Drew University conference explores television’s portrayal of the Holocaust

by Ron Kaplan
NJJN Staff Writer

For all its faults and detractors, “television has played a major role in bringing the Holocaust to the consciousness of America,” Jeffrey Shandler said at the 13th Annual Conference Commemorating Kristallnacht, held Nov. 3. at Drew University in Madison.

The program — Living Room Witness: American Television and the Holocaust — was sponsored by the school’s Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study.

“The Holocaust has become a filter of American culture over the last six decades,” said Shandler, the Allen and Joan Bildner Fellow at the Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University and author of While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press).

He offered a variety of examples accompanied by video clips from older and more recent television shows, beginning with Placing the Displaced, a 1948 CBS “docudrama” produced by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Other programs that used the Holocaust and its aftermath as a theme, if only tangentially, include the comedy The Goldbergs, which built an episode around a letter received from a long-lost relative from the “old country,” and a 1953 episode of This Is Your Life, which reunited a survivor (a term not yet used to describe the thousands of “displaced persons”) with her brother whom she had not seen since before World War II. Such programs, produced in television’s infancy, tended to be “upbeat,” Shandler suggested, focusing on the second chances received by survivors in their new American home.

During the “golden age” — the late 1940s to early 1960s, with an emphasis on live television — the Holocaust was the topic on dramatic anthologies such as The Alcoa Hour and Studio One. Shandler recalled a 1959 performance of Judgment at Nuremberg on Playhouse 90 in which the American Gas Association, the program’s sponsor, demanded dialogue about the use of gas to exterminate Jews be deleted.

A generation later, more than 50 percent of American television audiences watched Holocaust, a 1978 miniseries that was eventually seen by more than 220 million viewers worldwide. In a “pre-VCR, pre-TIVO age,” viewers watched programs when they were aired, Shandler noted, making them more “communal events.”

The turning point that cemented television’s place in presenting the Holocaust came as a result of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, which was aired to an international audience. In Shandler’s view, as “proud” a moment as it was, viewers found the trial, which was held in Israel, “frustrating” because Eichmann, a representative of pure evil, “didn’t look threatening,” and as such didn’t evoke a visceral hatred. More emotionally satisfying, Shandler said, were Nazi-based episodes on programs such as The Twilight Zone, which provided “quick and satisfying punishment” for the villains.

According to Shandler, documentaries which featured survivors and/or their descendants as they returned to the European towns of their birth or to the camps of their imprisonment, evoked a new intimacy and empathy from viewers.

“The Holocaust demonstrates just how mutable public memory can be,” Shandler concluded. “Thanks in large measure to television, millions of Americans who have no direct connection to this profoundly disturbing chapter in history nonetheless feel that they are on familiar terms with the Holocaust. Through television, the Holocaust has entered American living rooms to challenge viewers with a special onus to be witness, an onus that grows only more complicated and daunting as this era passes from those who experienced it directly to those of us who sit and watch.”

More than 20 percent of the audience of approximately 150 participants consisted of educators, according to Ann Saltzman, who, with Jacqueline Berke, serves as co-director of the Drew University Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study.

Richard Tisch was also on hand, as he has been for most of Drew’s Kristallnacht programs. Tisch, 83, was a member of the 42nd “Rainbow” Infantry Division that liberated Dachau. “It was unbelievable what you saw. There were over 30,000 [survivors]. They were so hyped to be liberated. We had to keep them there for their own safety.

“Having seen it, everybody who sees it has to have a lasting impression. Sometimes people couldn’t talk about it because it was a devastating thing to see: man’s inhumanity to man. It’s an old cliche, but it’s true.”

The Chatham resident shares his memories, along with pictures he took at the time, with school children in New Jersey. “I had to cut back a little. It gets to be really depressing to continue to recall [the camps].”

Tisch called the day’s program “outstanding. [Shandler] covered a tremendous amount of things. The videos were extremely good. Now that you’re going to remember.”

Ron Kaplan can be reached at RKaplan@njjewishnews.com.

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