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Can writers born after the Holocaust legitimately "testify" to its horrors? David Rosenberg's edited collection "Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal" (Times Books, 1989) raises this contentious question through essays by Jewish-American writers exploring their relationship to Holocaust history. Through critical literary analysis, this review reveals a fundamental tension between authentic survivor accounts and retrospective reflections by those distant from the events. Most contributions function primarily as personal meditations on Jewish-American identity rather than genuine testimony, with only Geoffrey Hartman and Lore Segal providing authentic survivor perspectives. Many writers problematically appropriate Holocaust imagery to articulate personal anxieties, creating what amounts to "non-testimony" that risks displacing genuine survivor voices. While some essays offer valuable insights into Holocaust narrative and Jewish-American identity formation, the collection's marketing-driven presentation and conceptual framework blur crucial distinctions between direct witness testimony and later cultural reflection. This conflation ultimately undermines the volume's scholarly integrity and risks trivializing authentic Holocaust testimony through inappropriate appropriation of survivor experiences.

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    Published 1991

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