
































Teaching the Holocaust in an Uncertain World 

Review by Naomi Calnitsky

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

First Century

by Jordana Silverstein

Berghahn Books, 2015

Anxious Histories is a sensitive work, which sets out to relate how the differing migration stories and

urban settings of Jewish communities in New York and Melbourne led to the establishment of Jewish

communities  that  teach  the  Holocaust  in  divergent  ways.  It  does  so,  not  by  seeking  to  offer  a

“totalizing” study of Holocaust education, but rather offering a glimpse into twelve schools, fifteen

teachers, and a variety of denominations in Melbourne and New York (from Orthodox to secular) (p. 5).

A somewhat daunting project upon first glance, the book reveals teachers of the Holocaust as “anxious”

about the ways in which “Jews” might “fit into the Australian, U.S. and Jewish worlds in which they

live,” and often adopting overtly Zionist orientations (p. 3-4) It locates diasporic Jewish communities

within broader social worlds and points to challenges of Holocaust narration to suggest “there are many

impossibilities involved in such pedagogical pursuits” (p. 5).

Holocaust  education  here  takes  place  in  what  are  termed “settler  colonial”  conditions.  The

author proposes to open conversations, formerly “foreclosed, about anxiety and the Holocaust” (p. 8).

While this literary gap is recognized at the outset, there is little thorough examination of the problem of

anxiety as a specifically psychological state applicable to Jewish communities in the diaspora world.

The  book  focuses  on  ways  that  “anxious  Jewishness(es)”  has  had  “protracted  effects”  (p.  9)  on

Holocaust education and in this sense the book succeeds. Education is under scrutiny as it commingles

with definitions of collective identity and the reproduction of ethno-religious culture among young

Jews of the Diaspora. Jewish communities’ past  historical engagement with European modernity is



considered, as are shifting characterizations of Jewish belonging in the modern non-Jewish West.

The book incorporates postcolonial thought, offering interpretive flourishes that in most cases

succeed,  but  on occasion,  concepts  like  mimicry  are  taken out  of  context  and can  risk  detracting

attention from the central research problem. The extent to which an analysis of what the author terms

settler-colonial  societies  in  which  modern  Jewish  diaspora  communities  live  is  pertinent  remains

somewhat  ambiguous,  influenced perhaps  more  by  modern  discursive  trends  than  Jewish realities.

While national contexts are critical, Jewish pasts and histories of migration into these societies may be

even more so, yet those stories are often eclipsed by the structure and intention of the work.

Chapter  One  introduces  post-Holocaust  migrations  to  the  “non-Jewish  West”  (p.  37)  and

proposes a discussion of racialized national pasts in Australia and America. It moves into a discussion

of Holocaust memorializing in the United States, changing conceptions of “whiteness” in post-war

America,  and  the  de-marginalization  of  Jewish  identity  gained  through  inclusion  in  an  American

culture often defined more by class than by religious indicators. Marginality as it relates to Judaism in

diaspora communities, whether imagined or real, is considered in a fruitful way. The author situates

Jewish migration to Australia in its formerly racialized immigration climate in which quotas defined

Jewish migration before and after the war, to probe connections between whiteness and Jewishness in

Australia. She refers to “strands of anxiety” (p. 55) experienced by Jews in their ability to integrate into

Australian society, and considers Diaspora and Israel in gendered terms, with Diaspora understood as a

state  of  “disempowered  exile”  (p.  54)  and  Israel  a  realization  of  masculinity  and  strength.  The

dichotomy is useful but does not open room for interpreting perforations between the two.

The book goes on to look at  how “chronological fact-based narrations” (p. 63) served as a

primary  way to represent  “truths”  of  the  Holocaust.  Putting  pedagogy under  scrutiny,  it  considers

Diasporic ways of knowing the Holocaust. It also refers to patterns prevalent in Holocaust pedagogy,

including modernist narratives that position the creation of the State of Israel as an uplifting Jewish

progression from the Nazi period. In relation to the problem of teaching trauma or unknowable pasts,

“coherence and knowability” were ultimate aims when narrating traumatic pasts (p. 65). Knowledge of

the Holocaust was often “unquenchable” terrain (p. 70). While Holocaust curricula were described as

totalizing or segmented from other histories, narrating the Holocaust offered solidity or a “bedrock”

upon which “uncertain identities” could sit  (p. 71), and survivor testimonies could serve as “truth-

telling”  devices  or  “primary  evidence”  (p.  77).  Anxious  Histories also  considers  liberation’s

ambivalence  for  many  survivors,  due  to  their  perpetual  suffering,  pointing  to  a  “lack  of  closure”

associated with the Holocaust and its positioning as an often “unresolvable” moment in history and

history education (p. 87).



