LEADER 03728ctm a2200397Ia 4500001 23541 005 20240621143051.0 008 960508s1995 xx rb 000 0 eng d 035 ocm34696214 035 USHOM 33877 035 23541 043 n-us--- 049 LHMA 040 ECL |beng |erda |cECL 050 00 PN1992.8.H627 |bS536 1995 100 1 Shandler, Jeffrey. 245 10 While America watches : |btelevision and the Holocaust in the United States, from 1945 to the present / |cJeffrey Alan Schandler. 246 30 Television and the Holocaust in the United States 264 0 |c1995. 300 vii, 657 leaves, bound 336 text |btxt |2rdacontent 337 unmediated |bn |2rdamedia 338 volume |bnc |2rdacarrier 500 Includes abstract. 502 Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1995. 504 Includes bibliographical references (leaves 601-657). 520 This dissertation examines presentations of the Holocaust on television as an important phenomenon of post-World War II American culture. The study adopts an openended approach to what might be considered within the embrace of "Holocaust television": all of the medium's genres are examined, including dramas, documentaries, news reports, public affairs programming, advertising. While focusing on how television's characteristics (small scale, intimacy, programming flow, dramatic mode, domestic setting, etc.) shape its mediations of the Holocaust, related phenomena, such as newsreels and the use of media in Holocaust museums, are also discussed. The dissertation critiques the notion that there is in "Holocaust television" an inherent incompatibility between a disturbing, ineffable subject and a popular, "low" medium--which gained wide currency following the premiere of the Holocaust miniseries (1978). Rather, "Holocaust television" is distinguished as an emerging concept in a nascent medium. Moreover, the respective developments of Holocaust memory culture and television broadcasting in America reach thresholds at similar times (e.g., telecasts of the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961)). Throughout the past half-century, "Holocaust television" also reflects the dynamics of the Jewish community within the United States. Holocaust dramas, beginning with those aired on prime-time anthology series and Sunday religious programs, offer revealing examples of American Jewish self-portraiture. In America, where mediations have always provided primary encounters with the Holocaust, television has helped establish watching vintage footage of liberated Nazi concentration camps as a morally transformative act of "witnessing" the Holocaust. In more recent years, the privileging of this mediated encounter with the Holocaust has been extended to watching testimonies by Holocaust survivors. Television figures strategically in debates over the Holocaust as "cultural property" in controversies surrounding recent dramas and documentaries, and it has also played a strategic role in elevating the Holocaust to the status of a master moral paradigm in American culture, evinced most recently by news reports on "ethnic cleansing" operations in Bosnia. 530 Electronic version(s) |bavailable internally at USHMM. 533 Photocopy. |bAnn Arbor, Mich. : |cUMI Dissertation Services, |d1996. |e23 cm. 590 Dissertations and Theses 591 Record updated by Marcive processing 21 June 2024 650 0 Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) 650 0 Television broadcasting |zUnited States. 956 41 |u http://dc.ushmm.org/library/bib23541/9522902.pdf |z Hosted by USHMM. 852 0 |bstacks |hPN1992.8.H627 S536 1995 852 |bebook