The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture

Samantha Baskind

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780271078700
• eBook ISBN: 9780271081489
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Art et politique

On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto staged a now legendary revolt against their Nazi oppressors. Since that day, the deprivation and despair of life in the ghetto and the dramatic uprising of its inhabitants have captured the American cultural imagination. The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture looks at how this place and its story have been remembered in fine art, film, television, radio, theater, fiction, poetry, and comics.

Samantha Baskind explores seventy years' worth of artistic representations of the ghetto and revolt to understand why they became and remain touchstones in the American mind. Her study includes iconic works such as Leon Uris's best-selling novel Mila 18, Roman Polanski's Academy Award–winning film The Pianist, and Rod Serling's teleplay In the Presence of Mine Enemies, as well as accounts in the American Jewish Yearbook and the New York Times, the art of Samuel Bak and Arthur Szyk, and the poetry of Yala Korwin and Charles Reznikoff. In probing these works, Baskind pursues key questions of Jewish identity: What links artistic representations of the ghetto to the Jewish diaspora? How is art politicized or depoliticized? Why have Americans made such a strong cultural claim on the uprising?

Vibrantly illustrated and vividly told, The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture shows the importance of the ghetto as a site of memory and creative struggle and reveals how this seminal event and locale served as a staging ground for the forging of Jewish American identity.

Table of contents

• COVER front
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Chapter 1: “You Must Be Prepared to Resist, Not Give Yourselves Up like Sheep to Slaughter: ”Heroism, the Muscular Jew, and the Warsaw Ghetto,1943–1950
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter 2: “I Was Responsible to the People Who Had Played Out That Terrible Hour inHistory”: Rod Serling, Millard Lampell, and Familial Conflict Behind the Walls
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Chapter 3: “I Am a Jew and What Am I Going to Do About It”: Leon Uris, Mila 18, and Muscular Judaism
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Chapter 4: “I Would Like to Paint One Million Jewish Icons”: Samuel Bak’s Painted Memorials and the Traumatic Loss of the Youngest Generation
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Chapter 5: “Our Children, Our Children Must Live”: Joe Kubert, Comics, and the Saving Remnant
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Epilogue: “Will the World Know of Us? Will the World Know?” The Warsaw Ghetto in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Notes to Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index