Carolina Seminar • Poland as Israel’s Antinomy in Contemporary Israeli post-Holocaust Narratives

The presentation will explore the geographical setting of Israeli national Holocaust discourse and the role Poland as a symbolic space plays within it. The main focus of this exploration will be to show how the binary opposition between Poland–the land of death–and Israel–the land of life–for several decades provided tools not only to talk about the Jewish past, but also to navigate the Israeli present. The phenomenon will be juxtaposed with literary works that involve Holocaust narration in a familial, rather than national, context. By and large, they introduce ambiguity to this solidified national narrational schema and in this way can be seen as broader statements against how official Israeli discourse engages the topic. These observations will be placed in the context of changes the events of October 7 introduced to the Israeli Holocaust narrative, which has served since then as a primary discursive framework for comprehending those events.

Jagoda Budzik is a tenured assistant professor at the University of Wrocław in the Taube Department of Jewish Studies. She also teaches Hebrew literature at Middlebury College in the Middlebury School of Hebrew summer program. She’s the author of the award-winning book, “Eretz Sham: Poland in the Writings of the Third Post-Holocaust Generation in Israel” (Warsaw, 2023). Currently she is working on her second book under the working title “Modern Goy. The non-Jewish Other in modern Hebrew literature.” Her work is highly interdisciplinary and draws from literary, cultural and memory studies.

The seminar series is a joint session of Carolina Seminar on Transnational and Modern Global History and Carolina Seminar in Eastern European and Russian/Soviet Studies. It is co-sponsored by the Carolina Seminar Program and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies and the Carolina Seminar on Transnational and Modern Global History. Please note that the participants will give an overview of their projects but will not read a formal paper. Instead, papers or book chapters will be circulated ahead of time to those who are interested in attending and participating in the discussion. Please contact Dr. Eren Tasar for more information (etasar@email.unc.edu).