131-120 Jewish Identities after the Holocaust

Note

Credit Points

HECS Band

Coordinator

Prerequisites

Usually admission to the Postgraduate Diploma or Fourth Year Honours in History or Jewish Studies.

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

What does it mean to be a Jew in the post-Holocaust age? What part has the Holocaust come to play in the different ways that Jewish identities have been re-imagined and reconfigured since the event? This subject will examine the new forms that Jewish identities have taken since the end of the war and will consider the specific conditions and factors that have made the Holocaust influential in their formation. Some of the themes and issues to be covered will include the political centrality of cultural identity in the latter half of the twentieth century; ethnicity; gender and different sexualities; the shift in the meanings of migration and diaspora with the dispersion of Jews from Europe and the creation of the nation-state of Israel; authenticity and language; trauma, genealogy and the 're-writing' of Jewish family histories; death camp tourism and other journeyings of the post-Holocaust generations. Students will have the opportunity to take a comparative and theoretically based approach to the implications each of these themes and issues has for post-Holocaust Jewish identities, and should develop an understanding of the part played by the Holocaust in their historical transformations.

Assessment

Written work totalling 5000 words.

Prescribed Texts

A subject reader will be available.