Posted 11 January 2005

As Shandler notes, although the Holocaust neither took place in America nor impacted the vast majority of Americans, by the end of the twentieth century it had emerged as the dominant moral paradigm in American politics and society. It is the rise of the Holocaust to the status of a contemporary American icon that forms the basis of While America Watches. However, unlike more general studies such as Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life (1999), the novelty and value of Shandler’s work is that his focus is on the representation of the Holocaust through the relatively new media of television. Indeed Shandler suggests that Holocaust representation and American television share something of a linked history. Thus, the televising of the Eichmann trial in 1961 was not only a watershed moment in American public consciousness of the Holocaust, but also the first presentation of a popular trial on television. As this example suggests, Shandler’s book is useful not only for those interested in the rise of Holocaust consciousness in contemporary America, but also teachers and students of media studies

In a chronological study, Shandler explores not simply the much-replayed newsreel footage of the liberation of the camps in 1945 and much-debated 1978 NBC mini-series Holocaust.  He also draws our attention to less well known televising of the Holocaust such as the first appearance of a Holocaust survivor on This Is Your Life in 1953 and a 1968 episode of Star Trek featuring the persecution of Zeons on the planet Ekos, which draws on Holocaust imagery whilst also resonating with debates over American engagement in Vietnam. Throughout, he demonstrates how the Holocaust has been variously introduced into the intimate space of American living rooms – although he could have reflected more on popular reception of these images - as well as how the very act of televising such a horrific event has become increasingly contested. Whilst public memory of the past may often be thought as best served through the perceived permanence of monuments created from metal and stone, Shandler points to the ways in which the Holocaust has entered popular consciousness through something so transient and flickering as the television screen.

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