Jewish Holocaust Research Articles

The Study of the Armenian Crisis of the late Ottoman Empire, or, “Seizing the Document by the Throat”

For a Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century, venturing into the Armenian crisis is like venturing into a minefield. It is fraught with dangers, the least of which is to be labeled a traitor by one's countrymen, and the worst of which is to be accused of being a “denialist” by one's Armenian colleagues. Even “balanced” analysis seems to have become politically incorrect of late, at least in some circles. The basic problem in the Armenian-Turkish polemic is that the sides do not actually address each other. They seize upon various capsule phrases, clichés and assumed political positions to heap opprobrium and abuse upon one another, to the point where we are confronted by something resembling a blood-feud. Thus Richard Hovanissian's obsession is to have the “Turkish side” admit, in a great ceremony of mea culpa, the claim of Genocide. On the other hand, Turkish historians and their like-minded foreign colleagues, at best, do contortionist acts to show that what happened to the Armenian people in 1915 does not fit the UN definition of genocide, which was fashioned after the Second World War to account for the Jewish Holocaust.

“The Mythical Jew”: Antisemitism, Intellectuals, and Democracy in Post-Communist Romania

A mentally healthy human being can go insane if suddenly diagnosed with leprosy. Eugen Ionescu finds out that even the “Ionescu” name, an indisputable Romanian father, and the fact of being born Christian can do nothing, nothing, nothing to cover the curse of having Jewish blood in his veins. With resignation and sometimes with I don't know what sad and discouraged pride, we got used to this dear leprosy a long time ago.With these words, the Romanian–Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian expresses within his private diary some of the darkest moments of a World War II “transfigured” Romania, populated as they are by the gothic characters of legionaries, Nazis, and antisemitism. His death soon followed in 1945, when Romania was at the threshold of fascism and communism. However, with the discovery and the subsequent publishing of Sebastian's diary in 1996, and following 50 years of communist mystification of the Jewish Holocaust, the entire chaotic war atmosphere with the fascist affections of the Romanian intellectual elite was once again brought to light with all the flavor and scent of the dark past. In this entry from Sebastian's diary he speaks of his friend, Eugen Ionescu who, born of a French-related mother and a Romanian father, was living in Bucharest at that time. He would later become known to the world as Eugène Ionesco, the famous French playwright and author of the well-known playsThe Bald SopranoandThe Rhinoceros.The above quote from Sebastian's journal, predating the international fame of Ionesco, but already marking the end of Sebastian's career under fascism, remains a traumatizing testimony of the Jewish Kafkian torment as “guilt,” a deeply claustrophobic identity that many Eastern European Jewish intellectuals have learned to internalize. Beyond this symbolism, the publishing of Sebastian's diary in Romania unintentionally challenged an existent post-communist tendency of legitimizing inter-war fascist personalities within the framework of a general lack of knowledge about the Jewish Holocaust in both the communist and post-communist periods.

Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir (review)

Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery Holocaust MemoirIn this study of Holocaust memoirs, David Patterson begins with two controversial assumptions. First, he believes experience of Jews camps was different from that of gentiles -- necessarily different, because as Chosen People, are partners covenant with God made at Sinai. Second, and as a result, he assumes any interpretation of that experience must be undertaken light of that covenant, and terms of that God. In nearly every memoir, according to Patterson, God there, either affirmed or denied, either silently or explicitly. Yet, Patterson asserts, in nearly every discussion of Holocaust memoir He is first one forgotten. Patterson's evaluation has value, if only as a corrective to largely secular, often politically based theories that tend to dominate critical discussion of Holocaust and its literature. If God can be forgotten study of Holocaust, hope can there be for a religiously informed approach to literary and historical studies general, which have grown increasingly profane, both senses of word? Patterson's own approach, however, is beset with many problems of both theory and practice. The theoretical assumptions are, alternately, challenging and disturbing; but deconstructive hermeneutics Patterson employs marginalizes and, at times, trivializes his work.Patterson's distinction between Jewish and gentile experiences death camps is an expression of faith, not a subject for verification. Yet it broaches problem of special consideration for suffering of some over others. We know that collectively Jewish experience was, fact, different, especially since, most of death camps, there were no gentile inmates. At Auschwitz, where there were, selections were suspended early war for all but whose clothing and diet were inferior to other camp inmates, whose punishments were more brutal, and whose healthcare was more treacherous -- and that, of course, applies only to those Jews not sent immediately to their deaths upon arrival. But of experience of Jews and gentiles individually -- experience described, after all, memoirs Patterson discusses? Weakened by disease, crazed with thirst, stupefied by malnutrition, numb with exposure, and exhausted by overwork, did those wearing a colored triangle have a qualitatively different experience from that of those wearing a yellow star? Few of us would care to measure individual suffering on such a scale, let alone construct comparisons order to determine who endured more. Some commentators, though, have suggested that criminals camps may have benefited psychologically from their sense of guilt, however cruel and unusual punishment, and that political prisoners may have been sustained by their commitment to a cause or outrage at injustice, while very senselessness of Nazis' war against Jews may have further contributed to mental and emotional anguish of Jewish inmates.Patterson, a sense, wants to move points of reference for this discussion from historical and psychological to spiritual, his exploration of the essential role of eternal Holocaust memoir. In so doing, he claims to have discovered what is distinctively Jewish Holocaust memoir and distinguishes it from other memoirs; One who is invoked memory needs that memory as much as one who remembers. This theme of interdependency of God and Jewish people is a common one Jewish tradition generally and Holocaust writing especially, perhaps expressed most succinctly opening line of Without Jews, by Jacob Glatstein: Without Jews there is no Jewish God. …

