How are Holocaust survivors’ life stories informed by other narratives with which they are familiar? Jeffrey Shandler addresses this question in his research on the Shoah Visual History Archive, the subject of his most recent book, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford University Press). Among the thousands of interviews conducted in the 1990s for this archive, which houses the world’s largest collection of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, are several dozen recordings in which survivors discuss the film Schindler’s List. These interviewees include Jews who had been rescued by Oskar Schindler, some of whom were involved in the making of this 1993 film, which prompted director Steven Spielberg’s to establish the Shoah Visual History Archive. In the course of relating their life histories, survivors mention Schindler’s List both in connection to their own stories of surviving the Holocaust and as they reflect on the differences between experience of the past and its narration.
Jeffrey Shandler is Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His previous books include While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press), Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press), Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York University Press), and Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press). Among other titles, Shandler is the editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press) and co-editor of Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton University Press) and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (Indiana University Press).
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