The Shoah in Postcolonial Perspective

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the interconnectedness of Jewish studies and postcolonial studies, particularly when it comes to questions of diaspora, memory, and trauma. Inherent to Edward Said’s conceptualisation of Orientalism is the ‘secret sharer’ of Western antisemitism. Such secret sharing was brought to the fore recently in the Netherlands when Dutch-Jewish author Arnon Grunberg declared in his Remembrance Day speech on 4 May 2020 that ‘if you’re speaking about Moroccans, then you’re speaking about me’. In a similar act of solidarity, in her novel Les Attentives [The Attentive Ones] (2014), French-Algerian Muslim author Karima Berger enters into sisterly dialogue with Russian-Dutch Jewish confessional writer Etty Hillesum through her wartime diaries, and more specifically the figure of a Moroccan girl who features within them. The dialogic novel reveals how Jews and Muslims are ‘secret sharers’, in their differentiated though intersecting experiences of colonisation, Orientalism, secularisation, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. In this way, it embodies memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg’s notion of ‘differentiated solidarity’ (2011). This sisterly solidarity is exemplified by contemporary peace activists Dina Awwad-Srour and Emma Sham-Ba Ayalon, a Palestinian and an Israeli, who created the ‘Etty Hillesum Cards’ in 2019 to promote a humanist response of global healing in the face of trauma.

This event is held in collaboration with UCL's Department of Dutch Studies. The Respondent is Jane Fenoulhet, Emeritus Professor of Dutch Studies at UCL and the meeting will be chaired by Francois Guesnet, Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, UCL.

Watch the trailer of Bringing Etty Hillesum to Life here.