Looking for Pontius Pilate's Footprints Near the Western Wall: Russian Jewish Tourists in Jerusalem

This study examined trips to Jerusalem by Russian Jewish tourists who visited Israel during late 1998. The research examines the expectations prior to travel, their actual experiences, and how they related to prior expectations. A content analysis was undertaken of tourist memories and reflective diaries. This analysis was supplemented by personal interviews and by participant observations undertaken during the course of Russian-language guided tours of Jerusalem. The research set out to examine tourist expectations and the differences between expectations and reality. Russian Jewish tourists arrive in Israel having left a country in transition. In the present study it is proposed that what has been called the “master narrative” for Russia has been lost and that this combined with the changed status of religion may have led to an intensified search for roots. The self-identification of today’s post-Soviet Jewish intelligentsia is made up of a unique combination of Jewish legacy and the heritage of the Grand Russian Culture, which has been created by Jewish writers and artists as well, although its main narrative is a Christian one. They regard Jewish writers and artists as having made a significant contribution to the development of Russian identity. In the present research it is suggested that any tour by a member of the Post-Soviet Jewish intelligentsia to Jerusalem may be viewed as a “double pilgrimage.” The first component is as a pilgrimage to King David’s capital, the capital of the original and ancient Jewish state. In this context the Western Wall may be viewed as the most sacred place in Jerusalem. The second component is as a pilgrimage to the roots of Christian civilization. In this context the Via Dolorosa, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Holy Sepulchre may be viewed as key sacred sites in Jerusalem. In practice, however, the landscapes of the Western Wall and the Garden of Gethsemane differ markedly from the expectations that tourists have and incongruity is evident within the dual role as the center of the Judeo-Christian civilization. In contrast to tourists’ expectations of Israel as a destination, Jewish history is in fact communicated most cogently at Yad VaShem, established in 1953 as a place to commemorate Jewish Holocaust victims. It is here that Russian Jewish tourists appear to gain an understanding of their roots.

A reconstruction of the size and composition of Jewish Holocaust survivors in the Netherlands, 1945

Compared to other countries that have suffered from the Nazioccupation, the destructive impact of the Holocaust on theJewish population has been particularly strong in the Netherlands. This paper gives a demographicreconstruction of the Jewish population in the Netherlands by the end of the war (1945),disaggregated by age and sex. The reconstruction is based on two approaches: a forwardprojection 1941–1945, starting from registration data supplemented by information onHolocaust losses; and a backward projection 1966–1945, starting from an enumerationof Halachic Jews carried out in 1966. The two approaches yieldtwo estimates that are comfortingly similar.

Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?

This article explores various aspects of Israel's implicit linkage of the Jewish holocaust with its right to exist and Palestinian and Arab responses to that linkage. The PLO's position in particular is examined in detail, as is Israel's rhetorical equation of Arab and Palestinian leaders with Nazis. The article also examines Edward Said's position on the topic, which generated considerable debate in the Arabic press.

