The Holocaust and History
Dr. Eliyana Adler
0142 Holzapfel Hall
X57640
adler@umd.edu
HONR238X
Spring 2010
T/Th 2-3:15
by appointment
Due to both the unprecedented nature of the event, and its long cultural shadow, the
Holocaust holds a unique place in historical and popular writing. It is the sine quo non for
Genocide and for evil in general. The vast amount of research, writing and rhetoric
devoted to Holocaust Studies has led not only to volumes of output, but also to historical
controversies.
This seminar will examine a number of ongoing debates in the study of the Holocaust.
Each week will be devoted to a distinct topic. While some topics, such as the dialog
between the Functionalists and Intentionalists, will be strictly historiographic, others,
such as the use of memoirs as an historical source, will be more methodological. We will
look to issues pertaining to the event itself, such as definitions of resistance, as well as
more contemporary concerns, including Holocaust denial and education.
Our approach will be interdisciplinary. In additional to strictly historical accounts, we
will read scholarship emanating from literary criticism, anthropology, linguistics, film
studies and women’s studies. The classroom experience will also include both film and
music. The resources of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will allow the
students hands-on access to primary sources.
Readings:
Gross, Jan T., Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community of Jedwabne,
Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Mintz, Alan. Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).
Niewyk, Donald L. The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation,
third edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003).
Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl (New York: Vintage International, 1990).
Assignments:
Class participation
Photograph paper
Autobiography Paper
Discussion
Final Essay
10%
20%
35%
5%
30%
(1) Academic Integrity & the Honors College
The University is an academic community. Its fundamental purpose is the pursuit of
knowledge. Like all other communities, the University can function properly only if its
members adhere to clearly established goals and values. Essential to the fundamental
purpose of the University is the commitment to the principles of truth and academic
honesty. Accordingly, the Code of Academic Integrity is designed to ensure that the
principle of academic honesty is upheld. While all members of the University share this
responsibility, The Code of Academic Integrity is designed so that special responsibility
for upholding the principle of academic honesty lies with the students. (The University of
Maryland Student Honor Council)
All University of Maryland students are asked to write and sign the following Honor
Pledge to all submitted assignments and exams:
I pledge on my honor that I have not given or received any unauthorized assistance on
this assignment/examination.
The University of Maryland honor system is fully described in the Code of Academic
Integrity. Please read: www.studenthonorcouncil.umd.edu/code.html. The Code is
administered by an all-student Honor Council. The student Honor Council office is
located in room 2118 Mitchell Building and can be reached at 301-314-8204.
The Honors College works to enrich its community life by promoting an atmosphere of
honesty, trust, and mutual responsibility. In the event that a Honors College student is
found responsible for a violation of the Code of Academic Integrity by the Student Honor
Council, he or she will be dismissed from the Honors College for the semester in which
the violation took place and for all subsequent semesters in which the student is enrolled
as an undergraduate at Maryland.
*(2) CourseEvalUM*
Your participation in the evaluation of courses through CourseEvalUM is a
responsibility you hold as a student member of our academic community. Your feedback
is confidential and important to the improvement of teaching and learning at the
University as well as to the tenure and promotion process. CourseEvalUM will be open
for you to complete your evaluations for fall semester courses between Tuesday,
December 1 and Sunday, December 13. You can go directly to the website
(www.courseevalum.umd.edu) to complete your evaluations starting December 1. By
completing all of your evaluations each semester, you will have the privilege of
accessing the summary reports for thousands of courses online at Testudo.
2
1/26
Introduction
Part I: Historiography
1/28
Uniqueness
Michael Marrus, “The Holocaust in Perspective,” The Holocaust in History (Hanover, New
Hampsire: University Press of New England, 1987), pp. 8-30.
John Sanbonmatsu, “The Holocaust Sublime: Singularity, Representation, and the Violence of
Everyday Life,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 68:1 (January, 2009): 101-126.
2/2
Functionalists vs. Intentionalists
Katz, Kershaw and Friedlander in Niewyk.
2/4
Perpetrators: Willing Executioners or Ordinary Men?
Lifton, Browning, and Goldhagen in Niewyk.
2/9
Perpetrators/Bystanders: Neighbors
Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
(Princeton New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 3-104
Gutman and Krakowski in Niewyk.
2/11
Perpetrators/Bystanders: Response
Gross, pp. 105-203.
Dariusz Stola, “Jedwabne: Revisiting the Evidence and Nature of the Crime,” Holocaust and
Genocide Studies 17:1 (Spring 2003): 139-152.
2/16
Holocaust Photographs
Judith Keilbach, “Photographs, Symbolic Images, and the Holocaust: On the (Im)Possibility of
Depicting Historical Truth,” History and Theory 47 (May 2009): 54-76.
Susan A. Crane, “Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity
Photography,” History and Theory 47 (May 2009): 309-330.
3
Discuss photograph paper
2/18
Rescuers
Oliner in Niewyk.
Julian J. Bussgang, “Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment,” Polin 21 (2009): 401-425.
