Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices

by Jeffrey Shandler

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.

233 pages, Hardcover

Published August 8, 2017

Reviews

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shandler’s volume provides a thorough insight into the history and evolution of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, from its conceptual beginnings out of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List to its most recent endeavors in connecting the youngest generations to the Holocaust through use of the newest technologies. Shandler describes the core elements of the Archive’s video testimonies – narrative, language, and spectacle – and the possibilities and challenges of these when set against the backdrop of the Archive itself.