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Book Prospectus for "Hollywood and the Holocaust: A Cultural History from 1933 to 1949"

 

This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.  The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality (Plato, Phaedrus).

 

What films reflect are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions - those deep layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness (Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film).

 

The primary aim of this book is to rethink much of the conventional wisdom concerning Hollywood and its role before, during and immediately after the Holocaust.  A growing body of scholarship continues to probe various aspects of this history with increasing precision, including such subjects as Hollywood and World War II, Hollywood and Nazism, and Holocaust film.  Yet little of this recent scholarship has tackled head-on the complex and very multi-faceted relationship that existed between Hollywood and the Holocaust.  The topic itself, now popularized as cultural shorthand and having aggregated its own "semblance of truth," offers seeming historical omniscience to an increasingly knowledgeable global public, who in turn may mistake a pat "show of wisdom without the reality" for the complexities of this important historical topic.

 

The stakes behind this "show of wisdom" became readily apparent amid a particularly bitter public debate over two books published in 2013: Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 by Thomas Doherty, and The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler by Ben Urwand.  The debate ultimately highlighted the need for further exploration of a complex and at times seemingly inscrutable subject.  Both books offered competing narratives for how Hollywood responded to Nazism throughout the 1930s and early 1940s.  Urwand accused Hollywood of collaborating with the Nazis before 1941.  Doherty offered a more reasoned and measured assessment of the period: Hollywood at first cooperated with Nazis, then looked away from Nazism, but ultimately faced "up to a menace beyond its imagination" (Doherty 373).  Perhaps the most telling aspect of this argument, though, was how tussles over Hollywood and Nazis could raise all manner of related but nonetheless distinct concerns.  Did the film industry willingly condone Nazi anti-Semitism before World War II?  Was it too cowardly to alert the world to the looming threat of fascism, thus helping to pave the way for future genocidal policies and actions?  Did it turn a blind eye to the suffering of Jews overseas in the hopes of securing lucrative markets there?  Underlying those concerns was a deep-seated assumption: whither Hollywood goes, so goes the righteous collective mentality and action of a nation, maybe even the world.

 

Neither Doherty nor Urwand likely ever intended to write the proxy history for Hollywood as litmus test for the American response to the Holocaust, but at a certain point, intent hardly mattered.  Hollywood and Hitler became interchangeable with Hollywood and the Nazis, which in turn became interchangeable with Hollywood and the Holocaust.  To be sure, the historical narrative of Hollywood and the Holocaust definitely encompasses Hitler and Nazism.  But the Holocaust is more than just interchangeable shorthand for Hitler and Nazis, and Hollywood is more than the cigar-chomping immigrant parvenu deciding from the front office which films the studio cannot afford to produce for fear of losing profits from a supposedly lucrative German market.  Despite much recent attention this debate gave to the subject of Hollywood and Nazis, the subject of Hollywood and the Holocaust still awaits its own close examination, precisely because no study has yet fully accounted for the complexity and contradictions inherent in either how Hollywood worked during this period, or how limited or contradictory information about the Holocaust might have played to an increasingly confused and divided American public.

 

To begin to understand some of these complexities, we would do well to revisit another book, Siegfried Kracauer's landmark 1947 From Caligari to Hitler.  Many a graduate seminar since has maligned its central thesis, namely that German films before 1933 obsessively dwelled on depressing and defeatist subjects featuring all-powerful authoritarian figures.  As a result, these films supposedly drummed the collective mentality of a nation into submission and willing acceptance of a strong charismatic leader.  Insights developed in subsequent decades by New Criticism, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies all made Kracauer an obsolete and easy mark to leverage these newer insights.  Shedding such archaic examples of social history meant finding one's sea legs in the academy's exciting new embrace of studying race, class, gender, and ethnicity that the equally new and exciting discipline of Media Studies now allowed.  Could one indeed talk about a singular collective mentality of a nation?  A monolithic audience?  Did films of that period really brainwash the entire German soul into accepting Hitler?

