Trauma and Origins: Post-Holocaust Genealogists and the Work of Memory

In the 1970s, as children of Holocaust survivors reached adulthood, many began to excavate, piece together, and re-fashion their fractured family histories. This movement achieved momentum in the 1980s and 1990s, as the so-called “second generation” moved into middle age. Drawing from data gleaned from participant observation on a listserv for children of survivors and from interviews, I argue that those who engage in post-Holocaust genealogy are searching for coherent narratives that place their own origin in the context of the families into which they were born. By seeking, borrowing from and selectively appropriating traces of the past, they are using them as raw material in the production of new stories about the past and, by implication, the present.

The Symbolic Type Revisited: Semiotics in Practice and the Reformation of the Israeli Commemorative Context

Revisiting Grathoff's theory of symbolic type (ST), we examine the personal evolution and commemorative work of Tsipi Kichler, a cultural entrepreneur and founder of an alternative Israeli Holocaust museum/geriatric center. As hybrid product of Israeli social cleavages, Kichler exteriorizes her paradoxical vision in the museum aiming to reform Holocaust‐related discourse and practice. Early biographical positioning and resultant contradictions become translated into resistant commemorative performance where serious humor deconstructs the binaries of life/death and past/present. We consider the implications of the ST's self‐referential closure to interaction, and the transformative potential of the alignment of cultural entrepreneurs' personal memory with collective memory.     

Not the Israel of My Elementary School: An Exploration of Jewish-Canadian Secondary Students' Attempts to Process Morally Complex Israeli Narratives

The following article presents data from a mixed-methods practitioner research study that focuses on understanding how Jewish secondary students learned about controversial topics in Israel's history and how these topics impacted their connection to the country. The responses that were provided by the students showed that the material forced students to conceptualize Israel in new ways and that the material— learning from Palestinian and Israeli texts about events that happened in 1947 and 1948—was disruptive to their preconceived notions of Israel. With the passing of time, the students were able to reflect on the real difficulty they had with learning about the topics but were able to synthesize the disruption into their Israel narrative to arrive at a new understanding. The integration of this new material into existing schema is understood within the context of dangerous memories, and how learning about controversial moments in nationalist narratives can impact the way students learn and relate to a topic. A further finding was that some students expressed resentment at previous educational experiences for not being fully transparent about historical events.     

The Square of Polish Innocence: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and its symbolic topography

The text refers to the space around the Nathan Rapoport’s Monument to the Fighters and Martyrs of the Ghetto and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN in Warsaw (Poland). The site of death – at the heart of the former Warsaw Ghetto – has now become a site overloaded with other symbolic messages. Two main symbolic centers (the 1948 Monument and the 2013 Museum) are today encircled by ten other, additional memorials. The message emerging from the content as well as the proportion of commemorations is that Polish solidarity with the Jews was a fact and it stood the test of terror and death brought by the Germans. Although it does not undermine the veracity of the few and isolated exceptions, such a version of events is drastically different from the actual facts. Both symbolic centers are perceived as emblems of Jewish minority narrative. Additional artefacts are a message formulated by the Polish majority. They constitute a kind of symbolic encirclement, block. Emphasizing the dominant majority’s version of the events in this place is in fact a symbolic pre-emptive action. It is meant to silence the unwanted narrative or suppress even the mere possibility that it might emerge. What turns out to be at stake in the dominant Polish narrative about the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations is the image of Poland and the Poles. This shows not only the topographic and symbolic situation but also the socio-cultural context of the functioning of the new Museum.     

The relative centrality of life domains among Jews and Arabs in Israel: the effect of culture,ethnicity, and demographic variables

The centrality of major life domains (work, family community leisure and religion) have not, to date, been studied among Arabs in Israel. This paper examines life domains centrality of 909 Jews and 286 Arabs (or Palestinians that have Israeli citizenship), who work in the Israeli labor market. The findings reveal significant differences in the importance of all life domains. Work centrality, as well as the importance of religion and community is significantly higher among Arabs than among Jews. Among Jews, the importance of family and leisure are significantly higher than among Arabs. A hierarchical regression analysis indicates that demographic variables have a low ability to explain the differences in the centrality of life domains among Jews and Arabs. The findings can be explained by cultural differences, the high degree of segregation, occupational discrimination, and mainly by the regional Palestinian/Arab-Israeli conflict.     

Stories of Risk and Protection: A Turn to the Narrative in Social Policy Education

This paper discusses the role of ‘story’ in social policy teaching within social work education. In particular, it uses the explication of two students' stories of their own experience to consider approaches to the concepts of risk and protection. The paper sets a scene whereby the roles of narrative, practitioner-wisdom (Phronesis) and personal experience need to be addressed within social policy education. Then, using stories generated by an educational intervention building on memory work, it illustrates how the ‘pragmatic eclecticism’ of narrative analysis can illuminate some of the complexities of social policy constructs. A range of analytical tools have been brought to bear on the stories, including the distinct but related concepts of ‘role’ and ‘performance’ and literary devices such as genre and plot, as well as a consideration of intertextuality. This is done to support the notion that social policy needs to broaden its methodological range.