Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

Over the last 70 years, memories and narratives of the Holocaust have played a significant role in constructing Jewish communities. This book explores one field where these narratives are disseminated: Holocaust pedagogy in Jewish schools in Melbourne and New York.

Bringing together a diverse range of critical approaches, including gender studies, diaspora theory, settler colonial studies, and psychoanalysis, Anxious Histories complicates the stories being told about the Holocaust in these Jewish schools and their broader communities. It demonstrates that an anxious thread runs throughout these narratives, as the pedagogy negotiates feelings of simultaneous belonging and not-belonging in the West and in Zionism. In locating that anxiety, the possibilities and the limitations of narrating the events of the Holocaust are opened up once again for analysis, critique, discussion, and development.