Eli Wiesel once wrote, 'A novel about the Holocaust is either not a novel or not about the Holocaust.' Given the proliferation of Holocaust fiction, can and should such a position be maintained? Join us for a conversation with two authors who have broached this very topic: historian Alan Rosen, author of The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder, and Elliot Perlman, author of The Street Sweeper. Both sought to explore the life and work of psychologist David Boder, the first person to undertake systematic interviews with Holocaust survivors in the Displaced Persons camps in 1946. How do history and literature bring different insights to bear in illuminating a traumatic past?
Freud, who described himself as a Godless Jew, may have been the most representative Jew of the 20th century. HIs family followed a typical path from the Pale of Settlement to a middle-class life in Vienna. Although Freud was to write that religion was an illusion, he associated with Jews all his life and Jewish ideas suffused his works.
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has authored more than fifty books, in which he endeavours to counter the enveloping fire of the Holocaust with the visionary fire of the Jewish tradition. By surveying his career and writings, we will explore his teaching on becoming a soul on fire.
Rod’s documentary, Uncle Chatzkel (1999), included an account of his great-grandparents' murder in Zagare, in 1941. In 2012 Rod returned for an event commemorating the town’s Jews. A memorial was erected in the town square, a first for Lithuania. Initiated by a young Lithuanian, the event was attended by international descendants of Zagare. Rod will recount the personal significance of this reconciliation journey in the context of ongoing controversy in Lithuania about the rewriting of history.
The House of Bacri and Busnach was a trading house run by Algerian Jews. They supplied wheat to France over two decades and ran up a bill of several million francs. The debt wove its way into diplomacy between France and Algiers and caused the tensions that led to invasion and colonisation of Algeria in 1830. The story of Bacri and Busnach, then, takes us from Napoleon to the Dey of Algiers and from Algiers to Marseille, to Paris and to Leghorn as these two families found themselves at the heart of political and diplomatic intrigue.
In this session Lynda will talk about how her life experiences and the evolution of her Jewish and Zionist awareness have influenced and continue to influence her professional development and the work she does in the Jewish community.
One Jew’s experience in apartheid South Africa and the perspective he has since gained on other Jewish responses.
This talk will examine the rehabilitation efforts that surrounded a group of 500 teenage Holocaust survivors after their arrival in France in June 1945. It will explore how the Buchenwald Boys were placed in an overcrowded orphanage, where tensions bubbled to the surface between non-compliant teenage survivors and adult professionals committed to their recovery.
Everyone knows that Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was a French stage and early film actress who went on to become the most famous actress the world has ever known. But who knew of her connections to Australia and who knew of her Jewish connections? We will examine her life and often troubled/often triumphant times.
At the end of the Second Temple period there were many versions of Judaism in the marketplace of ideas. We will review sources like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, Josephus and others to reconstruct this lost world. No prior knowledge of 'Sex and the City' required (although it will help with the quiz at the end).
This talk examines the work of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute in consulting with the testimony-gathering efforts of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an independent Cambodian research institute compiling written records, photographs and video testimonies of the Cambodian genocide. The collaboration between these two institutions raises pressing questions concerning the limits and possibilities of documenting more recent and contemporary genocides by using methods of testimony that were originally developed for survivors and witnesses of the Shoah. This talk thus considers the challenges of examining genocides at large through the particular lens of the Holocaust.
How would our lives be changed if we had no idea what day it was? no idea when to observe religious holidays or mark the passing of another year? This session examines these intriguing questions in the context of the Holocaust, when Jews in ghettos, in camps and in hiding were compelled to develop innovative strategies to track time, maintain continuity with the past and envision a viable future.
This talk by Dr Noah Shenker examines the prospects for the future uses of Holocaust survivor testimonies, arguing that in order to better interpret and more ethically utilise those invaluable resources, we must first understand how they are shaped by the cultures and methods of the archives and museums that preserve them.
Wladyslaw Szlengel became known as the 'Poet of the Ghetto'. Already a popular satiric poet before the War, he consciously took on the roles of keeping up morale among his fellow-condemned and of creating a verse-history of the ghetto. He and his wife were shot by the Nazis on 5 May 1943. To the end he preserved remarkable detachment, a great sense of humour and astute artistic self-criticism.
This talk will examine the Finaly Affair of 1953, in which a Catholic woman had two Jewish children baptised and kidnapped to Spain. We will discuss how such custody disputes reveal competing notions about French national identity in the wake of Vichy.