2/23
Victims: Judenrate
Trunk and Hilberg in Niewyk.
Daniel Feierstein, “The Dilema of Wittenberg: Reflections on Tactics and Ethics,” Shofar 20:2
(2002): 61-68.
2/25
Resistance: Armed
Bauer in Niewyk.
Leonid Smilovitsky, “Antisemitism in the Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941-1944: The Case of
Belorussia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20:2 (Fall 2006): 207-234.
3/2
Resistance: Spiritual
Eliyana R. Adler, “No Raisins, No Almonds: Singing as Spiritual Resistance to the Holocaust,”
Shofar 24:4 (2006): 50-66.
Shirli Gilbert, “Introduction: Redeeming Music—‘Spiritual Resistance’ and Beyond,” Music in
the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), pp. 1-20.
3/4
Gender
Milton and Langer in Niewyk.
Photograph paper due
3/9
Saving Remnant?
Rubinstein, Phayer and Laquer in Niewyk.
4
Part II: Representation
3/11
Self-Representation
Berel Lang, “Writing the Holocaust: Toward the Condition of History,” Holocaust
Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000), pp. 17-34.
Tim Cole, “Anne Frank,” Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler How History is
Bought, Packaged, and Sold (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 23-46.
Discuss choosing autobiography
Spring Break
3/23
Autobiography Reexamined
Alan Rosen, “Autobiography from the Other Side: The Reading of Nazi Memoirs and
Confessional Ambiguity,” Biography 24:3 (Summer 2001): 553-569.
Anne Whitehead, “Telling Tales: Trauma and Testimony in Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments,”
Discourse 25:1-2 (2004): 119-137.
3/25
Poetry After Auschwitz
Lawrence L. Langer, “In the Beginning was the Silence,” The Holocaust and the Literary
Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 1-30.
Bring in a Holocaust poem of your choice.
3/30
Passover-No Class
4/1
Fiction
Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl.
Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivors Tale (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), pp. 140-161.
4/6
Shoah
Meet in Hornbake Library, Non-Print Media, Rooms C and D
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah, Les Films Aleph, 1985 (New Yorker Video, 2003).
5
4/8
Film
Omer Bartov, “Spielberg’s Oskar: Hollywood Tries Evil,” Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical
Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997), pp. 41-60.
Mintz, “The Holocaust at the Movies,” pp. 85-158.
4/13
Fiction Revisited
Cynthia Ozick, “The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination,” Quarrel & Quandry (New
York: Alfred A. Knoph, 2000), pp. 103-119.
Mintz, “Two Models in the Study of Holocaust Representation,” pp. 36-84.
Part III: Memory
4/15
Yom ha-Shoah ve-ha-Gevurah
Tom Segev, “Holocaust and Heroism,” The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New
York: Henry Hold and Company, 1991), pp. 421-445.
Ruth Ebenstein, “Remembered Through Rejection,” Israel Studies 8:3 (2003): 141-166.
Autobiography paper due
4/20
The Cross over Auschwitz
Isabel Wollaston, “Sharing Sacred Space? The Carmelite Controversy and the Politics of
Commemoration,” Patterns of Prejudice 28:3-4 (1994): 19-27.
Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, “Reclaiming Auschwitz,” Holocaust Remembrance: The
Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 232-251.
4/22
Revisionism
Ernst Nolte, “Between Myth and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the Perspective of the 1980s,”
Aspects of the Third Reich, ed. H.W. Koch (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 17-38.
Dominick LaCapra, “Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the Historians’ Debate,” Probing
the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 108-127.
6
4/27
Denial
Meir Litvak, “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the Holocaust: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism,”
Journal of Israeli History 25:1 (2006): 267-284.
Deborah E. Lipstadt, “The Battle for the Campus,” Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault
on Truth and Memory (New York: The Free Press, 1993), pp. 183-208.
Discuss final essay
4/29
The Politics of Restitution
Regula Ludi, “Waging War on Wartime Memory: Recent Swiss Debates on the Legacies of the
Holocaust and the Nazi Era,” Jewish Social Studies 10:2 (2004): 116-152.
Norman G. Finkelstein, “The Double Shakedown,” The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the
Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 79-117.
5/4
Education
Geoffrey Short, “Learning from Genocide? A Study in the Failure of Holocaust Education,”
Intercultural Education 16:4 (2005): 367-380.
Ronna Sheramy, “From Auschwitz to Jerusalem,” Polin 19 (2007): 307-325.
5/6
Memorialization
Mintz, “From Silence to Salience,” pp. 3-35.
James E. Young, “Against Redemption: The Arts of Counter-Memory,” Humanity at the Limit:
The Impact of the Holocaust Experience on Jews and Christians, ed. Michael A. Singer
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 44-59.
5/11
Conclusions
Mintz, “The Future of Memorialization,” pp. 159-186.
Peter Novick, “Never Again the Slaughter of the Albigensians,” The Holocaust in American Life
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 239-263.
Final Essay Due 5/14 5:00 p.m. on Blackboard
7