Anxious Histories makes  for  a  nuanced study of  the  intricacies  of  Holocaust  education,  its

omissions  and  points  of  emphasis.  The  study  fits  into  a  category  of  post-Holocaust  inquiry,  not

dissimilar to Carolyn Dean’s recent work on post-Holocaust discourses of victimhood and empathy.

Modern Jewish culture is also considered alongside Zionist culture wherein a Jewish Diaspora often

operates  in  dialogue  with  the  postwar  establishment  of  Israel.  Australian  Zionism  and  other

incarnations  of  diasporic  Zionism  are  explored.  A view  into  patterns  of  teaching  about  postwar

concerns, including the problem of implementing the rule of law vis-à-vis Nazi war crimes, locates

Israel as a center for post-Holocaust justice making and education, and problematizes framings of Israel

as a culmination or “happy ending” of wartime trauma. Viewing patterns in Holocaust pedagogy with a

critical  eye,  Silverstein  charts  out  how  teachers  position  Israel  as  a  “redemptive  national  end,”

following a “Zionist narratorial path” (p. 110). Her discussion of Israeli masculinity vis-à-vis diasporic

feminity risks essentializing Israeli culture but is also reflective of certain realities.

The book suggests that “settler-colonial” societies often pursue acts of “forgetting” to establish

a  sense  of  belonging.  The  discussion  locates  Jewish  diasporic  identities  in  their  broader  national

settings.  Specifically in the discussion of America,  the “Americanization” of Holocaust memory is

manifested overtly through museum culture, (149) but settler-colonialism’s relationship with Jewish

culture  in  the  Diasporic  world  is  not  considered  in  any  meaningful  way.  U.S.  Holocaust

memorialization is  critiqued as  a  “brand” of  memorializing,  yet  the  context  of  American museum

culture  is  not  discussed.  America’s  positioning as  a  secondary  (after  Israel),  or  even  foundational

headquarters for the public display of Holocaust memory is to some extent taken for granted, and there

is a misplaced emphasis on the historical injustices performed by “settler-colonial” societies of which

modern  Jews  are  a  part,  and  the  lack  of  Jewish  institutional  attention  to  those  pasts.  Holocaust

education’s  potential  connection  with  histories  of  conquest  or  slavery  in  America,  or  its  role  in

“obscuring” those histories, is claimed; while this might seem a matter of pedagogical emphasis, the

author fails to probe why the often-insular institutions of the Diaspora emphasized their own histories

at the expense of others. Stories of Jewish migration to the “settler-colonial” societies under study are

given little attention. Similarly, the freedom of Jews to practice their faith in host societies, or their

relative comfort in doing so, is not considered. Due to the narrow emphasis of the central research

question, that of how Holocaust pedagogies operate in two Diasporic contexts, the broader political

problems and cultural questions raised by the study, which are interwoven into it  – the potentially

precarious location of Jews in Western societies, the controversial place of Israel in the world, and how

Diasporic Jews relate to Zionism – are considered as they relate to Holocaust education but not more

broadly.  The mosaic  of  outcomes  uncovered through fieldwork,  however,  reveals  a  multiplicity  of



positions and intersections with these larger narratives and themes.

The final chapter departs from earlier themes to consider how Jewish women’s experiences of

the Holocaust are narrated. The author applies university level feminist discourse to secondary level

teaching, to reveal complexity in the ways in which women’s roles in and experiences of the Holocaust

are taught at Jewish institutions. The book ends, somewhat ambivalently, with Said’s observation about

a lack of neutrality in the study of history. While the book’s findings effectively prove this to be the

case,  readers are left  with somewhat ambiguous conclusions. Holocaust educators outside of Israel

indeed do more than teach histories of the Holocaust; their curricula extend to fundamental questions

relating to Jewish diasporic identity, “how to be” in a non-Jewish world, how to study and “know” past

trauma, how to contend with Jewish anxiety in a post-Holocaust world (p. 208). A disclaimer, stating an

emphasis on pedagogy, positions the book as fundamentally anthropological, rather than historical, and

it serves ultimately as a study more so of discourse than of culture, serving as a transplantation of post-

secondary thought upon the more primary (and oftentimes foundational) levels of Jewish educational

life, to reveal their strengths and weaknesses, gaps, fissures and omissions, and enduring victories.

References Cited

Carolyn Dean

2010. Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University

Press.

Carolyn Dean

2004. The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Naomi Calnitsky is a PhD Candidate in Canadian and Latin American History at Carleton University.

She was a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Otago, New Zealand where she received a

Master of Arts in History. She specializes in research on labour migration from peripheral to first

world economies,  including Mexico-Canada migration routes and postwar Pacific  Island seasonal

migration to New Zealand.

© 2015 Naomi Calnitsky


