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Zusatztext "[A] welcome contribution to scholarship on the mediations of Holocaust memory....Shandler's book represents a timely and insightful contribution to a vibrant area of scholarship engaged in pressing questions." Informationen zum Autor Jeffrey Shandler is Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous works, including Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (2014) and Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (2009). Klappentext Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age explores the nexus of new media and memory practices, raising questions about how advances in digital technologies continue to influence the nature of Holocaust memorialization. Through an in-depth study of the largest and most widely available collection of videotaped interviews with survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, Jeffrey Shandler weighs the possibilities and challenges brought about by digital forms of public memory.The Visual History Archive's holdings are extensive--over 100,000 hours of video, including interviews with over 50,000 individuals--and came about at a time of heightened anxiety about the imminent passing of the generation of Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses. Now, the Shoah Foundation's investment in new digital media is instrumental to its commitment to remembering the Holocaust both as a subject of historical importance in its own right and as a paradigmatic moral exhortation against intolerance. Shandler not only considers the Archive as a whole, but also looks closely at individual survivors' stories, focusing on narrative, language, and spectacle to understand how Holocaust remembrance is mediated. Zusammenfassung Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age examines the nexus of new media and memory practices through an in-depth study of the Shoah Visual History Archive, the world's largest and most widely available collection of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, to understand how advances in digital technologies impact the practice of Holocaust remembrance. Inhaltsverzeichnis Contents and Abstracts Introduction: chapter abstract Videotaping interviews of Holocaust survivors began in the 1970s, at a strategic convergence of developments in technology (the widespread availability of videotaping and viewing equipment) and Holocaust remembrance, which had recently become a prominent fixture of public culture in the Western world. The Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive (VHA), inaugurated in 1994, the largest and most available collection of these videos, straddles the temporal boundary marked by both the loss of living witnesses to the Holocaust and the transition from the "video age" to the "digital age." As such, the VHA is an exemplar for studying digital humanities as well as the dynamics of Holocaust remembrance. 1 An Archive in Contexts chapter abstract This chapter provides an overview of the creation and development of the Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive (VHA) and situates the Archive in a set of contexts. First, the VHA is positioned within the history of Jewish ethnographic projects, dating from the late 19th century. Second, the Archive is situated within a burgeoning of public memory projects at the end of the 20th century, many of them focused on the Holocaust and World War II. Third, the VHA is located within the development of media used to document the Holocaust, from mid-20th century to...