Isaac Deutscher, historian and Hassidic rabbi, was immersed in the Talmud and Torah. His classic essay, ‘The Non-Jewish Jew’, notes the paradox that Jewish heretics belong to a characteristically Jewish tradition. Foremost was the great ethical philosopher Spinoza, considered wicked and excommunicated from the 17th-century Jewish community. More recently, Arendt, too, was accused of lacking ahavat Israel - love for the Jewish people - as a consequence of her universal stance on questions of justice.
In this session, Professor Deborah Lipstadt (award-winning author and academic whose books include History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier and The Eichmann Trial) will be in a video-linked conversation with Mark Baker (Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University). They will discuss her work on the Holocaust and Holocaust denial, her role in providing historical evidence against David Irving in court, her new book on Eichmann and what it reveals about the nature of evil, her recent visit to Rwanda and her views on Israel and Judaism.
Rewriting History is an inspiring documentary, set in Lithuania, about the emergence of 'double genocide' and its threat to the memory of the Holocaust in Europe and beyond - and an Australian-led campaign to counter this new form of Holocaust denial. At the time of its prime-time broadcast on SBS, The Australian reviewed the documentary 'as one of those films that is so compelling it leaves you a little breathless'. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the film's co-producer and co-director Danny Ben-Moshe. Be engaged by the film and also find out how you can get involved in the campaign to stop the rewriting of history. This is a double session.
The CerfBerr and Ratisbonne families were among the best-known in French Jewish history. They included high-profile members of the Jewish community, controversial converts to Catholicism, and career antisemites. What drove them to make the choices they did? What was the role of family, and how did this work with the pressures of modernity? This is a story of the long nineteenth century and the ways Jews interacted with modernity.
Paradoxically, wartime Holocaust writing is less known than its post-War complement. But wartime writing in all genres offers, in an unparalleled manner, the privilege of vicariously viewing the unfolding of events and the groping attempt to respond to them.
Mark Tedeschi will be speaking about his true-crime book Eugenia. Eugenia lived for 22 years as a working-class man in Sydney, and during that time was legally married twice. In 1920, she went to trial in the Supreme Court charged with the murder of her first wife. Her trial attracted the attention of the whole nation. Mark will describe Eugenia's life, both before and after her trial, and explain why he believes her trial resulted in a miscarriage of justice.
Rewriting History is an inspiring documentary set in Lithuania about the emergence of 'double genocide' and its threat to the memory of the Holocaust in Europe and beyond - and an Australian-led campaign to counter this new form of Holocaust denial. At the time of its prime-time broadcast on SBS, The Australian reviewed the documentary 'as one of those films that is so compelling it leaves you a little breathless'. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the film's co-producer and co-director Danny Ben-Moshe. Be engaged by the film and also find out how you can get involved in the campaign to stop the rewriting of history.
This is a double session.
Recent advances in research in psychological trauma, including contributions from the large Holocaust generational trauma literature, are changing both our understanding of and how we think about the generational impact of the Holocaust. This session will provide an overview of this exciting and rapidly advancing field and will examine the practical implications for care of the elderly survivor by their next of kin.
“To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightheartedly ... especially by one belonging to that people” - Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism. In his final book, Freud argues that Moses was an Egyptian monotheist nobleman who led only his close followers into freedom. Once in the wilderness, they murdered him before merging with another monotheistic tribe to become the Israelites. After examining some of Freud’s ideas, we will attempt to answer various questions, including some from the audience. For example: Does it matter whether our stories are true or not? Does the delegitimisation of Moses delegitimise Judaism itself?
"If you don't speak Yiddish, what kind of a Jew are you?" This was the question asked of Elana Benjamin's mother soon after emigrating from her native India. This session draws on material from Elana's memoir/history about the Baghdadi Jews of Bombay - My Mother's Spice Cupboard (2012) - with the aim of raising awareness and generating discussion about the experiences of Iraqi-Sephardi Jewry.
Olga Horak and David Benedikt are Holocaust Survivors who have been telling their story for over twenty years. In this session we will discuss with Olga and David how they came to tell their stories and why they feel compelled to talk about what they endured during World War II.
The Jewish community of Libya is believed to date back to the time of King Solomon. This session will explore the rich history of Jews in Libya, their struggles and achievements, strong and constant connection to the Land of Israel, and unyielding support for the subsequent State of Israel. A rich culture of customs and language, it remains a vibrant and prolific community in Israel today.