Post-Holocaust Culture and Jewish Identity

Abstract

Post-Holocaust Culture and Jewish Identity Phyllis Lassner (bio) and Victoria Aarons (bio) Titled “Cultural Expressions of Jewish Identities and the Holocaust,” this special issue of The Journal of Jewish Identities explores new directions in scholarly inquiry that emerge when the fields of Holocaust representation and Jewish identities are set in interwoven, critical relationships and in dialogue with each other. Although the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish identities has been an ongoing focus of scholarly investigation and debate, this collection of essays highlights the reflexive, mutually mediated, and interdependent relationship between the two subjects. Despite the manifold differences among evolving Jewish religious and secular denominations and identities, this collection argues that the Holocaust, its collective and historical memory, commemoration, and legacies, has for many Jews, provided a new, questioning, and even disorienting sense of what it means to be Jewish as individuals and as part of a collective identity. Identity, as we will see, is a fluid and in many ways unstable construct informed by geo-political, social, and cultural factors, as well as by the demands and contingencies of individual dispositions and defining interior structures. The Holocaust to a significant extent reshaped and continues to influence Jewish identity. In these essays’ reflexive constructions, we show that traditionally defined, revisionary, and even alienated or ambivalent Jewish identities, provide new perspectives and insights into how the Holocaust, its memory, and legacy might be considered. These complex interrelationships are the subject of the wide range of art and writing that responds to the burgeoning terrors of the pre-Holocaust period, its horrific apocalypse, survival, memory, and commemoration. The scholarly studies in this collection include fragments by those who perished, such as Polish novelist Bruno Schulz, and those who survived, including French writers Lili Berger, Rayzl Zshikhlinski, and Dora Teitelboim. Evolving permutations of Holocaust memory are evinced in the panoply of responses by succeeding generations of artists, filmmakers, and writers. The scholars included in this special issue demonstrate a variety of theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary approaches to the discussion of Jewish identities in relation to the Holocaust. The essays show a rich diversity of genres, writers, artists, and geographies, including France, the United [End Page xi] States, Mexico, Britain, Israel, Hungary, Australia, Poland, and Nigeria, all in an effort to explore different voices and different ways in which identity is understood, constructed, and expressed in response to the events of the Holocaust and their continuing aftermath. The essays address the work of eyewitnesses to the atrocities, as well as second- and third-generation writers, the children and grandchildren of those who experienced the events firsthand and have taken up the memory and legacy of the past. The essays also engage those writers who write from a more distanced perspective in an attempt to wrestle with the defining events of the Holocaust. For example, Nathan Abrams’s research reveals how the acute ambivalence of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick prevented the completion of his film adaptation of Louis Begley’s fictionalized Holocaust memoir. Axel Stähler concludes that Jewish American writers Michael Chabon and Simone Zelitch situate their Jewish identities in reimaginations of the fate of modern Jews. Rebecca Margolis and David Slucki analyze second- and third-generation Australian Jewish writers, focusing on work produced since the turn of the twenty-first century that together “constitute a canon of Australian Jewish writing.” The authors demonstrate that even when there is no personal connection to the Holocaust, artists working in a range of media and aesthetics have felt impelled to respond to the myriad ways in which the destruction of Jews, their communities, and culture have inspired a reexamination of their Jewish identity. In focusing on the interrelated connections among the Holocaust and Jewish identities, these essays examine representations of destroyed, disguised, concealed, and differently expressed Jewish cultures. In turn, our studies show that these individual and collective tragedies and legacies are inflected with dynamic psychological and social influences on developing definitions and protean forms of identity and of the expression of identities. To demonstrate this intricate critical interrelationship, our contributors offer various scholarly approaches that consider fluid and diverse definitions of Jewish identity, including multiple and hybrid denominations, beliefs, observances, and traditions, as well as...