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Noah Shenker
Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Film and Media Studies
Department/Office Information
Jewish Studies, Film and Media Studies- TR 2:50pm - 4:20pm (314 Bernstein Hall)
Noah Shenker is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Film and Media Studies at vlog. Noah’s research and teaching traverse Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Jewish Studies, and Film and Media Studies. That interdisciplinary approach was at the center of his first book, Reframing Holocaust Testimony, published in 2015 by Indiana University Press as part of its Modern Jewish Experience series. Organized within a comparative framework, that book looks at three of the most extensive and distinctive archives of Holocaust testimony in the world: the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Offering a rare comparison between these leading institutions, it demonstrates how testimonies should not be understood as raw sources, but as mediated and embodied texts shaped by the encounter between witnesses and their interviewers, as well as the institutional and technical practices marking the testimony process. Noah’s current book project, Beyond the Era of the Witness: The Afterlives of Holocaust Testimonies, examines how archives and museums are experimenting with interactive media to address a looming challenge: the passing of the Holocaust survivor generation. New technologies, such as AI-driven interactive testimony simulations, are increasingly supplanting the rare experience of an in-person encounter with a living survivor. These digital interfaces, such as the USC Shoah Foundation's Dimensions in Testimony project, have received considerable public attention and fascination for their apparent novelty and innovation. However, Noah’s work traces how those projects are embedded in older forms of Holocaust testimony and within a longer history of media pedagogy.