 

Yet overly focusing on only a part of Kracauer's explicit thesis offers too easy an excuse to ignore the book's more far-reaching, and at the time, revolutionary approach to film criticism.  Eschewing the "film for film's sake" approach common to film criticism of this period, Kracauer argued that film could reflect something more than its own inner aesthetic workings: a certain complexity of public attitudes and thinking, even if neither creators nor public were fully aware of what they were thinking, or what kinds of attitudes they held.  It could do this for two reasons.  First, the process of making films themselves involved a certain complexity.  Inherently a collaboration and "collective effort," this process necessarily encoded into film "a mixture of heterogeneous interests and inclinations" that in turn tended "to exclude arbitrary handling of screen material, suppressing individual peculiarities in favor of traits common to many people." (Kracauer 5)

 

Kracauer's second reason for how film revealed a certain complexity of public thinking and attitudes had to do with the popular appeal of films themselves.  "Hollywood films more often than not stultify and misdirect a public," Kracauer allowed to a readership well-versed in the day's dismissive attitudes toward mass culture.  But their "distorting influence" still had to have some basis in actuality.  "Hollywood cannot afford to ignore spontaneity on the part of the public.  General discontent becomes apparent in waning box-office receipts, and the film industry, vitally interested in profit, is bound to adjust itself, as far as possible, to the changes in mental climate." (6)

 

The recent controversy over Doherty's and Urwand's books demonstrates how much Kracauer still can teach us, if not about German cinema of the interwar era, then perhaps about what Kracauer was decidedly not talking about in 1947: how Hollywood's industrial practice worked in relation to a growing and shifting public awareness of the Holocaust, an awareness that imbued popular expression not so much with "explicit credos," but rather, through what Kracauer deemed "psychological dispositions," those "deep layers" extending "more or less below the dimension of consciousness." (6)  Viewing industrial practice exclusively in terms of Hollywood and Nazis or Hollywood and Hitler risks missing some of the "deep layers" underlying how mass culture might have responded to the Holocaust.  And while no study can ever fully excavate all of these dimensions, one can at least begin to understand Hollywood and the Holocaust through how these industrial practices navigated some extraordinary pressures, from within but especially between Hollywood and other institutions.  Those practices virtually ensured that there weren't any explicit credos in films, but they also did not - and could not - wipe deeper layers of meaning from Hollywood's vast output.  It was these negotiated practices, along with an influx of postwar foreign film, that eventually helped birth what increasingly globalized audiences learned to recognize as the Holocaust film.

 

Just as the debate between Doherty nor Urwand won't be the final word on Hollywood and Nazism, the proposed narrative for Hollywood and the Holocaust cannot offer an exhaustive history of the subject.  No single monograph could do that.  Instead, rereading Kracauer nearly 70 years later offers an opportunity to return to his underlying premise, but this time with an approach that can consider not just deeper layers of individual film titles, but also deeper layers of archival production materials and reception history. Asking whether human beings fully realize exactly what they are doing in the meaning-making process, either as a unit in collaboration, or individually as part of an audience has tremendous implications for the study of film and media. For studying Hollywood and the Holocaust, that premise certainly warrants a more thorough consideration of how both audiences and film industry personnel perceived what Hollywood could and could not do, first to address Nazism, and then later, to address growing public knowledge of what had taken place during the Holocaust. 

 

A more thorough consideration is not just a way to understand how Hollywood responded to Nazism and early aspects of the Holocaust.  It also can help reveal deeper understanding of the globalized hybrid of the Holocaust film and its origins.  Although scholars debate exactly when the Holocaust began - ranging from Hitler's appointment to Chancellor in 1933, to 1942 when senior Nazi leadership had formally outlined their plans for mass extermination at the Wannsee Conference - the Holocaust film is not simply an appendage to this historical chronology.  Rather, this globalized hybrid had its roots in an entangled economic and cultural relationship between Hollywood and Europe.

 

While the modern Holocaust film had begun to emerge for audiences after 1945, it did not spring full-formed from Auschwitz, but rather drew its antecedents from those deep layers embedded within newsreels, propaganda entries, short subjects, foreign film, and those earnest pre-war and wartime anti-Nazi features that could not have foreseen the full horrors depicted at Liberation. Much of the scholarship on Hollywood's response to the Holocaust has relied upon close textual readings of films themselves, biographies of key personnel, perspectives from trade paper accounts, and other secondary histories or memoirs.  Those considering film before the Holocaust have paid less attention to production histories of specific titles, and have given less weight to how actual audiences understood and interpreted anti-Nazi or Holocaust-themed meanings from these and other less familiar titles.   This project will explore how other films - costume epics, bio-pics, horror, comedy, short subjects, and other genres all worked intertextually to convey meanings relevant to the Holocaust by recombining with more familiar and established Hollywood genres.

