| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Lynn Rapaport Lynn Rapaport is Associate Professor of Sociology and Department Chair at Pomona College. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University. She is the author of Jews in Germany after the Holocaust: Memory, Identity, and Jewish-German Relations (Cambridge University Press, 1997), which won the 1998 Best Book Award in the Sociology of Religion from the American Sociological Association. She is currently working on a project on how the Holocaust is portrayed in popular culture. Notes 1. I thank two of my students, Margaret Androwski and Yazmin Flores, for their assistance in preparing and analyzing this material. I am also grateful to Lawrence Baron, Deborah Carmichael, Maria Donapetry, Kathleen Gerson, Stephen Lebowitz, Peter Rollins, Larry Wilcox, and Diane Wolf for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2. Franciszek Palowski, The Making of Schindler's List (New Jersey: Carol Publishing Group, ([1993] 1998) 6. 3. Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) 9. 4. Keneally visited these locations with Leopold Pfefferberg. 5. Keneally, Schindler's List, 10. 6. Palowski, Making of Schindler's List, xii. 7. Some argue that seeing Schindler's List at home is even more intense than viewing it in the theater, as film and television flow in different directions. Films watched in the dark isolation of the movie theater, draw you into their world, whereas television, by watching it in the lighted comfort of your home, intrudes into your world. It achieves an unavoidable intimacy, whereby individual Jews are casually shot in the head; families are dragged from their homes and shipped to camps; hundreds of Jews at a time are herded into cattle cars for transport to Auschwitz. When such scenes enter your private space, the effect is more personal. 8. The Ford Motor company paid as much as $5 million to $6 million to sponsor the three-and-one-half hour commercial-free telecast. The movie was preceded by a one-minute car commercial created by the ad agency J. Walter Thompson, a 30 second introduction by Ford General Manager Ross Roberts, and a 90 second introduction by Steven Spielberg. During the film there were two 90 second intermissions where the screen went black except for the word "Intermission," a Ford logo and a countdown clock. Following the film, Ford aired a 50-second commercial, and Spielberg spoke for 90 seconds describing his foundation for Holocaust survivors. 9. For a good overview of work on this topic see Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins, "Social memory studies: From 'collective memory' to the historical sociology of mnemomic practices," Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 24 105-40 (1998). 10. See, for example, Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper and Row,) 1980; George Herbert Mead, "The Nature of the Past" in John Coss (ed.) Essays in Honor of John Dewey (New York: Henry Holt, 1929) 235-242; George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1932); and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.) The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 11. As cited in Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 1999) 16. 12. Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today (New York: Random House, 1978) 197. 13. Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 14. See, Edward R. Isser, Stages of Annihilation: Theatrical Representations of the Holocaust (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997). 15. See, for example, Hilene Flanzbaum (ed.) The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); and Lawrence Langer, "The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen" in Sarah Blacher Cohen (ed.), From Hester Street to Hollywood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.) 16. Superman went back to Nazi-occupied Poland three times in the 1990s. In "Superman: The Man of Steel" Nos. 81 and 82, Clark Kent is sent to Poland to investigate reports of atrocities committed by the Nazis. At first he works behind the scenes, but once realizing the extent of evil and devastation about to take place, he transforms into Superman to try to rescue Jews. 17. Gabriel Schoenfeld, "Death Camps As Kitsch", NY Times, 18 March 1999. 18. Baron goes on to...
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