Amos Goldberg

הספר עוסק את התופעה הספרתית הנפוצה של כתיבת יומנים בידי יהודים בתקופת השואה. הספר בודק את העימות שבין מגמתו הקונסטרוקטיבית של הטקסט האוטוביוגרפי (כסיפור חיים) לבין הממדים המפרקים והמתפרקים של הטראומה.
הספר מחולק לשלושה חלקים. החלק הראשון הוא מבואי והוא סוקר את התופעה עצמה, מציע מודל להבנת הטקסטים הללו וממקים את העיסוק בהם בתוך ההיסטוריוגרפיה שנכתבה על השואה. החלק השני עוסק בסוגיית הזמן ביומנו של ויקטור קלמפרר מדרזדן. והחלק השלישי עוסק ברובו בשאלת קולו של המעוול החודר לתוך קולו של הקרבן כפי שהדבר בא לידי ביטוי ביומנו של חיים קפלן איש ורשה

Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global discourse by critically examining their function and inherent dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued intellectual and practical discontent.

Review of Anna Hájková. The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt. New York:  Oxford University Press,  2020.
The American Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 3, September 2022, Pages 1409–1412, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac227

As early as 3 February 1940, some five months after Warsaw had been occupied by the Nazis and some nine months before he was prisoned in the Warsaw ghetto, the Hebrew diarist Chaim Kaplan addressed the question of how Nazism could be understood and represented: Descriptive literary accounts cannot suffice to clarify and emphasize its [Nazism’s] real quality. And moreover, no writer among the gentiles is qualified for this task. Even a Jewish writer who lives the life of his people, who feels their disgrace and suffers their agony, cannot find a true path here. Only one who feels the taste of Nazi rule in all his [body], only one who has bared his back to the lashes of his whips […] only such a writer, if he is a man of sensitivity […] might be able to give a true description of this pathological phenomenon called Nazism.1

Abstract: Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources. Publication Date: 2009 Publication Name: History and Theory

This article follows Charles Maier's notion of two global moral-historical narratives dominating our world: the Holocaust narrative and the post/anti-colonial narrative. The article follows some of the relations between these narratives and their inherent tension and clashes, focusing primarily on the context of Palestine-Israel. It ends with a hint to a third way which it calls "bi-national".

Church from the time of Christ and the apostles with the sectarian divisions, isolation in small numbers, and postbiblical origins of the Waldensian heretics. Persecuting the Waldensians, therefore, was a way for Zwicker and others to translate any doubts about church teachings or ritual practice into potential heresy. It also enabled the clergy to deploy the persecution of dissidents as a way to quell their own doubts and anxieties resulting from a persistent crisis in ecclesiastical unity and stability that, during Zwicker’s lifetime, seemed far from resolution. Välimäki is very much aware that Zwicker’s pastoralization of heresy required not only the participation of inquisitors, but also the publicly disciplined bodies of persecuted Waldensians. The trials over which the Celestine monk and provincial presided resulted in condemned heretics suffering such punishments as humiliating penance, perpetual imprisonment, and burning at the stake. However, while acknowledging the experie...

One of twentieth century's most radical yet widespread political evil is the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing and forced migration. This phenomenon has undoubtedly brought great misery to very many people around the globe. However when one looks more closely into these events it sometimes becomes much more difficult to distinguish in a clear cut way between malicious perpetrators and righteous victims. Moreover, although at the end of the day one has to take a moral stand in regard to such criminal acts of evil, it is not less important to investigate and understand the human dimension that enabled or caused them in the first place. Such an investigation often reveals the complexity and the deep tragic dimensions of these historical events. In this chapter I explore the memoir of the Holocaust survivor Beni Wircberg who immigrated to Palestine and fought on the Zionist side in the 1948 war which resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel on the one hand, and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians (the Nakba) on the other. I characterize three interconnected registers of violence in the memoir that make Wircburg identify with the victim and perpetrator positions at one and the same time - manifestation of what Mahmood  Mamdani theorized as "victims who become killers".

An oft-forgotten fact about Warsaw Jews during World War I I is that until they were deported to Treblinka, they lived in an urban space. In order to understand the wartime life o f Warsaw Jews, then, we must investigate the new modes of urbanism that evolved in those years. This article seeks to investigate the new modes o f communication that emerged during the war as a result of the transformed Warsaw Jewish public sphere. More specifically, it examines the new culture of rumors that emerged and prevailed during that time and that replaced the highly literate prewar Jewish public sphere of Warsaw. The first section of the article describes various aspects of this phenomenon, and the second section, which constitutes the bulk o f the article, focuses on rumor culture's semiotics and hermeneutical procedures. In so doing, this article uncovers a fundamental social practice o f the time, enabling us to scrutinize and map Warsaw Jews' wartime mentalite (popular beliefs, mindsets, and " mental " processes), which was com­pletely transformed under Nazi occupation.

Elias Khoury’s novel Bab el Shams (Gate of the Sun), which came out in 1998 symbolically marking fifty years to the Palestinian Nakba, is perhaps the most comprehensive narrative of this ongoing event. This fascinating novel has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. My suggested reading of the novel is inspired by and juxtaposed with Holocaust literature
and what might be called ‘Holocaust related critical theory’. This reading, I contend, is invited by the novel itself and is pursued from the perspective of a Jewish Israeli Holocaust and trauma scholar. The main argument of this essay is that the novel deals with the unsettling conjuncture of the extremely destabilizing, traumatized and decentred testimony of the Palestinian victim–
witness and the essential, collective Palestinian national epos  that frames these individual traumatized narratives. The former inevitably undermines the latter while, at the same time, the latter collectively frames the former. These tensions, integrations and disintegrations form the core theme of Gate
of the Sun. To put it differently, I contend that this novel is about the unsettling paradoxes of writing a polyphonic non-monolithic decentralized collective epos. This narrative of collective and individual traumas manages to unsettle old national structures and ultimately invites binational thinking.

Abstract:

Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources.

Publication Date: 2009

Publication Name: History and Theory

A chapter from: Dan Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, (New York: Berghahn publication 2012), pp. 79-100
An analysis of four major trends in Holocaust historiography about the Jews and a suggestion research Jewish life during the Holocaust along cultural history lines

This article explores the question of whether the Holocaust and the massive body of research on it have had a significant impact on the discipline of history. I argue that although their impact is felt in a few areas within the discipline (for example, genocide studies and collective memory), they seem not to have influenced its deep structure. The article focuses on two postmodern theoretical discussions that took place withing the discipline, and examines their impact. The first discussion dealt with issues of representation of the Holocaust, epitomized with the publication of the canonical book Probing the Limits of Representation (1992), edited by Saul Friedländer. I argue that although this discussion was groundbreaking in terms of theory, it had very little impact on the practice of historical writing. The second discussion dealt with issues of meaning production in history and contributed to the emergence of the field of cultural history, which fundamentally changed the discipline of history. However, this field, so it seems, was not influenced by Holocaust research.
In the second part of the article, I consider Saul Friedländer’s recent book, The Years of Extermination: 1939–1945, (2007) as an attempt to integrate the theoretical insights of the representation discussion with historical writing. The result, I contend, is aesthetically impressive but has very limited theoretical significance.

פרק מתוך הספר "כאב בשר ודם" בעריכת שירה סתיו ואורית מיטל. הפרק מבחין בין שתי פואטיקות של טראומה - פואטיקה של גוש ופואטיקה של חריץ. הראשונה מנכיחה את הטראומה כגוש והשנייה חורצת בה חריץ באמצעות מבע אירוני. הפרק מבוסס ברובו על מושגים פיסכואנליטיים