 

To seriously consider the "deep layers" of meaning embedded within these texts, one must carefully examine them in light of their relationship to Hollywood's industrial practice.  Rather than presume the industry only existed as a passive and ellipsis-prone recorder of the times, a return to Kracauer's approach helps shift this perspective. Whatever Hollywood's shortcomings, it also functioned as the prototype of an emergent multinational industry, centrally implicated within and ensnared by the economic, political, and social upheavals brought about by the rise of Nazi anti-Semitism. Few recall that not even a month after the 5 March 1933 plebiscite democratically electing the Nazis to power, the party immediately began Aryanizing the German subsidiaries of six American movie studios.  Before all of its subsequent decrees barring Jews from government service, schools, universities, and other public sectors, the Nazis had singled out Hollywood, launching an anti-Semitic campaign targeting Jews working in the increasingly globalized film industry.  According to the New York Times, the Nazis’ 1 April 1933 letters instructed each subsidiary of the six American film companies to

 

give notice of the dismissal of all your representatives, rental agents and branch managers of Jewish extraction and to give them leave of absence immediately.  No more employment contracts must be entered into and so far as such have been effectuated lately from transparent causes they shall be canceled immediately.

 

I emphasize that it is not religion but race that is decisive.  Christianized Jews are thus equally affected.  In place of these gentlemen only members of the National Socialist cells shall be employed (New York Times 1933).

 

What warranted making Hollywood one of the earliest targets of Nazi anti-Semitic measures?  At one level, this project further explores a trajectory raised but not necessarily answered by Doherty.  Hollywood behaved, not as a run-of-the mill corporate entity of the period, but as a special target singled out for Nazi anti-Semitic enmity.  Hollywood was above all an industry and institution that behaved like many other major industries and institutions of the time. It existed, warts and all, within both the constraints and possibilities of these economic, political, and social contexts and their upheavals.  But unlike those other industries, it incurred a particular kind of wrath.  That is not to let the industry off the hook for its role during this period. Yet the failures to anticipate the ultimate lethality of Nazi anti-Semitism, to confront Nazi policy and totalitarianism head-on, either using its economic and diplomatic clout or through its on-screen depictions, were all failures not of Hollywood alone, but failures of Hollywood in relation to the web of economic, political, and social institutions and practices within and among which Hollywood operated.

 

Beyond the level of industrial constraint, the project also reconsiders much of the anti-Nazi and Holocaust canon, revisiting both some familiar titles as well as rediscovering some less well-known or forgotten ones.  Current knowledge of early Holocaust film frequently gets stuck in mostly textual and auteurist-based approaches to familiar canonical texts.  Yet new methods involving production and reception histories can yield new insights, alongside textual- and genre-based approaches, into canonical anti-fascist comedies such as Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (United Artists, 1940).  The Chaplin Archive in Bologna features of wealth of scripts, correspondence, and other production materials shedding new light on the development of this film, but that have as yet to receive serious scholarly attention.  At the same time, a plethora of less well known feature length and low-budget films, live-action and animated shorts, newsreels and other cinematic ephemera also represented Nazism and even the Holocaust, despite their fleeting presence or absence from cable, DVD or streaming for today's popular consumption.

 

The book's end point of 1949 considers Hollywood in relation to the growing influence of foreign film in the U.S., and how this influence established a set of stylistic conventions for what a Holocaust film should look like.  For audiences in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington DC, their first cinematic encounter with the fictional Holocaust film came with the Polish The Last Stop (Times Film, 1949), shot on location at Auschwitz by two female survivors of the camp who recruited some additional 3,500 female survivors to reenact as extras what the experience of being in a concentration camp was like.   Given its reputation as studio-bound dream factory divorced from harsh realities, Hollywood would never have dared make such a film in 1949, and yet American audiences in these cities saw this film alongside other Hollywood films of the time.  Within ten years, The Diary of Anne Frank (20th Century-Fox, 1959) would intertextually quote The Last Stop in a brief and unattributed nightmare sequence, perhaps in deference to what the Polish film could depict of Auschwitz, on location, that the studio backlot could not.

