Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust

Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust, edited by Shelly Hornstein, Laura Levitt, and Laurence J. Silberstein. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 285 pp. $20.00. As a middle school teacher engaging my students in a unit on the Holocaust, I often struggled with the limitations of my own knowledge. Impossible Images: Contemporary Art After the reminded me of how I, like many teachers, wrestled to comprehend the murderous history of this era and to find meaningful ways to engage my students in a critical exploration of both history and their own budding viewpoints. This essay collection, which grew out of an interdisciplinary conference of Jewish scholars and artists, raises questions about our seemingly firm perceptions of the Holocaust. What do works of art make visible to us? How do they challenge our prior perceptions of the Holocaust? How do geography and cultural background affect our interpretations? Who in today's world has the right to create these images? reader will encounter many more difficult and important questions, some of which are mentioned in the brief overview that follows. Impossible Images is organized into four conceptual clusters. In Geography of the Heart, the essays confront the implications of art in places far removed from the actual events of the past. How do we as Americans remember the from these distances? In Haunted By Memory: American Jewish Transformations, Michelle A. Friedman examines the work of American artists Shimon Attie and Steve Reich. Whether examining Attie's Between Dreams and History or studying Reich's musical composition, Different Trains, we are reminded that the history of the does not really belong to this country and that the experiences of Jews in Europe and Jews in America are quite different. Julian Bonder, author and director of the controversial Center for Studies at Clark University, contributes a fascinating essay addressing the relation between memory and commemoration. In A House for a Uninhabitable Memory, he recalls the intentions of the designers as well as the many sensitive issues raised by the very nature of the project itself. How can this seemingly innocent site in Massachusetts become a Holocaust site? We learn that this structure was not designed to serve as a memorial or a museum but rather as a place where the present generation must . . negotiate the twilight zone between the as a recollected background and the as a historical event. second section examines Israel and the Politics of Memory. In The Return of the Repressed, Ariella Azoulay examines the ways in which several Israeli artists have begun to incorporate images of Hitler in a culture where these representations have been traditionally repressed. And in Don't Touch My Holocaust-Analyzing the Barometer of Responses: Israeli Artists Challenge the Taboo, Tami Katz-Freiman helps us navigate the tricky waters surrounding the representation of the in modern-day Israel. She first examines the 1980s movement to break the taboo of silencing the with particular attention to the notions of Holocaust and Heroism and Negation of Exile as they relate to the ethos of the Zionist movement. …