Catskills Idyll: Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Bungalow Colony Experience, 1950s–1960s

Since the early part of the 20th century, the Catskill Mountains of New York State (also known as “the Borscht Belt”) was famous for its hotels and resorts. This chapter explores a lesser-known aspect of the Catskills: the bungalow colonies where thousands of working-class New York Jews spent their summers. Focusing on the experiences of children of Holocaust survivors during the 1950s–1960s (the “golden age” of the Catskills’ popularity) it shows how the bungalow colony was not only an enjoyable summer environment, but also an ideal place for children to run free and feel safe, especially those whose parents went through unspeakable horrors during the war. In addition, for survivors whose wartime/Holocaust traumas were still fresh, it was a uniquely relaxing and comfortable setting that served as a means of social and psychological transition to the New World.

“To Extract from It Some Sort of Beautiful Thing”: The Holocaust in the Families and Fiction of Nava Semel and Etgar Keret

In literary narratives by Nava Semel (1954–2017) and Etgar Keret (b. 1967), both Israeli children of Holocaust survivors, readers encounter the kinds of searching questions about inheriting the burden of traumatic inheritance, witnessing, and postmemory frequently intrinsic to second-generation literature in other national contexts. However, their works are further distinguished by acute examinations that probe the moral fabric of Israeli society itself, including dehumanization of the enemy through slogans and other debased forms of language and misuses of historical memory. In addition, their fiction measures the distance between the suffering and pain of intimate family memory (what Semel once dubbed their “private Shoah”) and ceremonial, nationalistic forms of Holocaust memory, and the apartness felt by the children of survivors who sense themselves somehow at odds with their society’s heroic values. Semel’s numerous articles, and fiction as well as nonfiction books, frequently address second and third-generation trauma, arguably most impressively in her harrowing five-part novel And the Rat Laughed (2001) that spans 150 years but most crucially juxtaposes the experiences of a “hidden child” in a remote wartime Polish village repeatedly raped with that of her grandchild writing a dutiful report for her class in contemporary Israel. Elsewhere, in a distant future, a bewildered but determined anthropologist is set on assembling a scientific report with coherent meaning from the fragmented “myths” inherited from the barbaric past. Over the years, Keret (generally known more for whimsical and surreal tales) has often spoken in interviews as well as his memoir about being raised by survivors. “Siren”, set in a Tel Aviv high school, is one of the most acclaimed of Keret’s realist stories (and required reading in Israeli high schools), raises troubling questions about Israeli society’s official forms of Holocaust mourning and remembrance and individual conscience. It is through their portrayals of the cognitive and moral struggles of children and adolescents, the destruction of their innocence, and gradual awakening into compassionate awareness that Semel and Keret most shine, each unwavering in preserving the Shoah’s legacy as a form of vigilance against society’s abuses, whether toward “internal” or “external” others.

Diversity and Ethnic Conflicts

This chapter evaluates the cultural, psychological, and moral issues surrounding revenge, justice, and forgiveness. Revenge is conceptualized as symbolic behavior showing wrongdoers that insults will be met with reprisal. Viewed through Fritz Heider’s lens, revenge is also an effort to change the underlying belief-attitude of the wrongdoer, often through aggressive retribution predicated on indignation and sometimes hatred. The legal system has sought to efficiently preempt, neutralize, and dilute these emotions by permitting victims a measure of legitimate revenge under the aegis of public order. However, as ethnic conflicts show, the legal system cannot abolish the zeal for revenge. In ethnic strife, each side perceives itself as the legitimate victim, removing claims for justice out of the realm of right or wrong and framing them mainly as issues of ethnic identification. A case in point is the author’s 1992–1993 study of the children of Nazis and the children of Holocaust survivors. The conference findings showed that the views and feelings the participants inherited from their parents created a barrier to establishing equal moral relations. One potential antidote to this conundrum resides in Immanuel Kant’s mandate: sapere aude, dare to know. One specific method for persuading individuals to pursue this mandate and eliminate belief perseverance is through an exercise in hypothetical reasoning, which trains people to live with ambiguity and multiple truths, and to develop flexibility in their belief systems. Ultimately, however, the finest balm for suffering and injustice is compassion.

