Over and over

Say a word over and over again until it loses all meaning; "persimmon" for example. The glut of Holocaust movies is in danger of doing the same thing to history for those born after 1945. (Nextbook)

This isn’t to deny the possibility of moral persuasion. Certainly you could find young Christians—Muslims, too—who saw Korczak, or Anne Frank Remembered, or even Life Is Beautiful and felt a new understanding; just as there must be young Jewish viewers who watched such films and then concluded they had to do something for the people of Darfur. For the most part, though, the mounting volume of this material seems merely to have allowed people to think of the Holocaust as another choice on the entertainment menu, another imaginative world to inhabit at will and then abandon. Where does this lead? Todd Solondz showed us in his 2001 feature Storytelling (a movie that Insdorf’s filmography skipped), in a corrosively funny scene set at a dinner table in New Jersey. A family of suburban Jews, all of them born in the United States well after 1945, are drawn into a discussion of the Holocaust, and by the end manage to conclude that they, too, deserve to be called survivors.