SOURCE: Bernstein, Michael André. “The Schindler's List Effect.” American Scholar 63, no. 3 (summer 1994): 429-32.

In the following review, Bernstein asserts that Schindler's List has affected “the way our culture understands, historically orders, and teaches how the Holocaust should be remembered—and effects like these require a sharp-eyed and unembarrassed resistance.”

Tact is the discrimination of differences.

—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

There is little pleasure in being troubled by what so many have found deeply moving. For several months now, scarcely a day has gone by without a chorus of impassioned voices, recently augmented by New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley and California Governor Pete Wilson, publicly testifying to the profound impression Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List made on them personally, while insisting on the movie's educational value for our society as a whole. Skepticism about the entire phenomenon of attributing such edifying power to a Hollywood movie must seem simultaneously...