-American fiction created after World War II. The analysis of seventy novels reveals portrayals of Poles as secondary or unimportant characters then and now. The perception of Poland indicates the Holocaust's overwhelming impact on its conceptualization as the land of death.

The book adds new studies of memories and interactions between Jews and non-Jews to the historical and cultural research on this topic. It gathers in one volume the results of work by scholars from several countries, while the topics of the articles cover various disciplines: history, sociology, psychology, literary and language studies.