 

In order to rethink commonly held assumptions about both the Holocaust film and Hollywood's response to Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust during this period, the book does not attempt to offer a comprehensive or exhaustive study of every film depicting these subjects.  Rather, it considers a set of crisis points that prove crucial for this history.  From a historical perspective, these economic, cultural, political, and social crisis points reveal a complex negotiation of meanings and significance at particular moments in time, ultimately resulting in a remarkable consensus about what made a film a Holocaust film, and what a Holocaust film should be.  A tentative table of contents shows how I plan to trace this evolution:

 

Chapter 1: Global Entanglements

The first chapter examines the unique entanglements American and German film industries reluctantly and ambivalently faced at the beginning of 1933 in economic, cultural and technological terms.  This chapter would cover controversies over the exhibition of All Quiet on the Western Front (Universal, 1931); economic and cultural challenges posed by the coming of sound; and the transnational flows existing between both German and American film industries.

 

Chapter 2: Struggle and Regulation

The second chapter reviews the internal political and industrial struggles Hollywood faced throughout the 1930s with the rise of activist movements like the Popular Front and the formation of the industry's self-censoring Production Code Administration.  It argues that films throughout the 1930s negotiated these struggles through a set of reading strategies that actively encouraged audiences to find relevance between a wide variety of films and rising anti-Semitism in Europe.

 

Chapter 3: Backlash

With new research, the third chapter expands discussion of the 1941 Senate Motion Picture Propaganda Hearings and the isolationist backlash against Hollywood anti-Nazi films first discussed in my book, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II (Cambridge U P, 2001).  Based on production materials from the Chaplin Archive in Bologna, this chapter considers Chaplin's The Great Dictator (United Artists, 1940) as a case study in the perils of making an anti-Nazi film.

 

Chapter 4: Four Freedoms

The fourth chapter considers how both Hollywood and the Roosevelt Administration negotiated their relationship after the U.S. entered the war, especially with films such as Mr. Skeffington (1943), which Warner Bros. succeeded in making despite resistance to its treatment of American anti-Semitism from the Office of War Information.  The chapter considers how films during this period sought not only to demonize Nazism, but also to draw stark contrasts between Germany and the American way of life.

 

Chapter 5: Atrocity

The fifth chapter considers how both Hollywood and the Truman Administration negotiated their relationship at the end of World War II, amid the emergence of atrocity footage of the camps and efforts to use entertainment films to help build postwar Europe.  The chapter considers the initial encounter with atrocity footage as reception history.  It also considers how an industry-government consensus had emerged over the increasingly global importance of Hollywood film to assist in nation building.

 

Chapter 6: Social Problems

The sixth chapter considers the spate of social problem films Hollywood released during the immediate postwar period, and the ways in which films treating anti-Semitism became a target for nascent anti-communist forces.  Unlike Senate isolationists, anti-communists had learned how to reconfigure and camouflage an underlying antisemitism in renewed postwar attacks on the film industry.

 

Chapter 7: Foreign Films

The seventh and final chapter addresses the importance of foreign film in bringing the semi-fictional depictions of the Holocaust to American screens.  In establishing a set of conventions independent of Hollywood, these foreign films drew upon new modalities of atrocity footage to help define for audiences the very essence of what a Holocaust film should be.

 

When I first began this project in 2001 after the publication of Hollywood and Anti-Semitism, only a handful of books offered reasonably comprehensive surveys of Holocaust films.  Titles such as Annette Insdorf's Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (Cambridge U P, 1983; 2nd ed. 1989); Judith Doneson's The Holocaust in American Film (Jewish Publication Society, 1987); and Ilan Avisar's Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's Images of the Unimaginable (Indiana U P, 1988) all developed sensitive critical analyses of American and European titles.  Much of this early scholarship understandably centered on identifiying the most explicit cinematic depictions of the Holocaust.  My project initially intended to fill a gap, considering films like Mr. Skeffington that implicitly or allusively invoked anti-Semitism as a theme and thus would have appeared to World War II audiences as pointed commentary on Nazism.  As Joel Finler (1990) noted in his review of The Holocaust in American Film, for example, Doneson omits mention of Warner Bros.' The Life of Emile Zola (1937), an anti-Nazi allegory appearing two years before the studio's release of Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939).  Only perfunctorily about the life of Zola, the film used the conventions of the bio-pic genre to recount the Dreyfus affair, which at the turn of the century had brought worldwide attention to French anti-Semitism.  Despite the film showing the word "Jew" only once in a fleeting shot, American audiences of the time widely understood this popular film as an indictment of contemporary European anti-Semitism.

