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

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Books and other texts mentioned or discussed

Janet Jacobs, Hidden Heritage: The Legacy of the Crypto-Jews

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

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: [email protected]

Comments and ideas to [email protected]