Method and Meaning in Holocaust-Knowledge Surveys

In: Novis-Deutsch, N. S., Lederman, S., Adams, T. & Kochavi, A. J. (2023). Sites of Tension: Shifts in Holocaust memory in Relation to Antisemitism and Political Contestation in Europe. Haifa: The Weiss-Livnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education, p. 298-317.

This work addresses how public and private attitudes toward the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors in the United States may have influenced the way in which the survivors viewed themselves and their relations with others. It seems that both ‘public’ and ‘private’ attitudes toward the Holocaust and its survivors in America impeded a better understanding of the Holocaust and the survivor experience. Further, the above may have – in fact – adversely affected the adult psychological development of the survivors. Finally, an alternative explication of the dynamics underlying the attitudes examined here will be presented that can contribute to a more correct and beneficial way of approaching survivors of events producing similar psychological manifestations as the Holocaust.

Political Psychology

This research tested whether chronic or contextually activated Holocaust exposure is associated with more extreme political attitudes among Israeli Jews. Study 1 (N 5 57), and Study 2 (N 5 61) found that Holocaust primes increased support for aggressive policies against a current adversary and decreased support for political compromise via an amplified sense of identification with Zionist ideology. These effects, however, were obtained only under an exclusive but not an inclusive framing of the Holocaust. Study 3 (N 5 152) replicated these findings in a field study conducted around Holocaust Remembrance Day and showed that the link between Holocaust exposure, ideological identification, and militancy also occurs in real-life settings. Study 4 (N 5 867) demonstrated in a nationally representative survey that Holocaust survivors and their descendants exhibited amplified existential threat responses to contemporary political violence, which were associated with militancy and opposition to peaceful compromises. Together, these studies illustrate the Holocaustization of Israeli political cognitions 70 years later.

Journal of Traumatic Stress, 1995

This paper discusses the complex attitudes of Israeli society and mental health professionals toward the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. While the nascent state of Israel provided refuge for the Holocaust survivors and offered them a new identity and opportunity to rebuild their lives, it also demanded that they abnegate their former identities, their Holocaust experiences above all, and repress all the emotional problems that the Holocaust created. In the nearly 5 decades since the first survivors arrived on Israel's shores with their accounts of barely imaginable horror, society's attitudes toward the survivors have traced a tortured course, throughout which the views of the helping professions have mirrored, rather than led, those of the general public. This paper describes the process of change in attitudes and attempts to explain this process.

2016

What new insights can social scientific methods uncover from material predominantly situated within the humanities—oral histories, in particular—and why might this methodological development be valuable for the greater interdisciplinary field of Holocaust (and Genocide) Studies? In this project, I use the videorecorded testimonies of the Shoah Foundation archive to create a testable and replicable theory about the influence of national rhetoric on memory. In particular, I research how and why the typical Soviet-Jewish Holocaust testimony is likely to differ from a non-Soviet—for example, Polish, French, or Hungarian—narrative of victimhood and oppression. I hypothesize that national rhetoric impacts memory, in particular the memory of child survivors that remained in the Soviet Union until its collapse. The mechanism that links national rhetoric to memory is the socialization, or assimilation, that these young people experienced during their formative postwar years. I suggest that these factors—national rhetoric, socialization, and assimilation—lead child survivors to recall those who helped or harmed them in a particular manner. To operationalize my study, I developed a code to trace the confluence of proper nouns and strong emotional responses in videotaped survivor testimonies. I chose videotaped testimonies, as opposed to written or audio testimonies, as the presence of metadata (namely: silences, facial reactions, and body language) is most observable with this medium. In this preliminary test of my methodology, I began with survivors born in Minsk, who remained there after the war, but intend to expand my analysis to other cities that demonstrate assimilative variation throughout the post-Soviet region. In addition to the empirical portion of this research, I also address the potential ethical problems in quantifying sensitive archival material. By reading oral testimonies as both text and a response to text, I demonstrate patterns in how this group of Soviet-Jewish survivors uniquely remembers their own childhood, wartime experiences. Ideally, this method could not only reinforce, objectively and systematically, our current hypotheses about history and memory, but could also generate new theories that scholars may have overlooked.

PROSPECTS, 2010

This article examines Holocaust education in secondary school social science textbooks around the world since 1970, using data coded from 465 textbooks from 69 countries. It finds that books and countries more connected to world society and with an accompanying emphasis on human rights, diversity in society and a depiction of international, rather than national, society are more likely to discuss the Holocaust. Additionally, textbooks from Western countries contain more discussion of the Holocaust, although the rate is increasing in Eastern European and other non-Western countries, suggesting eventual convergence. We also find a shift in the nature of discussion, from a historical event to a violation of human rights or crime against humanity. These findings broadly support the arguments of neo-institutional theories that the social and cultural realms of the contemporary world are increasingly globalized and that notions of human rights are a central feature of world society.

Israel Studies, 2003

Until the 1960s, many scholars assert, most Americans' awareness of the Holocaust was based upon vague, trivial, or inaccurate representations. Yet the extermination of the Jews was remembered in significant ways, this article posits, through World War II accounts, the Nuremberg trials, philosophical works, comparisons with Soviet totalitarianism, Christian and Jewish theological reflections, pioneering scholarly publications, and mass-media portrayals. These early postwar attempts to comprehend the Jewish tragedy within prevailing cultural paradigms provided the foundation for subsequent understandings of that event.

Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 2006

Interviews with 29 Holocaust survivors indicate wide variation in degree of aversion to Germans and activities associated with Germany. For some survivors, aversion is limited to those closest to the Nazi perpetrators; for others aversion includes anyone with German ancestry and any situation or product linked to contemporary Germany. This wide range of aversion following horrific experiences is not easily explained by known psychological mechanisms, and has important implications for understanding and ameliorating ethnopolitical conflict. Possible sources of variation in aversion are explored with measures of personality differences and differences in Holocaust experience. Results indicate that degree of trauma during the Holocaust is not significantly related to aversion, and that strong predictors of aversion are degree of blame of Germans not directly involved in the Holocaust, religiosity, and German origin. Aversion to Germans is strongly related to aversion to contemporary Arabs and Muslims.

Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire, 2016