Israel and the daughters of the Shoah

Contends that the unavoidable inclusion of the Holocaust in the Israeli social myth was accompanied by the stigmatization of Holocaust survivors and the silencing of their memories. Israeli memorialization of the Holocaust became a tool in the negation of the diaspora; the Zionist discourse "masculinized" the "New Hebrew" brought up in the Land of Israel, and "feminized" the Holocaust and its survivors. Moreover, this type of Holocaust memory serves to justify the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Israeli women writers and filmmakers of the second generation have challenged the Zionist version of Holocaust memory. In 1992 Lentin interviewed nine such writers and filmmakers, "daughters of the Shoah". Her book contains excerpts from the interviews (and in one case the full text) and offers a gendered analysis of Israeli society and the Holocaust. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)