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Laura Levitt, "Changing Focus: An Introduction," page 4
Notes
1. The American Heritage Dictionary Fourth Edition, s.v. "Ode."
2. This haunting and evocative phrase comes from Michelle Friedman. It is the title of her extraordinary dissertation about Next Generation Holocaust Narratives, "Reckoning with Ghosts: Second Generation Holocaust Literature and the Labor of Remembrance." Diss. Bryn Mawr College, 2001.
3. Laura Levitt, Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home, (New York: Routledge, 1997). See, for example, the table of contents.
4. Serge Klarsfeld, French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial, (New York, New York University Press, 1996).
5. See for example, Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was A World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1998) and Ann Weiss, The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001).
6. I am so grateful to Irena Klepfisz not only for her powerful words but also for her friendship. It was both a pleasure and an honor to have her in the audience as I passed out her words as part of the handout for my presentation at Barnard. Her work continues to be an inspiration in all that I write.
7. In a somewhat different way, I am reminded of Susan Suleiman's efforts to go back and trace her own parents' past but even with the names of places and dates, she discovers that there is no going back, the records of Jews are lost. See Susan Suleiman, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).
8. See for example, Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). Rosen's book is literally his attempt to confront the legacies of his two grandmothers, the one who died in the Holocaust and the one he knew, the woman like my grandparents, an Eastern European immigrant who lived to a ripe out age in this country.
9. I should also note that Janet Jakobsen and I discussed this before the panel discussion where this essay began. We pushed to make the panel and even this issue not about the Holocaust but in our conversation its presence loomed larger. Again I felt important to put the tension out there, to make it visible, tangible, for it is the frame around the more common images I want to consider.
10. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
11. Marianne Hirsch, ed. The Familial Gaze, (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999).
12. It was Michelle Citron's powerful book Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) that inspired me to invite her to Temple University as a guest of the Jewish Studies program. I called her out of the blue saying that although she is best known as a feminist filmmaker, I wanted to have her come and talk some about how Jewishness figured in her work. It was the way Jewishness figured in her book and her accounts of her family that brought her into these conversations. When I asked her to contribute to this issue she took the opportunity to create, "Jewish Looks," a website specifically about some of her own family photographs.
13. This is why I felt it worth asking first Lorie Novak and Joanne Leonard then Michelle Citron and Muriel Hasbun to reconsider their works as Jewish. I wanted to see what might happen if these works are viewed, seen, or read as Jewish. What does this lens make visible and what does it obscure?
14. There are other works not included in this issue that also in different and provocative ways, raise additional questions about Jewishness and family photographs. I am especially moved by "Angels and Ghosts" by Raphael Goldchain, a remarkable Canadian artist. For a powerful analysis of this work, see Shelley Hornstein, "Archiving an Architecture of the Heart," in Sighting the Holocaust: Contemporary Visions, edited by Shelley Hornstein, Laura Levitt and Laurence Silberstein, (New York: NYU Press, forthcoming). See also Raphael Goldchain's website, http://zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/goldchain/index.html.
In addition to this important work, I also want to call attention to another very different Canadian project, Karen Shopsowitz' documentary film "My Father's Camera." For more information on this film see: http://www.nfb.ca/fatherscamera/index.html. Here again I am indebted to Shelley Hornstein for putting me in contact with Karen Shopsowitz. Although the primary focus of this issue has been on American Jews defined in terms of the United States, I want to acknowledge that these Canadian works alongside Muriel Hasbun's contribution to this issue all suggest a broader vision of the various enactments of Jewishness that have been performed in all of the Americas.
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