Guest lecture: "Reading Gender in the Memoirs of German Jewish Refugees during the Nazi Era"

Lecturer: Professor Judith Gerson, Departments of Sociology, Women's and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA

This lecture analyzes the meanings of collective identity and collective memory among Jewish refugees who fled Germany between 1933 and 1941, and resettled in the States before the war’s end.  Reading largely unpublished memoirs, oral history interview transcripts as well immigrant essays written in the 1940s, Judith Gerson unravels how expressions of being Jewish and German are gendered.  Interpretations of German and Jewish practices suggest that gender binaries exist alongside convergent forms of femininity and masculinity as writers and speakers record their past.  Though there is significant variability in what it means to be German Jewish gendered subjects, gendered practices that emphasize family prevail in these testimonies. A focus in these narratives on emigration and resettlement rather than experiences of the atrocities of the Holocaust, moreover represents a desire to collectively forget the past and reassert conventional forms of gendered life.