The Lilith Blog

November 19, 2018 by Amy Stone

A Final “Shoah” Installment Tells Women’s Stories

What’s left for filmmaker Claude Lanzmann to tell us about the Shoah? At his death at 92 this past July, with rare honors at Les Invalides in Paris, he had gone from teenage fighter in the French resistance to the tireless creator of “Shoah,” its 9-plus hours of interviews followed by feature-length spinoffs.

Much of Lanzmann’s work concentrates on men’s stories. Now women are getting the last words. And the telling is in the details.  Would these stories have the same impact if they were not part of the Lanzmann canon? I think not. But he showed us a different way of looking at the Shoah. As historian Deborah Lipstadt says, Lanzmann was trying to instill modesty of judgment. We don’t know what we’d do in their place.

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