It is deeply troubling to speak about traumatic violence and the bloody, desecrated, and destroyed property of those whose lives have been profoundly harmed without acknowledging the present moment. Since October 7, 2023, these concerns have been very much on my mind. The many months since then have been almost impossible to bear for so many, but none more than those who are trying to make lives in unlivable conditions in Palestine and in Israel. The incalculable, continued loss of life and limb haunt this essay alongside the captivity of so many innocent lives. And like so many of us, I struggle to find the right words, writing and rewriting these words, these sentences. How can I appreciate the differences between what those in Gaza, in the West Bank, and what those in Israel are experiencing right now, as I write in March of 2024? Thirty-one thousand dead (and counting), starvation, few medical supplies, the destruction of homes, businesses, schools, hospitals, museums, and archives, entire communities — how can these losses not figure in what I might say in this forum?
These times
Pause.
My work has been about the legacy of the Holocaust and violent criminal acts, the ways that such experiences continue to shape our lives in both intimate and more grand historical ways long after these horrific events. I have come to these stories through material remains, criminal evidence, the objects that were there then and are here now, and I have used these remnants to attempt to tell these difficult stories, stories often otherwise without words. In this respect, the tales I tell are forensic. They are pieced together from the objects that remain. But right now, the profound devastation that continues in Gaza, in particular, demands our attention. Some of what I have learned about trauma and loss from my work on Holocaust memory and criminal justice, might help us begin to confront the urgency of the present moment. By taking seriously the ties that bind us, these stories of tainted objects allow us to appreciate our connections to those who are suffering now, people like and unlike ourselves. Informed by the careful and painful work of scholars of Holocaust and traumatic memory, poets and writers who have drawn such connections, I enter this conversation. Their words inspire these musings. I offer them with humility.
In her 1990 essay “Yom Hashoah, Yom Yerushalayim: A Meditation,” poet, activist and child survivor of the Holocaust Irena Klepfisz wrote about the First Intifada. She shaped this essay explicitly for Jewish Women’s Call for Peace, an organization that was devoted to ending the occupation. In this piece, Klepfisz carefully considered a series of challenges that remain all too familiar to many American Jews today. How do we appreciate the vulnerability of Jews or the importance of the Jewish state since the Holocaust? And, at the same time, how do we confront the urgency of Palestinian suffering then and now, under occupation and under siege in the present?
Over these many years, I have come to appreciate what happens when we address different experiences of trauma, violence, and profound loss next to each other, not to make them one and the same but to appreciate their similarities and their differences. Irena Klepfisz did this so long ago, delicately drawing out connections for the sake of justice and peace. Early in her brief essay, a text I have taught for over thirty years, Klepfisz already addressed the taboos around any analogizing of the Holocaust with what is happening in Israel/Palestine. She made clear the anguish that marks these commitments to respecting Jewish pain. And yet, she ventures to draw a connection.
“What does it remind you of?” I ask my mother, and read her the Newsday article about the Palestinian men in Rufus; rounded up by the Israeli police, they’re told to lie face down in a nearby field. “I know what it reminds me of;” she answers, and says nothing more.
Klepfisz made a formal connection. She asked her survivor mother what is already obvious, a relationship between something that was happening then, in the present moment of the Intifada, and what happened in their Holocaust past. Whether we want to acknowledge these associations or not, it is difficult not to see them, to feel them. This is where I find myself these days. I am back in familiar territory, writing about formal connections between different losses just as I did in American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust, but now the stakes feel much higher. I am not writing about everyday losses in American Jewish life, but rather the pain and sorrow of so many in Palestine and also in Israel and I do so from a distance. But there is more.
