| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. By Gary Weissman. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xvi, 266 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8014-4253-2.)

Gary Weissman's core positions in Fantasies of Witnessing pose a challenge. He laments the extent to which scholars working in the field of Holocaust studies have participated in "something akin to [a] hierarchy of suffering—complete with much jockeying for position over who really understands the Holocaust and 'what it was like' to be there" (p. 21). He documents how many of those with a professional or personal interest in the Holocaust—an increasing number of whom are themselves, of course, "nonwitnesses"—have evinced a powerful wish "to feel closer to that horror" (pp. 5, 209). This desire to feel the Holocaust has, however, in his view, not generally furthered "critical thinking about our present-day relationship to the Holocaust" (p. 215). Thus Weissman seeks to encourage a new and balanced perspective in the field of Holocaust studies, and his method throughout is to provide close, sensitive, and scrupulous readings of controversies within the field.

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