Nazi and Holocaust Representations in Anglo-American Popular Culture, 1945–2020

“No subject poses a greater challenge to the moral imagination than the Holocaust, nor raises more complicated questions than its memorialization and its pedagogy.  To clarify these tricky issues, Jeffrey Demsky brings the resources of an enduring and serious engagement, a tenacious appetite for the detritus of popular culture, and a flair for crisp and lively prose.  Demsky’s willingness to stalk the terrain of the most problematic expressions of Holocaust imagery is scrupulous and admirable”.

–Stephen J. Whitfield, Professor of American Studies (Emeritus), Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA

“Jeffrey Demsky’s Nazi and Holocaust Representations in Anglo-American Popular Culture makes a vital contribution to Holocaust Studies. Beginning with the 1945 Nuremberg Trials and concluding with the emergence of potentially incendiary modes of representation in the opening decades of the 21st century, Demsky makes convincing claims for the complex ways in which even the most problematic pop cultural discourses reframe and extend Holocaust memory”.

–Victoria Aarons, O.R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA

This book analyzes sensationalized Nazi and Holocaust representations in Anglo-American cultural and political discourses. Recognizing that this history is increasingly removed from contemporary life, it explains how irreverent representations can help rejuvenate the story for successive generations of new learners. Surveying seventy-five-years of transatlantic activities, the work erects counterposing categorizes of “constructive and destructive memorializing,” providing scholars with a new framework for elucidating both this history and its historicization.

Jeffrey Demsky is an Associate Professor of Political Science at San Bernardino Valley College (USA). His scholarship exists at the intersection of post-World War II western democratic history and Holocaust memorialization.