91Թ

91Թstudents by the Seine.

George and Irina Schaeffer Center

International Research Workshop: Early Holocaust Remembrance in the Jewish Press, from the Second World War to the 1960s

The Schaeffer Center (Q-709) | 6, rue du Colonel Combes
Monday, November 25, 2019 - 10:10

Scholarly works dealing with early Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust have mainly focused on documentation efforts, historiographical writings, testimonies,Yisker-books, commemorations, and monuments, among other topics. In such works, the Jewish press has been extensively mobilized by scholars as a privileged source of information on communal initiatives and perspectives.Indeed, as means for thecirculation ofinformation on Jewish persecutions since the very moment when thesewere taking place, Jewish journalshave also become important vehicles forthespreadingofknowledge on the Holocaust in the early postwar years. Nonetheless, if the relevance of the Jewish press as a historical source has been widely acknowledged, this media still needs to be approached as a subject ofstudy in itself, alongsidewithother commemorative endeavors.

Bytransmittinga great variety of Holocaust writings in the early postwar years, the Jewish press has significantly shaped the understanding of the Jewish past within the communities it was addressed tothrough itsmajor informative and commemorative role. Moreover, editors and journalists of the Jewish press worldwide very often adopted positions of their own with respect to the meanings of the past expressed in their writings. Hence, this workshop regards Jewish journals as vehicles for early Holocaust memory, and simultaneously as institutional actors with their own memorial agendas.

Questionsproposed to be addressed by participants in theirpapers:

  • What werethecontinuitiesor differencesbetweenthe wartime Jewish press (a free one in countries spared by Nazi occupation and a clandestine one in Nazi-occupied Europe)andthe postwar Jewish press?

  • Which topics related to the Holocausthavecirculated in the Jewish press?

  • Whatkind/genreof texts werepublished?(Testimonies? Historicalwritings?Fiction? Poetry?News?Opinion?)

  • Whatwere the specificitiesofthetreatment of the Holocaustinthe Jewish press, compared tobooks?

  • Which audience did the Jewish press reachto,compared to other printed materials?

  • Who wroteabout the Holocaust in the Jewish press?Was the readership involved inthe elaboration of Holocaust memory?

  • What was the editorialpositionof the journal(s)under consideration? Were there contesting visions within the same journal?

  • Was there a dialoguebetween theJewishpress and otherJewish or non-Jewishmedia?

  • How haveimagesprintedin the Jewish press(pictures, drawings, cartoons)contributed tothe construction of aHolocaustvisual culture?

  • To what extentwasthe Jewish presstransnational?For instance, can we speak of the Yiddish press as being always transnational?

  • What were the particularities of Holocaust writings circulating in the Jewish press in languages other than Yiddish? Was the Jewish press able to reach a non-Jewish audienceby using non-Jewish languages?

  • Howcan we appeal toquantitative methods to study the place and evolution of the Holocaust as a topic in the Jewishpress?

Organizers:

Malena Chinski (EHESS)

ConstancePârisdeBollardière(TheAmerican University of Paris)

Simon Perego (LabExEHNE/Sorbonne Université)

Miriam Schulz (Columbia University)