 

Since these early volumes, the number of titles engaging Hollywood films and the Holocaust has expanded to fill a fairly wide bookshelf.  While films like Zola and Skeffington still demand further scholarly attention, the scholarship of Lawrence Baron, Omer Bartov, Hilene Flanzbaum, Joshua Hirsch, Lawrence Langer, Alan Mintz, Michael Rothberg, and others have significantly extended textual approaches.  They have addressed such themes as the Holocaust as a crisis of representation in both familiar American titles or lesser known European ones; or the ways in which popular culture has Americanized the Holocaust, a recurrent scholarly concern since the release of Schindler's List (Universal, 1993).   A 2001 symposium at the Imperial War Museum in London brought together an ever-expanding range of scholarly approaches to the subject, which in turn served as the basis for Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman’s anthology Holocaust and the Moving Image (2005).  A 2004 documentary, Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust (Shadow, 2007) even explored these issues for a popular audience.  Running tandem alongside textual approaches to Holocaust film, scholarship by Michael Birdwell, Sabine Hake, David Welky, and Jennifer Langdon represent an important new direction in grounding close textual analysis with vital historical and audience-oriented research using archival materials and other historical sources.  Each of these studies pinpointed an important aspect of film history in ways that move discussion of anti-Nazi and Holocaust film beyond exclusively textual analysis.  Birdwell's Celluloid Soldiers (1999), for example, used the Warner Bros. archive to focus on the anti-Nazi activities of a single studio.  Welky's The Moguls and the Dictators (2008) used a wide range of archival materials and correspondence from the Roosevelt Administration, Will H. Hays' papers, and other sources to consider the industry's response to European fascism across multiple studios.  In the chapter devoted to 1940s Hollywood film, Hake's Screen Nazis (2012) significantly added to our understanding of the representation of Nazism by expanding the repertoire of films to include shorts, B-movies, and other titles often ignored by serious scholarship.  In addition, Hake effectively deployed a reception-based approach in her analysis of Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Warner Bros., 1939) to consider how audiences at the time might have imagined that film in relation to the Nazi characters it depicted.  Finally, Langdon's book made extensive use of historical materials related both to public reception and to the production history of RKO's Crossfire (1947).  Her book challenged auteurist approaches to film history, arguing for the importance of studying the creative contribution of the film producer as a way to examine the relevance of anti-fascist politics to both creative personnel and audiences of the time.

 

Despite this expanding body of scholarship addressing various aspects of Hollywood, Nazism, and the Holocaust, none of these studies has addressed the Holocaust film as an emergent globalized product formed through a set of ongoing economic, political, and cultural negotiations.  Rather than focus on a specific film, studio, or set of politics, this study explores the Holocaust film in three different dimensions: as a textual formation with a particular set of generic, narrative, and stylistic conventions; as a culturally negotiated product emanating from an industrial context and operating within historically situated economic, political, and social constraints; and as the object of shifting popular reception, as evidenced through studio publicity, advertising, and newspaper reviews. All three of these dimensions helped frame meanings and set audience expectations for what a Holocaust film should be.  In addition, while existing scholarship has begun to address many of these aspects, no single study has attempted to define a Holocaust film as an emergent cultural product that, even before Anne Frank, already portended many of the subsequent trials and tribulations that the genre has faced as a result of its increasing prominence within globalized popular culture.

