Cole, Tim (J.) 1970-

PERSONAL: Born in 1970. Education: University of Cambridge, Ph.D., 1997.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol, 13 Woodland Rd., Clifton, Bristol BS8 1TB, England; fax: 0117 928 8276. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Taylor & Francis Group Ltd., 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxford OX14 4RN, England. E-mail—tim.cole@bristol.ac.uk.

CAREER: University of Bristol, Bristol, England, senior lecturer in social history, 1995-.

AWARDS, HONORS: Pearl Resnick fellow, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1999-2000.

WRITINGS:

Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold, Routledge (New York, NY), 1999.

Images of the Holocaust: The Myth of the "Shoah Business," Duckworth (London, England), 1999.

Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto, Routledge (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of Contemporary History.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Holocaust in Hungary: A History in Fragments, a history of the experience of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.

SIDELIGHTS: Author and historian Tim Cole is a specialist in Jewish and Holocaust history. His book Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold was described as a "thoughtful and brave study" of how Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jewish people "has become an overly central myth and too commercialized for its own effectiveness" by a Kirkus Reviews critic.

Cole's comparative study focuses on three prominent figures of the Holocaust—Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl and Holocaust victim; Oskar Schindler, a German gentile who risked his life saving others; and Adolf Eichmann, a notorious Nazi war criminal. The study also examines three key geographic locations: Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and explores the different representations of the Holocaust as viewed in Israel, Europe, and the United States. Cole maintains that "the past is forever understood from the point of view of the present," according to Jack Riemer in Jewish Bulletin of Northern California. "It is not only that history is written by the winners. It is that the needs and perspectives of the winners constantly change, and as they do, their understanding of the past changes, too." With this notion at the base of his work, Cole "attempts to come to grips with the ways in which twentieth-century Holocaust iconography … reflects shifting political and cultural concerns rather than immutable historical reality," observed Washington Post Book World reviewer Susan Jacoby. Thus, according to Cole, the Holocaust has been adopted in America as a symbol of tolerance and redemption, despite the fact that America was far removed from the Holocaust during the war years. Cole asserts that Anne Frank's diary has become the definitive first-person report of the horrifying events; although "there were other diaries, written by adolescents, some of them by fervent and learned Jews,… it was [Frank's] diary that met the needs of America in those years," Riemer noted. Jewish memorials, in contrast, portray the "Jewish victimization at the core of their holocaust narrative," observed Alvin H. Rosenfeld in the Wilson Quarterly, while Israelis focus on the heroic aspects of Jewish resistance and Americans stress the role of American troops in the liberation of the death camps. "The meaning of the Holocaust depends on who asks the questions and when and where," Riemer stated.

In Images of the Holocaust: The Myth of the "Shoah Business" Cole looks critically at the social, cultural, and, especially, economic uses of the Holocaust and related history. While Holocaust sites remain top tourist attractions, universities earn large sums of money for Holocaust studies departments, and the entertainment industry records high profits for Holocaust-related books and films. According to Cole, the Israeli government has used the Holocaust as a justification for its own existence. Cole "seems to know that the post-War attention span is infinitesimally small," commented Adam Frost in Contemporary Review. "If we are not constantly reminded of an event, we will forget it ever happened. But this does not stop him from making incisive observations about how the Holocaust has been kept in the public domain."

Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto is an examination of the geographic aspects of the Holocaust, "the intersection among geography, the urban landscape of the ghetto, and the process of implementing racial ideology," explained Frederic Krome in Library Journal. Cole presents a systematic case study of the implementation of the Jewish ghetto in Budapest, Hungary, in 1944. Gradually, building by building, Jews were segregated in apartments, restaurants, theaters, shops, bars, and bathhouses until nothing was left for them but the ghetto. "Ghettoization unfolded at the level of the individual apartment building—those with Jewish majority occupation were designated as Jewish—and the ghetto was built around where Jews were already living," commented Lynn Rapaport in Contemporary Sociology. Cole's work, Rapaport concluded, "shows successfully how geography's concern with place and space can contribute to a more nuanced analysis of ghettoization, one part of the process of implementing [Hitler's] Final Solution."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Contemporary Review, December, 1999, Adam Frost, "Making Use of the Holocaust," review of Images of the Holocaust: The Myth of the "Shoah Business," p. 323.

Contemporary Sociology, November, 2004, Lynn Rapaport, review of Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto, p. 712.

History Today, January, 2000, John Klier, review of Images of the Holocaust, p. 54.

Jewish Bulletin of Northern California (San Francisco), December 17, 1999, Jack Riemer, "Holocaust Lessons Shaped by Culture, Vantage Points," review of Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold, p. 31A.

Jewish News, November 4, 1999, Jack Fischel, "Using the Shoa to Serve Society's Needs," review of Selling the Holocaust, p. 42.

Journal of Cultural Geography, fall-winter, 2003, Joshua Hagen, review of Holocaust City, p. 129.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1999, review of Selling the Holocaust, p. 1191.

Library Journal, September 1, 2003, Frederic Krome, review of Holocaust City, p. 183.

Publishers Weekly, August 2, 1999, review of Selling the Holocaust, p. 65.

Washington Post Book World, February 28, 2000, Susan Jacoby, "Holocaust vs. 'Holocaust'" review of Selling the Holocaust, p. C4.

Wilson Quarterly, autumn, 1999, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, review of Selling the Holocaust, p. 124.

ONLINE

University of Bristol Web site, http://www.bris.ac.uk/ (February 1, 2005), "Tim Cole."