Stephen Naron

This project aims to develop a new genealogy of Holocaust video testimony that re-embeds the genre in a wider social and historical context connecting it to earlier efforts to gather testimony, before, during, and after the war. There is still no comprehensive study of audiovisual testimony, its origins, development, and relation to earlier documentation projects. There have also been few, if any, comparisons of the content of audiovisual testimonies with previous forms of survivor testimony. Based on this analysis of underexamined testimonies, interviews with participants who helped build the Fortunoff Video Archive, as well as the study of institutional records, Stephen Naron intends to reconsider the impact of the rhetoric of novelty surrounding video testimony, underscore the significance of grassroots memory activism (archivalism), and demonstrate the “family resemblance” between video testimony and earlier first-person accounts of Jewish catastrophes—including early ethnographic studies, wartime testimony, historical commissions, yizker bikher, and the work of early postwar testimony-collectors like Eva Reichman, David Boder, and Rokhl Auerbach.