Abstract
In this essay, I analyze the terminology used in the United States (U.S.) to refer to Jews who lived through the Holocaust as well as their descendants. This essay constitutes a first step in a project focused on re-conceptualizing Holocaust survivors and their families through the lens of agency and victimization. Many children and, more recently, grandchildren of Jewish Holocaust survivors trace their genealogy to their parent’s or grandparent’s past, and self-identify through this experience. The specific terms and labels used to identify or self-identify reflect different kinds of assumptions as well as claims on how that particular past affects their present. My preliminary findings suggest a paradoxical inversion of victimization and agency in some of the terminology used to identify or self-identify survivors as well as children of survivors.
Highlights
I analyze the terminology used in the United States to refer to Jews who lived through the Holocaust as well as their descendants
What is implied by identifying and naming oneself as the child of a survivor? I very much agree with Arlene Stein (Stein 2014) that the creation of the child of survivor identity is connected to the ways in which different oppressed peoples created groups for solidarity, activism and/or for healing as a result of 1960s activism
In her prizewinning book on the discourse of victimhood in Judaism, Esther Benbassa (Benbassa 2010, p. 108) argues that the Holocaust, ‘as a religion of suffering’ was ‘adopted by the Jewish masses’ as the new Jewish civil or secular religion, replacing Judaism, and strengthening Jewish identity. She (Benbassa 2010, p. 114) contends that at a time when most American Jews were living comfortable lives, the emphasis on the Holocaust required them to ‘constantly imagine that they were in the gas chambers or on the thresholds of them,” despite their actual standing being the inverse. Many of those active in the COS movement were involved in other civil rights struggles, this more generalized cultural emphasis on the Holocaust allowed American Jews in general, and the second generation in particular, to sustain an identity based on victimhood
Summary
The term “survivor” glosses over the reality that like those who perished, those who lived were victims as well and they were victimized by those few who possessed agency and power.8 Another problem is that in American English, a victim usually refers to someone who died or was killed. Feminists point to the structures of patriarchy underlying and reproducing violence against women, those in recovery groups who use the term “survivor” are referring to a more personal situation Regardless of how it is applied, the meaning of the term could reflect a collective memory but it could reflect a very American ideology of proud and persistent individualism that triumphs over adversity. Survivors are elevated in our society; victims, perhaps less so
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