The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture

On Passover eve, April 19, 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland staged a revolt against their Nazi oppressors, holding off 2,000 well-armed SS men for 28 days. In this critical, mostly chronological but also thematic study, Baskind (art history, Cleveland State Univ.; Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America) examines depictions of the uprising in American literature. There are memoirs and other nonfiction, such as Mac Davis's Jews Fight Too!; stories by Twilght Zone creator Rod Serling and Leon Uris's novel Mila 18; poetry from Emma Lazarus, Hayim Bialik, and others; radio dramas, including Morton Wishengrad's 1943 The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto; film, television, and theatre (H. Leivick's The Miracle of The Warsaw Ghetto); art (painting and illustration by Arthur Szyk, Jack Levine, and others); sculpture (including monuments); and comics (Joe Kubert, Bernice Eisenstein, Art Spiegelman). Finally, the author details how the Holocaust Memorial Museum portrays the revolt.