 

Now nearing completion, the project brings together a great deal of scholarship already completed since 2002, and will synthesize this work into a comprehensive rethinking of the Holocaust film as a globalized cultural practice developing over decades of production methods, textual conventions, and audience interpretation.  Some of the material on http://stevenalancarr.pbworks.com indicates my interest and commitment to the project, a small portion of which has appeared in print, although this material serves only as starting points for each chapter and would involve significant expansion and revision:

• Chapter 5 on atrocity film, which would expand upon a 2008 essay.
• Chapter 6 on the Hollywood social problem film, which originally appeared in a shortened 2011 essay.
• Chapter 7 on the American reception of both the foreign anti-Nazi film and the Holocaust film, a version of which will appear as part of the Holocaust Education Foundation's Lessons and Legacies conference proceedings.

 

The book seeks to achieve cross-over appeal with upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, scholars, and a general audience.  Relevant disciplines for this title include film studies, film history, cultural studies, Jewish Studies, and Holocaust Studies.

 

The manuscript will be approximately 100,000 words.  Should I secure support for its completion, I anticipate delivering a completed first draft by 1 Aug. 2016.  Currently, the project has no publisher.  I had submitted a prospectus to Northwestern University, but I withdrew the proposal from consideration after differences over the terms of the contract.  Since that time, I have spoken to editors at both New York University Press and Indiana University Press, but I have not yet made a formal submission to either press. 

 

I am Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor of Communication at Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, a 2002-03 Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, a 2010-11 Loewenstein-Wiener Marcus Research Fellow at the American Jewish Archives, and Co-Director of the IPFW Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. I received my M.A. from Northwestern University in 1987 and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994, both in Radio-Television-Film. Reviews of my first book, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War II (Cambridge U P, 2001), have appeared in Commentary, The Forward, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, and The Washington Post. The project first received an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2002, and has since continued to receive support.  An expanded CV is available at http://stevenalancarr.pbworks.com.

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Avisar, Ilan.  Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's Images of the Unimaginable.  Bloomington IN: Indiana U P, 1988.

Baron, Lawrence.  Projecting the Holocaust Into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema.  Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

Birdwell, Michael E.  Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign Against Nazism.  New York NY: New York U P, 1999.

Bartov, Omer.  The "Jew" in Cinema: From The Golem to Don't Touch My Holocaust.  Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies.  Bloomington IN: Indiana U P, 2005.

Carr, Steven Alan.  Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II.  Cambridge Studies in the History of Mass Communication.  Cambridge UK: Cambridge U P, 2001.

---.  "Jew and Not-Jew: Anti-Semitism and the Postwar Hollywood Social Problem Film."  The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema.  Lawrence Baron, ed.  Waltham MA: Brandeis U P - U P of New England, 2011.

---.  "Staying for Time: The Holocaust and Atrocity Footage in American Public Memory."  Violating Time: History, Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema.  Christina Lee, ed.  New York NY: Continuum, 2008.

Doherty, Thomas.  Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939. Film and Culture. New York NY: Columbia U P, 2013/

Doneson, Judith E.  The Holocaust in American Film.  New York NY: Jewish Publication Society, 1987.

Finler, Joel.  Rev. of The Holocaust in American Film by Judith E. Doneson.  Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 10(1): 105-06.  Academic Search Elite.  EBSCOhost.  Accessed 30 Aug. 2001.

Flanzbaum, Hilene.  The Americanization of the Holocaust.  Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 1999.

Haggith, Toby and Joanna Newman, eds.  Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933.  London UK: Wallflower P, 2005.

Hake, Sabine.  Screen Nazis: Cinema, History, and Democracy.  Madison WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2012.

Hirsch, Joshua.  Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust.  Philadelphia PA: Temple U P, 2004.

Insdorf, Annette.  Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust.  2nd ed.  New York NY: Cambridge U P, 1989.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton NJ: Princeton U P, 1947.

Langdon, Jennifer E.  Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood.  New York NY: Columbia U P, 2008.

Langer, Lawrence.  Preempting the Holocaust.  New Haven CT: Yale U P, 1998.

Mintz, Alan L.  Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America.  Seattle WA: U of Washington P, 2001.

"Nazi Orders Jews Dismissed By American Film Companies."  The New York Times.  2 Apr. 1933: 1.  http://nytimes.com.  Accessed 27 Dec. 2012.

Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation.  Minneapolis MN: U of Minnesota P, 2000.

Urwand, Ben. The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler. Cambridge MA: Belknap - Harvard U P, 2013.

Welky, David.  The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II.  Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2008.