Quenching public thirst for historical voyeurism, "Schindler's List" not only invites a renewed scholarly and intellectual discussion about the limits of representation, but also proves the necessity of such a discussion for a larger public. The critical and popular receptions of "Schindler's List", and the public conversations it has triggered in different national ethnic contexts touch upon a variety of issues: the representation of history by cinema and popular culture; the right to dramatize the unrepresentable; the relationship between public/popular memory; the role of national identity in the shaping and selective reception of popular memory; the place and role of the Holocaust in ongoing debates about racism and group hate; and the authority of popular culture, and Hollywood in particular, to retell and ultimately shape public perceptions of the Holocaust. Such questions are not easily answered. It is to provoke reflection on them that this interdisciplinary critical anthology, compiled of a dozen essays written by distinguished scholars in different fields, has been designed.
