The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History(39 Religion, Culture, and Public Life)

In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, The Holocaust and the Nakba explores the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. The majority of the contributors argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Focusing on them paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables a joint Arab-Jewish dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. This book does not seek to draw a parallel or comparison between the Holocaust and Nakba or to merely inaugurate a “dialogue” between them. Instead, it searches for a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating their complicated intersections. The book features prominent international contributors, including a foreword by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury on the centrality of the Holocaust and Nakba in the essential struggle of humanity against racism, and an afterword by literary scholar Jacqueline Rose on the challenges and contributions of the linkage between the Holocaust and Nakba for power to shift and a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples. The Holocaust and the Nakba is the first extended and collective scholarly treatment in English of these two constitutive traumas together.

Table of Contents:
Foreword: Elias Khoury Introduction: The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Syntax of History, Memory, and Political Thought, by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg Part I. The Holocaust and the Nakba: Enabling Conditions to a New Historical and Political Syntax 1. Harbingers of Jewish and Palestinian Disasters: European Nation-State Building and Its Toxic Legacies, 1912–1948, by Mark Levene 2. Muslims (Shoah, Nakba), by Gil Anidjar 3. Benjamin, the Holocaust, and the Question of Palestine, by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin 4. When Yaffa Met (J)Yaffa: Intersections Between the Holocaust and the Nakba in the Shadow of Zionism, by Honaida Ghanim 5. Holocaust/Nakba and the Counterpublic of Memory, by Nadim Khoury Part II. The Holocaust and the Nakba: History and Counterhistory 6. When Genya and Henryk Kowalski Challenged History–Jaffa, 1949: Between the Holocaust and the Nakba, by Alon Confino 7. A Bold Voice Raised Above the Raging Waves: Palestinian Intellectual Najati Sidqi and His Battle with Nazi Doctrine at the Time of World War II, by Mustafa Kabha 8. What Does Exile Look Like? Transformations in the Linkage Between the Shoah and the Nakba, by Yochi Fischer 9. National Narratives of Suffering and Victimhood: Methods and Ethics of Telling the Past as Personal Political History, by Omer Bartov Part III. The Holocaust and the Nakba: The Deployment of Traumatic Signifiers 10. Culture of Memory: The Holocaust and the Nakba Images in the Works of Lea Grundig and Abed Abdi, by Tal Ben-Zvi 11. Ma’abara: Mizraḥim Between Shoah and Nakba, by Omri Ben-Yehuda 12. From Revenge to Empathy: Abba Kovner from Jewish Destruction to Palestinian Destruction, by Hannan Hever Part IV. On Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam: Narrating the Nakba with the Holocaust 13. Novel as Contrapuntal Reading: Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam, by Refqa Abu-Remaileh 14. Writing Silence: Reading Khoury’s Novel Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam, by Raef Zreik 15. Silence on a Sizzling Tin Roof: A Translator’s Point of View on Children of the Ghetto, by Yehouda Shenhav Afterword: The Holocaust and the Nakba, by Jacqueline Rose Bibliography Contributors Index

About the Author :
Bashir Bashir is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication at the Open University of Israel and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He is coeditor of The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (2008). Amos Goldberg is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust (2017). Elias Khoury is a literary critic and novelist whose books include Gate of the Sun. Jacqueline Rose is a professor of humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Review :
Bashir Bashir, Amos Goldberg, and seventeen contributors have produced a powerful and incisive book that deserves the attention of everyone interested in central European history. In their edited collection of essays, Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (with a forward by Elias Khoury and an afterword by Jacqueline Rose) have created a much needed intellectual space for a topic that has become increasingly politically taboo and thereby subject to multiple modes of censorship (academic and beyond). [A] pathbreaking book. The Holocaust and the Nakba is an original and timely volume that sheds new light into our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By putting these two traumas together, it challenges what many would consider a blasphemous comparison and refutes any binary approaches to explaining one of the most intractable conflicts of the twentieth century. It provides us with new modes of thinking needed for transcending the ongoing political impasse and building a true historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. The key to unlock the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is hiding in the field of psycho-politics. This book offers the readers a new courageous reading for the painful traumatic rivalry that continues to mold the two national communities–the Holocaust and the Nakba. The remarkably insightful, yet challenging, arguments pursued by leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals and scholars in this volume bring a ray of hope during these gloomy times. Bringing together the Holocaust and the Nakba in a joint meditation is a taboo that this salutary book boldly breaks. In discussing the many ways in which the Palestinian Nakba and its Arab representation are intertwined with the Jewish Holocaust and its Israeli representation, it provides the reader with much to mull over at this climactic juncture in the relation between Israel and its Palestinian 'other.' Of the many points of conflict in Israel-Palestine, none is as confounding as the intersecting claims of collective suffering. At once historical and normative, this landmark volume is the first to reprise the many ways in which the relationship between the Holocaust and Nakba have been imagined since the 1940s. The editors propose a bold, even revolutionary framework for relating these traumas that is a necessary provocation to entrenched patterns of memory. Rarely do scholarly works attain the moral and political significance of The Holocaust and the Nakba. Bashir and Goldberg’s essential volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of prominent thinkers to address one of the world’s thorniest problems: how to think through the conflicting narratives of Israelis and Palestinians about their respective traumatic experiences. Without flinching but with considerable nuance, the book offers a crucial ethical and political vision of binational coexistence premised on decolonization and mutual recognition. A ground-breaking book....a remarkably curated collection of interventions that together constitute a new theoretical approach, methodology, and “grammar” to put into dialogue the Holocaust and the Nakba...This book is welcome, long overdue, and will quickly become a canonical text in Middle East Studies.