27th Annual Joseph Alexander Colloquium: Anne Frank: From Diary to Book. (Shandler)

Thursday, November 8, 2012 - 12:00pm

Benjamin Franklin Room, Houston Hall

27th Annual Joseph Alexander Colloquium Lecture:
 
“Anne Frank: From Diary to Book”
 
Speaker: Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University
 
Before Anne Frank’s diary became one of the world’s most widely read books, it was a private manuscript. The book that millions of readers know as The Diary of a Young Girl has a complicated history of writing, rewriting, and editing by several hands. Since its first publication in the original Dutch in 1947, it has appeared in dozens of translations and hundreds of editions. Each edition presents the diary anew, with different introductions, explanatory material, and cover art. At the same time, Anne Frank’s original diary notebook, in its plaid notebook, has become a treasured icon, commemorated in museum exhibitions, films, even architecture. Exploring these many transformations of the diary shed light on how Anne Frank’s life and work have become fixtures of public culture throughout the world.


 
Jeffrey Shandler is Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His books include Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (NYU Press, 2009), Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002), and While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1999), among other titles. His most recent book is Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (coedited, with Barbara-Krishenblatt-Gimblett, Indiana University Press, 2012). Currently he serves as President of the Association for Jewish Studies. 


 
Cosponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures and the Jewish Studies Program, in commemoration of Kristallnacht.