Witnessing Unbound: Holocaust Representation and the Origins of Memory (Wayne State University Press, 2017) is a collection of essays and interviews that offer fresh insight on the last of the primary witnesses to the Holocaust. The book interrogates the stylization of the narrative account of the primary witness, and it offers significant new scholarship on the Halakhic witness — Orthodox Jewish prisoners of German concentration camps, who attempted to confront their experience through the framework of Halakhic thought and praxis. The book also provides analysis of the different methods and aims of collecting witness testimony between the Soviet-dominated East and the Allies of the West. Through the testimony of survivors of and witnesses to the atrocities, and the work of those who seek them out, the book unveils new insights at a critical moment in the documentation and commemoration of the Holocaust. David Gottlieb interviews co-author and co-editor Henri Lustiger-Thaler, professor of cultural sociology at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu.

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Henri Lustiger-Thaler and Habbo Knoch, eds., “Witnessing Unbound: Holocaust Representation and the Origins of Memory” (Wayne State UP, 2017)