Between Remembrance and Denial: The Fate of the Jews in the Wars of the Polish Commonwealth during the Mid-Seventeenth Century as Shown in Contemporary Writings and Historical Research

Selecting the Jewish Holocaust of the 17th century as a case study in creating the image of the massacres of Ukranian and Polish Jewry, this text traces the fate of the non-combatants in European newspapers, diplomatic dispatches and popular literature of the time.

When the Nazis came to Skokie: freedom for speech we hate

In the Chicago suburb of Skokie, one out of every six Jewish citizens in the late 1970s was a survivor or was directly related to a survivor of the Holocaust. These victims of terror had resettled in America expecting to lead peaceful lives free from persecution. But their safe haven was shattered when a neo-Nazi group announced its intention to parade there in 1977. Philippa Strum's dramatic retelling of the events in Skokie (and in the courts) shows why the case ignited such enormous controversy and challenged our understanding of and commitment to First Amendment values. The debate was clear-cut: American Nazis claimed the right of free speech while their Jewish targets claimed the right to live without intimidation. The town, arguing that the march would assault the sensibilities of its citizens and spark violence, managed to win a court injunction against the marchers. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union took the case and successfully defended the Nazis' right to free speech. Skokie had all the elements of a difficult case: a clash of absolutes, prior restraint of speech, and heated public sentiment. In recreating it, Strum presents a detailed account and analysis of the legal proceedings as well as finely delineated portraits of the protagonists: Frank Collin, National Socialist Party of America leader and the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor; Skokie community leader Sol Goldstein, a Holocaust survivor who planned a counterdemonstration against the Nazis; Skokie mayor Albert Smith, who wanted only to protect his townspeople; and ACLU attorney David Goldberger, caught in the ironic position of being a Jew defending the rights of Nazis against fellow Jews. While the ACLU did win the case, it was a costly victory-30,000 of its members left the organization. And in the end, ironically, the Nazis never did march in Skokie. Forcefully argued, Strum's book shows that freedom of speech must be defended even when the beneficiaries of that defense are far from admirable individuals. It raises both constitutional and moral issues critical to our understanding of free speech and carries important lessons for current controversies over hate speech on college campuses, inviting readers to think more carefully about what the First Amendment really means.

Entre Nous, Female Eroticism, and the Narrative of Jewish Erasure

ABSTRACT Although grounded in wartime and immediate postwar contexts, Entre Nous has been critiqued primarily for its portrayal of ambiguous female eroticism to the exclusion of how such eroticism is linked via the film's narrative structure to the Jewish Holocaust, the French collaboration, and U.S. transnationalist hegemony. This paper takes up an examination and explication of this narratological linkage as well as theorizes the determinants of its persistent critical ignoring.

‘ENJOYING’ TRAUMATICALLY: THE HOLOCAUST AS‘THE SECOND GENERATION'S' OTHER

ABSTRACT This paper sets out to explore a question opened up by the growing number of life‐writings and oral testimony currently being produced by members of‘the second generation’. That is, how can the descendants of Jewish Holocaust survivors free themselves from ‘the repetition of suffering’, which, in the language of Lacanian psychoanalysis, could be described as the attachment to an unbearable form of enjoyment (jouissance) of the Shoah? The paper pursues a Lacanian reading of the writing of one such descendant, the expatriate Australian writer, Lily Brett. It considers whether the themes of anxiety, death, eating, bodies and the fantasy of love between mothers and daughters that structure her stories constitute a form of testimony with, as the Lacanian Israeli psychoanalyst Rivka Warshawsky puts it, ‘the power of resolving the repetition compulsion’.

Muriel H. Hasbun: Landscapes of Light

Instead of ashes and flame, Arabic calligraphy rises from the cone ofEl Salvador's Izalco volcano, the fumed lighthouse of the Pacific (figure 1). The Salvadoran photographer Muriel Hasbun has suspended one of her great-grandfather's prayers invoking ‘all the saints and martyrs’ above the volcano's distinctive pyramidal form. The juxtaposition is both unexpected and memorable. Created as a consequence of almost imperceptible geologic migrations, Izalco volcano provides a fitting metaphor for the processes that formed Hasbun's artistic vision . Like the converging forces that gave birth to the fiery volcano, her roots lie in the Palestinian exodus sparked by the First World War and the Jewish Holocaust of the Second World War. Just as the volcano's eruptions helped form the fertile landscape of her homeland, Hasbun's images also suggest the potential for human growth rising from the ashes of destruction.

