Shameless

"The Shoah is everywhere in popular culture but, as it really was, it is nowhere." —Tanya Gold

In novels, film and popular culture, the Holocaust genre is booming. Streaming hits and bestsellers are playing a vital role in shaping our understanding of the past.

But, as Tanya Gold shows in this excoriating essay, the creators of these works all too often engage in crass or self-serving exploitation. In this new wave of Shoah blockbusters, the destruction of the Jews becomes a plot device, Auschwitz a readymade backdrop – and the truth is elided or erased. They pretend to be looking, but they are looking away.

Shameless is a moral reckoning. It traces the link between the glibness of these representations and the persistence of the hatred that fuelled the Shoah – and warns of the dangers when memory is distorted, and history is turned into spectacle.