“Yiddish is Our Language, Concentration Camp is Our Passport:” Survivors and Holocaust Memory in the United States

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture Fellowship in American Jewish History (The Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellowship and the Dora and Mayer Tendler Endowed Fellowship in Jewish Studies) Admission: Free

The 1983 inauguration of the American Gathering for Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Washington DC was the largest gathering of survivors since the closure of the DP camps in the early 1950s. The 20,000 attendees asserted their connectedness to one another based on their shared experiences, and their distinct identities as survivors. This event was the culmination of decades of survivor-driven activities, debates, and discourse around how best to memorialize the destruction of European Jewry.  

In this talk, David Slucki traces the development of Holocaust survivor organizations from small circles of left-wing, Yiddish-speaking survivors, to the bigger, inclusive networks like WAGRO and the American Gathering. Through these organizations, survivors negotiated their understandings of who was a survivor, what was the Holocaust, and how it should be memorialized.

About the Speaker

David Slucki is an Assistant Professor in the Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program at the College of Charleston. He is the author of The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: toward a global history (Rutgers University Press, 2012), which looks at the attempts of Bundists to rebuild and adapt their shattered movement in the wake of the Holocaust. He is also co-editor of the recent volume In the Shadows of Memory: the Holocaust and the Third Generation (Vallentine Mitchell, 2015), a collection of scholarly contributions and personal narratives on the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. His current research focuses on American Holocaust survivor organizations from the 1940s to the 1990s. Dr. Slucki is the 2015-2016 recipient of YIVO’s fellowship in American Jewish History, The Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellowship and the Dora and Mayer Tendler Endowed Fellowship in Jewish Studies.