Performing Selves/Performing as Self: Autobiographical Films of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

Performing Selves/Performing as Self: Autobiographical Films of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

Haim Gouri and “The Jewish People Who Have Been Severely Injured”

The poet Haim Gouri is a central figure among the artists of the generation of the War of Independence and one of the first Israeli poets and novelists to express experience of the Holocaust. Gouri, who was bom in Tel Aviv in 1922, was sent to Europe in 1947 to smuggle Jewish Holocaust survivors into Palestine. Subsequently, he served in the Palmach and fought in the battles in the Negev in 1948. He attests that his encounter with the survivors of the Nazi camps changed his life, and that the experience became an obsessive theme throughout his work. This article focuses on two complementary subjects: (1) Gouri's perception of Jewish history and the effect of his encounter with Holocaust survivors in the formulation of his autobiography; (2) the concrete shaping of the experience of this encounter in his first three books of poetry, Pirhey esh, 'Ad 'alot ha-shahar, and Shirey hotam,1 and in his autobiographical novel Ha-haqira, sippuro shel Re 'u 'el?

“Rambowitz” versus the “Schlemiel” in Leon Uris' Exodus

The reprinted edition of Exodus, which appeared in 1969 (the novel first published in 1958), opens with a striking declaration from its author, Leon Uris. Pondering why the book met with universal success, Uris proclaims that it tells event unparalleled in the history of mankind...the Jews coming back after centuries of abuse, indignities, torture and murder to carve an oasis in the sand with and blood (Uric preface). Such a sentiment, of course, expresses the traditional heroic Zionist narrative of Israel's founding, recognizable to most Jews from countless rabbis' sermons, fundraising appeals by Jewish organizations, pontifications by one's relatives at Passover Seders. But the next passage is much more peculiar, though no less strident: All the cliche Jewish characters who have cluttered our fiction-the clever businessman, the doctor, the lawyer, the sulking artist...all those good folks who spend their chapters hating themselves [and] the world...all those steeped in pity...all those riders of the psychoanalysis couch...all these have been left where they rightfully belong, on the room floor (preface). The preface concludes: is about people, people who do not apologize for being born Jews or the right to live in human dignity. Their story a revelation to me as I discovered it in the farms and cities of Israel. And...it has been a revelation to...readers, Jewish and Gentile, alike (preface). Never mind that Uris has mixed his metaphors here, starting off by lambasting American fiction but ending with an image, cutting room floor, clearly taken from the movies. (The slip may further confirm the suspicion raised by Joel Blocker, reviewing the novel in Commentary, that Exodus was written with one eye on the movies [Blocker]). Never mind, either, the astounding breadth of this condemnation; one can understand Uris disliking authors who stereotype Jewish characters as sneaky lawyers, but why, for God's sake, does he object to Jews portrayed as brilliant doctors? The passage is typical of Uris' writing in that it blends simplistic thinking and stylistic ineptitude with a certain crude but undeniable power; golden riders of the psychoanalysis couch, for instance, is admittedly a memorable phrase. What concerns me most in this essay, however, is Uris' championing of Jews as a fighting people-proudly claiming what they deem rightfully theirs, Palestine, with guts and blood. In Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of Jewry ( 1990), Paul Breines has distilled this warlike conception into an archetypal figure whom he pithily labels Rambowitz. In his preface and in Exodus itself, Uris juxtaposes Rambowitz-like characters with their polar opposite, a kind of Jew he sees as vilely clutter[ing] up Jewish-American fiction, a type characterized, significantly, by a wealth of wonderfully onomatopoetic Yiddish words (each with its own subtly distinctive meaning, and many of which have entered the English language): nebbish, klutz, yold, shlimazl, shmo, shlepper, shlump, shmuck, shmegegge, shmendrick. Here, I'll be referring to this figure, a kind of anti-Rambowitz, with perhaps the best-known term from this linguistic group: schlemiel. Traditionally, of course, the schlemiel is everything Rambowitz is not: weak, cowardly, bumbling, hyper-intellectual, sexually dysfunctional, feminized, hypochondriacal, paralyzed by neurotic self consciousness. Clearly, Leon Uris is not only a writer who lionizes tough Jews, but one who considers himself a tough Jew as well. This speculation is confirmed by Uris' reply to Yehiel Aranowicz, former captain of the Exodus, the actual ship filled with Jewish Holocaust survivors that after the war ran the British blockade and docked in Palestine-the pivotal story in Uris' novel, as its title implies. Quoted in Time Magazine, Aranowicz dismissed Uris' book as neither history nor literature. …