At the heart of her essay was Klepfisz’s address to a gathering of survivors and their families commemorating the forty-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a defiant act that took the life of her own father. In the talk, she described what it is that survivors mourn, not just on this designated occasion “but during all those frequent moments when memory of childhood or ghettos or camps is triggered by something in the present — an angle of someone’s jaw, a special shade of color, a faint smell of a certain food, a dream.” What does it mean to lose things that were once so familiar to us that we hardly paid any attention to them — a pair of sweatpants, an old comforter that, once brushed by violence, returns to us with a vengeance, as a deep reminder of all that we have lost? In those daily moments, Klepfisz explained, “the fabric of our present life tears apart” and “survivors mourn and mourn again.” But what I find even more haunting right now is how she described what it is that survivors mourn, what the Holocaust meant to them. She begins with der khurbn, the destruction and devastation that survivors experienced, noting that it
is not general but very specific. It is reflected in precious sepia photographs pasted into incomplete family albums. It consists of identifiable names, of familiar faces of family members, of named streets, stores, and schools, teammates, friends, libraries, doctors, hospitals, lectures, marches, strikes, political allies and enemies — the people, places, and institutions that make up the fabric of any human being’s ordinary, everyday life. It is these specifics and the loss of that ordinary life that survivors remember and mourn.
Reading this familiar passage in the present, what does it remind you of? The loss of once familiar names and faces, streets, stores, libraries, hospitals, everyday objects, a dress, a pair of sneakers, a child’s bicycle, or a sweater? Like Klepfisz’s mother, I know what they remind me of. I cannot stop these associations.
The objects that remain
My scholarship has focused on the ongoing effects of trauma and violence and how we live with these legacies. These days, I still take my cues from Klepfisz. I do this even as I turn my gaze to the material remains of the present conflagration, the similarities and the difference between those once ordinary possessions and the ones I have written about — Holocaust objects and criminal evidence. These remnants that were there then, and are accumulating now, are a way into sharing these tortured tales. The objects are but one way of recognizing the tangible toll of violence and its rippling effects over and across time. These are scars that do not disappear. Rather, they constitute abiding reminders of these legacies, showing us in visceral and material ways how our everyday lives can be torn apart over and over again and how difficult it is to remake our lives in the aftermath. They constitute our undoing.
For me, this has meant finding, reading, and telling forensic stories with the hope that these painful tales just might help us carry on. And in the most hopeful of circumstances, these stories enable us to build on what Michael Rothberg calls “differentiated solidarities.” These kinds of intimate alliance can help us resist these all-too-often horrific cycles of violence. As Klepfisz suggested so long ago, these tales are not merely about the past. They insist on speaking to us in the present. They demand that we confront the ongoing destruction of ordinary lives. Sharing these stories is doing justice. It is a crucial way to begin to resist the cycles of vengeance and ongoing violence.
How can we do justice to these experiences? As the poet Maggie Nelson explains, justice does not come from on high. It need not always be “rendered,” “served,” or “done” in the passive voice. It need not always swoop down — from God, from the state — like a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword come to separate the righteous from the wicked in the Earth’s final hour.” Instead, what she calls for is “something we can give to one another, something we can make happen, something we can create together down here in the muck.” Writing about her aunt’s thirty-plus-year-old unsolved murder, Nelson resists the allure, the promise of a courtroom doing justice to her aunt’s life and death, through her forensic writing in both her book of poetry, Jane: A Murder, and her memoir about the trial, The Red Parts. In these texts, Nelson honors the broken nature of this story of a life and its violent, abrupt ending — a tale told in pieces. Like Nelson, we do this kind of justice by attending not only to the scars, but also to the wounds that are open and festering right now. My work has focused primarily on the aftermath of violence and not so much on its abiding presence. And yet, knowing what I know, I find this distinction untenable. Being attentive to the destruction of everyday life is an ongoing struggle and even those of us who have known the terror of violence cannot turn away.
This essay is indebted to the Society of Jewish Ethics, where I presented some of this material on January 5, 2024, and to Suffolk University, which hosted “The Ties that Bind Us: Forensic Storytelling Across the Ages,” a conversation with Barbara Abrams that took place on March 21, 2024.