Memorializing the Holocaust

Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory

Janet Jacobs

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781848851023
• eBook ISBN: 9780857718112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

How do collective memories of histories of violence and trauma in war and genocide come to be created? Janet Jacobs offers new understandings of this crucial issue in her examination of the representation of gender in the memorial culture of Holocaust monuments and museums, from synagogue memorials and other historical places of Jewish life, to the geographies of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Ravensbruck. Jacobs travelled to Holocaust sites across Europe to explore representations of women. She reveals how these memorial cultures construct masculinity and femininity, as well as the Holocaust's effect on stereotyping on grounds of race or gender. She also uncovers the wider ways in which images of violence against women have become universal symbols of mass trauma and genocide. This feminist analysis of Holocaust memorialization brings together gender and collective memory with the geographies of genocide to fill a significant gap in our understanding of genocide and national remembrance.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Project of Memory and the Study of the Holocaust
• 1. Genocide and the Ethics of Feminist Scholarship
• 2. Gender and Collective Memory: Women and Representation at Auschwitz
• 3. Ravensbruck: The Memorialization of Women's Suffering and Survival
• 4. Jewish Memory and the Emasculation of the Sacred: Kristallnacht in the German Landscape
• 5. Gender and Remembrance: Pre-Nineteenth-Century Jews in European Memory
• 6. Relational Narratives in Survivor Memory and the Future of Holocaust Memorialization
• Bibliography
• Index