Queerer than Queer

SUMMARY In this article the author, a Jewish lesbian academic, reflects on the positive and negative aspects of her dual identity and explores her feelings of exclusion from “in groups” in a range of settings. Annie Goldflam carries a legacy of fear from stories of medieval “witch” burnings and drownings and the twentieth century Jewish Holocaust, which she reflects on to compare the nature of anti-semitism and lesbophobia, considering the options of hiding from racist and homophobic forms of oppression or confronting them. She has chosen to confront, be “out” and politically active.

"Sensibility" and "Otherness" in Emmanuel Levinas

turned to Levinas when began to write Para una etica de la liberacion latinoamericana (Towards an Ethic of Latin American Liberation) and it was Levinas who gave me the opportunity to go beyond the Heidegger of Being and Time. Without abandoning the approach to liberation that took in writing that text, shall continue my argument from the pulsional perspective.' As the phenomenological critic that he was, Levinas' first approach to understanding otherness was to place himself systematically outside the straightforward gnoseological order.2 Unlike the study of the subject prior to him, his life was the reference situation his own thinking of the other. A Lithuanian Jew, whose mother tongues were Russian and Hebrew and who acquired French as a student in Strasbourg and German in Freiburg, he lived the of five traumatic years in the Nazi French prisoner of war camp at Stammlanger. He was a victim of the Jewish holocaust in the heart of Modernity. He was a survivor who began his mature work as follows: To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations. . . victims of the same hatred of the other man, of the same anti-Semitism.3 As a South American, asked myself: When Levinas spoke of victims of the same anti-Semitism, what did he imply about all those others who are not Semitic? In 1972, in Louvain, got a group of students together to talk with Levinas. asked: What about the fifteen million Indians slaughtered during the conquest of Latin America, and the thirteen million Africans who were made slaves, aren't they the other you're speaking about? Levinas stared at me and said: That's something you to think about. And so continued to develop the Liberation Philosophy on which had already begun to work. At the end of the meeting at which asked Levinas my pressing question, he said to us: I see all of you as though you were hostages. didn't grasp what he meant. Shortly after that, while was reading Otherwise than Being, understood. As a group of young teachers and students, obsessed by our Latin American victims, Levinas saw us as hostages in Europe; that is, Europe took us as hostages our distant and oppressed peoples. didn't know if he was insulting us by making this observation, but as read Otherwise than Being, it dawned on me that it had been a vast, undeserved, and encouraging appraisal of us. It seems to me that Levinas the prisoner in the Stammlanger camp is a clear reference situation that must be kept in mind when reflecting on his idea of otherness. In prison, as a his persecuted people, he was aware of himself as guilty, because he had survived. Obsessed about his brothers, the victims, through his ethical-critical philosophy he bore witness to the evil of Being through which the other is closed out. In the experience of being a hostage, a substitution takes place. The hostage is an innocent, just person who witnesses the victim (the other). The victim suffers a traumatic action. The hostage suffers for the other. The theme of one who suffers persecution the other (the rabim) is treated dramatically in the four-poems of the Servant of Yahweh in Isaiah 42:1-53. The servant finds him/herself before a court as a ransom victim the sake of the multitude. Among the that are to be ransomed, there were two poles: my who are pardoned and are an object of pity and the multitude, the undetermined, that which could be the object of the pardon. My is the portion of the saved multitude; the is the symbol of all humanity-present or future who could be my people.4 We shall see this diachrony in due course going from the multitude (a mere contradictory social block) to the people (historical subject). The ethical question Levinas analyzed is structured around several Hebrew words the ideas of redemption, redeem, and ransom. …

Australian Representations of the Holocaust: Jewish Holocaust Museums in Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney, 1984–1996

Abstract Museums in Europe and elsewhere have depicted the events of the Holocaust in different representational and narrative forms. This article observes that Holocaust museums in Australia present neither a humanist narrative, as in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, nor a Zionist narrative, as at Yad Vashem. Nor do the museums connect the Holocaust to Australian history or relate it to Australian Cultural or political contents. Museums in Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney were established primarily to educate the broader Australian public In response to the Phenomenon of Holocaust denial. Their founders were motivated more by this task than by any political ends: the issue of addressing rival claims to victimhood was not at the fore.