The Science of Diversity

Using a multidisciplinary approach, The Science of Diversity reveals the theories, principles, and paradigms that illuminate people’s understanding of the issues surrounding human diversity, social equality, and justice. Noted psychologist and educator Dr. Mona Weissmark assembles a rich array of research from anthropology, biology, religious studies, and the social sciences to write a scholarly diorama of diversity. This book contextualizes diversity historically, tracing the evolution of ideas about “the other” and about “we” and “them” to various forms of social organization—from the “hunter-gather,” face-to-face, shared resource model to the anomie of megacities. Moreover, it explicates the concept of diversity, analyzing its meaning over time, place, and polity—from ancient Greece to the time of Donald Trump, from biblical parables to United Nations pronouncements. Ultimately, drawing on the author’s groundbreaking research work with the children of Nazis and the children of Holocaust survivors, the book suggests that one potential antidote to ethnic strife lies in the pursuit of Immanuel Kant’s mandate, sapere aude (dare to know), combined with the development of compassion.

News From Home the redux version: Amodal perception and ‘la jouissance du voir’

In my 2004 article on Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976), I deployed a Deleuzian reading of the film to release the film from being interpreted as manifesting the impossibility of a woman’s desire (Stephen Heath) or a desire to return to the mother (Richard Kwietniowski), arguing instead that the indeterminacy of the final sequence opens out onto a transformative freedom from identity. In this article, I persist with this idea but reconsider it in relation to Griselda Pollock’s convincing insistence that Akerman’s work is a journey towards maternal trauma, a position that she develops in relation to Akerman’s installation Walking Next to One’s Shoelaces Inside an Empty Fridge. Before encountering this work, Pollock says that Akerman’s cinematic intervention was linked to ‘the choked feminine voice in culture meeting a new cinematic formalism’ rather than to the ‘deeper trauma’ of being the child of a Holocaust survivor. Pollock’s convincing reading of Akerman’s installation as visualizing the effects of unmourned trauma transmitted to the children of Holocaust survivors had a profound impact on me, one that I take into consideration in my reframing in this article of the final sequence of News From Home. In this, I deploy Raymond Bellour’s adaptation of psychoanalyst Daniel Stern’s notion of ‘amodal perception’ as a sensory, kinetic modality of spectatorship. This model allows me to retain the transformative freedom from identity in my earlier reading, while nonetheless mapping early intersubjective relations onto the pleasures of the film body Akerman called ‘la jouissance du voir’.

Postmemories of joy? Children of Holocaust survivors and alternative family memories

Substantial research in multiple disciplines on Jewish Holocaust survivors and their postwar offspring has been dominated by the discourse of trauma, focusing on the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Based on the narratives of 35 children of Holocaust survivors in the United States, my research counters and nuances this over-determined “paradigm of trauma” by illuminating their more diverse cache of family memories. Some parents transmitted their Holocaust experiences in lively and colorful ways,as an exciting adventure, as a fairy tale, or as a humorous story. The narratives suggest that for these children of survivors, the postmemories of their parents’ history and trauma are embedded in other positive family memories, including the way in which the stories were told. Thus, postmemories of trauma do not necessarily elide or dominate other more positive family memories, including memories of joy

Ari Folman’s Other War

This chapter looks at Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir within the context of the Holocaust. It recounts the 1980s and 1990s that marked the emergence of second-generation Israeli cinema that was specifically produced by the children of Holocaust survivors. It also reviews the second-generation Israel films that address the subject of war and critique the Zionist project, which intimates that it had simply replaced the trauma of the Holocaust with a new and different kind of Israeli trauma. It also mentions Ari Folman, a child of survivors, who began making films during the period of second-generation Israeli cinema. The chapter describes Waltz with Bashir as an example of second-generation film-making and as a film that explicitly deals with Lebanon, but implicitly engages with events of the Second World War. It analyzes the function of the Holocaust in greater detail within the context of Israeli cinema of the early millennium and the cinema of second-generation film-makers.