Episode 20: “How do we carry that”? Janet Jacobs on the ethics and politics of Holocaust memory
In episode 20, I speak with esteemed feminist holocaust scholar, Janet Jacobs, about her work on holocaust memorialization and intergenerational trauma. We discuss Janet’s work on women in cults and on the crypto-Jews. We then dig into her books on the holocaust, one of which was recently banned from the US Naval Academy library by the Trump administration, and we get into the larger issue of weaponizing “antisemitism” in this moment. Janet explores the ethical and psychological challenges of writing about and representing atrocities. How do we avoid re-objectifying victims when we represent or study them? What does it do to us individually and collectivity to engage these histories? How do future generations carry the fear, trauma, and even hate that stem from genocide? What does Frantz Fanon teach us and about how victim-groups can become perpetrators, such as in Israel/Palestine now? We end with both the value and complexity of holocaust memorialization in our moment, and we affirm the necessity of continuing to teach genocide in our classrooms.
Books and other texts mentioned or discussed
Janet Jacobs, Hidden Heritage: The Legacy of the Crypto-Jews, awarded the Distinguished Book Award 2003, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion
Janet Jacobs, Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self
Janet Jacobs, Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide, and Collective Memory
Janet Jacobs, The Holocaust Across Generations: Trauma and its Inheritance Among Descendants of Survivors, awarded best book 2017 by Peace and Conflict Studies of the American Sociological Association
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “The Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write” NYT, April 6, 2025
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Music by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com
Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com
Janet Jacobs
Janet Jacobs Janet Jacobs is Professor of Distinction in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on ethnic and religious violence, gender, mass trauma, and collective memory. She is author of numerous books and journal articles, including Divine Disenchantment: Deconverting from New Religious Movements (1989), Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self (1994), Hidden Heritage: The Legacy of the Crypto-Jews (2002), Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory (2010), and The Holocaust Across Generations: Trauma and Its Inheritance Among Descendants of Survivors (2016). She is editor of Religion, Society and Psychoanalysis, William James: The Struggle for Life and Interpreting Contentious Memory: Counter Memories and Social Conflicts over the Past. Her articles have been published in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Gender and Society, and Memory Studies. Her current work is on genocide and collective memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda. She is a recipient of the Hazel Barnes Prize for teaching and research.
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