Genocide Imagined: Dramatizing the Holocaust on American Media During the second half of the twentieth century, the Holocaust became a prominent fixture of North American public culture. This is a remarkable phenomenon, given that the great majority of people in Canada and the United States have no direct connection to this genocide. Indeed, no other event of modern history looms so large in the moral landscape of these nations that did not either take place there or involve large numbers of their populations abroad. Rather, almost all North Americans have always encountered the Holocaust through some kind of representation. Film and broadcast dramas have not only presented the Holocaust to the largest number of North Americans but also played leading roles in shaping how these audiences engage this subject through their imaginations.
12 Neuberger Holocaust Education Week
In the first postwar decades, several film and television dramas integrated the Holocaust into American narratives. Original television dramas aired in the 1950s on such series as Playhouse 90 and Studio One portrayed Americans encountering Nazi antisemitism in Europe or the struggles of Holocaust survivors building new lives in the United States. The 1965 film The Pawnbroker offered a disturbing portrait of a Holocaust survivor living in New York, haunted by the torments of wartime experiences. Some American films and telecasts about the Holocaust became widely influential internationally: The Diary of Anne Frank (1959); Judgment at Nuremberg (1961); the Holocaust miniseries (1978); Schindler’s List (1993). They imported distinctively American visions of the Holocaust to other countries, including those where it took place. The Holocaust’s appearance as a “guest” subject on episodes of many American television series has made the genocide a familiar element of the nation’s repertoire of moral issues. Occasionally these works engendered a contentious debate on representing the Holocaust through popular media. A widespread discussion attended the premiere of the Holocaust miniseries. Many opined that television was inherently incapable of dealing with a subject understood as testing the limits of representation, including Elie Wiesel, who asserted that “Art and Theriesienstadt were perhaps compatible in Theresienstadt, but not . . . in a television studio.”¹ Such concerns did not discourage American broadcasters and filmmakers from approaching the Holocaust; rather, new films and telecasts on the subject have burgeoned since then, though they often provoke discussions of their appropriateness. Sometimes, the debates surrounding these media works overwhelmed their reception—for example,