Reviewed by Carol Thompson for Readers' Favorite

Stories of the Holocaust: Art for Healing and Renewal, Volume II, edited by Karen Berman and Gail Humphries, is a wide-ranging collection that examines how film, visual art, museum work, and performance sustain Holocaust memory. Rather than offering a single narrative, the book gathers many voices, including scholars, artists, educators, survivors, and descendants, each exploring how creative work preserves testimony and shapes moral understanding. The chapters move from stories told on screen to those in galleries, showing how art becomes a form of witnessing as direct survivor voices are increasingly mediated through recordings, archives, and interpretation. Throughout, the editors frame the arts as a means of confronting antisemitism, resisting forgetting, and encouraging empathy across generations. The book positions remembrance as both a sacred responsibility and an urgent civic act, connecting the Shoah to contemporary struggles against hatred and injustice. It asks readers not only to learn history but also to consider how stories, images, and performances can guide present action.

Many chapters read like conversations across disciplines, where theater, psychoanalysis, education, and visual culture intersect. The pacing is deliberate, moving from broader questions about trauma and representation to specific examples of plays, films, installations, and curricula. The writing is reflective and engaged, with contributors emphasizing ethical responsibility in portraying the Holocaust experience truthfully while also acknowledging the imaginative strategies artists use to communicate what defies easy depiction. Readers who enjoy interdisciplinary nonfiction, cultural criticism, and the study of memory will find much to engage with here. Stories of the Holocaust, Volume II is especially suited for educators, students of Holocaust studies, museum professionals, artists, and thoughtful general readers interested in how creative expression can be a vehicle for witness, moral inquiry, and renewed commitment to human dignity. Karen Berman and Gail Humphries deserve a Pulitzer Prize for their contributions to the preservation of history.