To Remember, Repent, Renew

The National Catholic Educational Association (1998) reports that 13.6% or 359,146, of all students in Catholic elementary, middle, and secondary schools are non-Catholic, manifesting the importance of educating Catholic school students to understand and appreciate the diversity of cultures and religions other than their own. This article examines some ways that Catholic schools can educate students about the Jewish Holocaust, or Shoah, and through its study embrace a truly Catholic approach.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Performance-Based Assessment

A major challenge facing instruction and assessment is lack of evidence of their efficacy for students of color, excluding certain high-achieving Asian American groups, and poor students. This article considers authenticity of performance-based assessments (PBAs), exploring their relationship to pedagogical practices that address ethnic and linguistic diversity. It details author's efforts to transform English instruction and assessment in ways that draw upon cultural funds of knowledge that African American students bring from their home and community environments. Cognitive and cultural arguments for culturally responsive PBAs and research implications of their use are presented. THE DILEMMAS OF TESTING Arguments over limits of traditional multiple-choice standardized testing have been made for many years and have emanated from many corners of academia (Wolf, Bixby, Glenn, & Gardner, 1991). The movement toward performance-based assessment (PBA) has been manifested in more widespread appearance on market of portfolio and other PBA test packages linked to commercially prepared teaching materials such as textbooks and other curriculum support materials. Additionally, over last decade, a few key states (California, Kentucky, Maryland, and Vermont, among others) have begun to adopt formal performance-based assessment as part of their official statewide educational testing systems. The results of these state measures have been mixed and, in at least one state (California), rather disastrous. Nonetheless, performance-based assessments have been deemed in sense that they require students to tackle complex problems that have some real-world currency over an extended period of time. Such understanding performances (Perkins, 1992, p. 79) are often included as part of standards-based instruction, as in rigorous New Standards Project (NSP) (1997), which is beginning to be adopted by several states as an articulation of world-class standards in both curriculum and assessment.1 One of major challenges facing movement toward authentic instruction and assessment is lack of external validity that has been obtained as far as minority student populations and children of poor are concerned. Closer examination of this movement reveals that it is largely driven by White, university-based researchers, while its assumptions and products are largely tested on and geared toward White, middle-class students. Indeed, it is rare, if ever, that one sees included in examples of rigorous standards-based objectives, curricula, or assessments anything that smacks of ethnic or linguistic diversity. For example, none of samples of work provided in New Standards Project guide, especially those in its applied learning strand, address cultural diversity or needs or concerns of minority communities. As a case in point, language arts section of draft version of this guide presents an analytical essay considered to represent quality of student work in this area that assessment's developers would like to see. The essay offers a response to Winston Churchill's statement that American Civil War was the last romantic war and first horrendous modern war. However, inclusion of this essay, and elevated status attributed to it, strikes of insensitivity to African Americans, for whom Civil War, though undoubtedly horrible in its physical manifestation, represents far more than either a romantic or an horrendous notion. It is doubtful that test's authors would have considered placing an essay focusing on romanticism in German literature during period of Jewish Holocaust as an exemplar. Moreover, in both preliminary as well as current edition, NSP's exemplar of a potential reading list across genres includes only a paultry representation of works by African American, Hispanic American, Native American, or Asian American authors-let alone authors from Africa, China, or Central America. …

The American Indian Holocaust: Healing Historical Unresolved Grief

American Indians experienced massive losses of lives, land, and culture from European contact and colonization resulting in a long legacy of chronic trauma and unresolved grief across generations. This phenomenon, labeled historical unresolved grief, contributes to the current social pathology of high rates of suicide, homicide, domestic violence, child abuse, alcoholism and other social problems among American Indians. The present paper describes the concept of historical unresolved grief and historical trauma among American Indians, outlining the historical as well as present social and political forces which exacerbate it. The abundant literature on Jewish Holocaust survivors and their children is used to delineate the intergenerational transmission of trauma, grief, and the survivor's child complex. Interventions based on traditional American Indian ceremonies and modern western treatment modalities for grieving and healing of those losses are described.