Anxious Histories

Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

Jordana Silverstein

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782386537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Over the last seventy years, memories and narratives of the Holocaust have played a significant role in constructing Jewish communities. The author explores one field where these narratives are disseminated: Holocaust pedagogy in Jewish schools in Melbourne and New York. Bringing together a diverse range of critical approaches, including memory studies, gender studies, diaspora theory, and settler colonial studies, Anxious Histories complicates the stories being told about the Holocaust in these Jewish schools and their broader communities. It demonstrates that an anxious thread runs throughout these historical narratives, as the pedagogy negotiates feelings of simultaneous belonging and not-belonging in the West and in Zionism. In locating that anxiety, the possibilities and the limitations of narrating histories of the Holocaust are opened up once again for analysis, critique, discussion, and development.

Table of contents

• Anxious Histories
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction - Holocaust Historiography, Anxiety and the Formulations of a Diasporic Jewishness
• Chapter 1 - 'Don't Ever Think That It Can't Happen Again': Memories of the Holocaust, Anxieties of Difference
• Chapter 2 - 'I Think It Makes It More Real That Way': Chronology, Survivor Testimony and the Holocaust
• Chapter 3 - 'From the Utter Depth of Degradation to the Apogee of Bliss': Uncanny and Mimicking Diasporic Zionism
• Chapter 4 - 'There Is No Doubt That It Was a Jewish Experience': The Forgetfulness of a Haunting Settler Colonialism
• Chapter 5 - 'Why the Role of Women Was Any More Special Than the Role of the Rest of Them': Circumscribing Jewish Femininity in Holocaust Pedagogies
• Conclusion - 'It's an Unusual Topin You've Chosen': Negotiating Emplacement through History-Making
• Bibliography
• Index