American Public Memory and the Holocaust : Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations

This book explores new media and new stories in Holocaust public memory as powerful agents against a rising tide of global intolerance. Arguing that gender is often absent in traditional medial forms of public memory, Costello illustrates how new forms of memorialization shift our orientation toward others and our engagement with the past.

The recent rise of global antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and American white nationalism has created a dangerous challenge to Holocaust public memory on an unprecedented scale. This book is a timely exploration of the ways in which next-generation Holocaust survivors combine old and new media to bring newer generations of audiences into active engagement with Holocaust histories. Readers have been socialized to expect memorialization artifacts about the Holocaust to come in the form of diaries, memoirs, photos, or documentaries in which gender is often absent or marginalized. This book shows a complex process of remembering the past that can positively shift our orientations toward others. Using gender, performance, and rhetoric as a frame, Lisa Costello questions public memory as gender neutral while showing how new forms of memorialization like digital archives, YouTube posts, hybrid memoirs, and small films build emotional connections that bring us closer to the past.