Lightning Talk
Rachel Deblinger
Doctoral Candidate, UCLA History Department
Biography
Rachel Deblinger is a Doctoral Candidate in the UCLA History Department. Ms. Deblinger is currently the Rabbi Joachim Prinz Memorial Fellow at the American Jewish Archive and during 2011-12, she was the Samuel and Flora Weiss Research Fellow at YIVO and a Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Abstract
I am building an online exhibit, Memories/Motifs, based on source material for my dissertation, Holocaust survivor accounts from the early postwar period in a variety of media. Memories/Motifs will be a website that aims to let visitors access the sources directly, enabling a user-driven online experience that promotes individual interpretation of Holocaust survivor accounts. My dissertation examines how American Jews came to know stories about Holocaust survivors through American Jewish philanthropic activities in the immediate postwar period and challenges a well-established historiographical assertion that no one talked about the Holocaust after the war. The digital extension of this research will serve as a resource that can combat this myth of silence by allowing scholars and the Jewish community at large to see the narratives for themselves. This online site will also enable users to assess the relationship between Holocaust narratives and publicity and reach their own conclusions about how the public shaped stories about the Holocaust. Creating an online space for early Holocaust resources and curating a user experience that highlights unique themes and individual experiences empowers users to ask questions about the form and construction of Holocaust memory – questions that are often not part of the user experience of major Holocaust testimony collections.
Memories/Motifs will also consider how media forms make meaning by depicting narratives that were transformed between forms, such as newspaper or magazine articles, radio dramas, short films, and fundraising pamphlets. Examining the role media plays in constructing and preserving early Holocaust survivor narratives challenges the primacy of video testimony in large scale testimony collections and prompts an examination of how future changes to technology will continue to alter the way audiences engage with testimony. In this way, this exhibit looks from the past to the future, beyond video testimony, and considers what’s next for Holocaust testimony.