While America watches

The Holocaust holds a unique place in American public culture, and, as Jeffrey Shandler demonstrates, television has played a strategic role in establishing the Holocaust as a powerful moral paradigm in the United States. And while much has been written about Holocaust literature and film, the medium that has brought the subject to most people - television - has been largely neglected. Now Shandler provides the first account of how television has enabled so many Americans to feel familiar with this remote and deeply disturbing subject. In America, where mediations have always provided most people with their primary encounter with the Holocaust, television has helped transform watching into the morally charged act of "witnessing" the Holocaust. By tracing the course of Holocaust television over the past half century, While America Watches reveals how Americans have come to embrace this subject as a model for responding to other moral crises, from domestic racial strife to "ethnic cleansing" operations in Bosnia.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.