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“Growing in the Shadow of the Past: Second Generation Holocaust Survivors' Childhoods as depicted in Israeli Documentary Films”

2021

“Growing in the Shadow of the Past: Second Generation Holocaust Survivors' Childhoods as depicted in Israeli Documentary Films”

Studies in Contemporary Jewry

As far back as the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Holocaust survivors became a presence in Eretz Israeli documentary cinema. They continue to appear in Israeli cinema until the present. In the initial period from 1945 until the 1960s, films, as was the case for other facets of Eretz-Israeli/Israeli culture, emphasized the Zionist lessons of the Holocaust and centered on the national collective transformation of Holocaust survivors from “ashes to renewal.” Events such as the Eichmann trial of 1961 and political and social upheavals in the twenty years that followed led to a change in the way survivors were depicted. Documentaries produced in the 1960s and 1970s began dealing with the Jewish past in the diaspora and with the Holocaust itself in greater depth; by the late 1980s, they were exploring such issues as how survivors dealt with post-trauma and the transgenerational transfer of trauma to survivors’ children. This essay will focus on the representation of second-generation Holocaust survivors in Israeli documentary cinema from the 1980s onwards. It will first introduce the major psychological schools regarding second-generation Holocaust survivors and will then show how the films reflect only those schools that highlight the separate and unique features of children growing up in families of Holocaust survivors.

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Keywords:

Holocaust, Holocaust survivors, second generation, Israeli cinema, Holocaust memory

Reference:

Liat Steir-Livny, “Growing in the Shadow of the Past: Second Generation Holocaust Survivors' Childhoods as depicted in Israeli Documentary Films”, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 32, 2021, pp. 157-168.

“Growing in the Shadow of the Past: Second Generation Holocaust Survivors' Childhoods as depicted in Israeli Documentary Films”

2021

I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.

מילות מפתח

הפניה ביבליוגרפית

“Growing in the Shadow of the Past: Second Generation Holocaust Survivors' Childhoods as depicted in Israeli Documentary Films”, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 32, 2021, pp. 157-168.

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