The Genizah

In this fascinating and innovative book, Rina Dudai looks at Holocaust trauma through the lens of poetic testimony: the act of writing poetry and prose to both relay and process traumatic events. Dudai begins with a study of both factual testimony and the act of bearing witness in the aftermath of trauma. She uses these as the foundations for her exploration of poetic testimony and the benefits the creator will find over and above other forms of testimony. Showing how this method avoids the additional trauma often brought about by making survivors directly address their experience, Dudai offers a new toolkit to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists working with patients experiencing trauma. Through an analysis of the works of three writers who survived the Holocaust – Primo Levi, Ka-Tzetnik, and Aharon Appelfeld – Dudai establishes a conceptual framework for discussing this mode of testimony and the poetic language through which it speaks. By comparing the work of these writers, Dudai identifies the distinct qualities of this form of poetic language while establishing a foundation for discourse of other literary works that deal with trauma. Through close textual analysis and the incorporation of therapeutic concepts like "acting out" and "working through," Psychoanalysis, Poetic Testimony, and the Trauma of the Holocaust is an invaluable resource to psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals working with trauma patients, as well as students and scholars of literature and 20th-century history.

Bridge builder: My life since the Holocaust is the fourth and final volume of Shimon Redlich's autobiographical cycle, which began with Together and Apart in Brezany (2002), a description of relations among Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in his native town and his survival during the Holocaust. It continued with Life in Transit (2010), an account of his family's resettlement in postwar Lodz and a new life in Israel. A New Life in Israel (2018) portrayed his adjustment to life on a kibbutz and service in the Israel Defense Forces. In Bridge Builder, Redlich recounts his life since the late fifties. It features his academic journey from student in Jerusalem and the US to professor at Ben-Gurion University, his friendships, his encounters with Jews and non-Jews in Eastern Europe, and his unconventional approach to controversial topics. As in previous volumes, in Bridge Builder Redlich's own memories are supported and enriched by meticulous historical research.

Situated within the broadly understood subfield of environmental memory studies, this book explores Israeli forests as spaces of commemoration. It investigates their significance in the Jewish‑Israeli memory culture over the last century, as well as their role as a recurrent form of environmental memorial, understood as a commemoration that uses the organic as both the symbolic and the building substance. In doing so, it reveals the roles that the natural environment plays in memory practices: as a carrier of symbolic meanings, and also as an acting, more‑than‑human element of memorial spaces. Employing the perspective of environmental hermeneutics, the analysis is grounded in the realities of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and reflects on the intricate intersection of ideological, political, socio‑economic, personal, and institutional dimensions of local tree planting. Simultaneously, it draws from instances of arboreal commemorations found in other geographical and cultural contexts, situating the practice of memorial forests within the wider framework of environmental memory and its associated social practices. In this way, it offers instructive insights for other cases of arboreal remembrance, highlighting both the potential benefits and risks linked to environmental memorials. Utilising an interdisciplinary approach, this fascinating and groundbreaking volume will engage scholars and researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including Memory Studies, Cultural Geography, Israel Studies, and Environmental Humanities.

Intimate in voice and sweeping in historical reach, "Was It Just a Matter of Luck?" bears witness to the endurance of memory and the moral force of survival. Through the voice of his mother, Ray Kaner - a fiercely intelligent young woman who endured four years in the Lódź ghetto, brutal slave labor, and near death in Bergen-Belsen - Dr. Charles Kaner reconstructs her harrowing passage through the Holocaust and the sustaining power of sisterhood that helped her survive. Interwoven with his own journey as a second-generation survivor, Kaner traces how Ray transformed unspeakable trauma into purpose. In postwar America, she became a quiet but determined force in the preservation of Holocaust memory, helping to establish one of the nation's earliest survivor-testimony projects and laying crucial groundwork for what would become the Museum of Jewish Heritage. At once a son's act of devotion and a profound historical reckoning, Was It Just a Matter of Luck? asks not only how one woman survived, but how survival itself became a legacy.

Dress in Auschwitz is the first comprehensive study of prisoners' clothing in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Drawing from a wide range of sources, including survivor memoirs and unpublished primary sources, testimonies, personal interviews, surviving garments, scholarly work, and rare illustrations, the book explores the experience of Auschwitz prisoners through the lens of their clothing.

This source edition on the persecution and murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany presents in a total of 16 volumes a thematically comprehensive selection of documents on the Holocaust. The work illustrates the contemporary contexts, the dynamics, and the intermediate stages of the political and social processes that led to this unprecedented mass crime. It can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and all other interested parties. The edition comprises authentic testimony by persecutors, victims, and onlookers. These testimonies are furnished with academic annotations and the vast majority of them are published here for the first time in English.

The existence and achievements of Jewish “self-rescuers” within Nazi-occupied Hungary remains, in spite of their significance, historically underexplored. In this illuminating chronicle of the life and work of a Jewish couple, László and Eugenia Szamosi, Remembering Resistance seeks to address this lacunae, offering a unique insight into a family’s personal history of resistance under the Nazi regime. Combining oral testimony from fellow survivors, with a previously-unpublished translation of László’s memoir, this book foregrounds the remarkable work of the Szamosis and their network, in rescuing Jews from the Death Marches and reuniting displaced families. Through doing so, this book offers a powerful framework for mediating how we remember Jewish experiences of the Holocaust.

Holocaust and Hope shows one of our preeminent critics grappling with a subject to which he had returned for decades: literary, cultural, political, and historiographical implications of the Holocaust and its aftermath in Europe and America. In his last planned book, Geoffrey Hartman confronts contradictions that pose a challenge for our present and future. The passing of Holocaust survivors and their immediate families makes continued acts of witnessing more necessary even as distance in time makes the identities and acts of future witnessing more complicated. With characteristic intensity and humanity, Hartman's essays explore the full complexity of how to transmit knowledge of the Holocaust to the future in ways that avoid simplification, the illusion of synthesis, or the aspiration to final closure, on the one hand, or compulsive repetition on the other. A significant part of the answer, for Hartman, requires special attention to the role of literary and audiovisual forms in promoting an active witnessing to extreme suffering that is relevant both for our time and the encroaching future.