European Judaism

The impulse that led to the topic of this issue was an invitation to the editor from Dr Glenn Sujo to attend the conference ‘Migration, Memory and Visual Arts: Second Generation (Jewish) Artists’ held by the School of Arts at the University of Leicester, on 7 May 2021, at which he was a keynote speaker. The topic resonated on various levels with themes explored in this journal. Following the conference I approached Dr Sujo who kindly put me in touch with the organisers of the conference, Dr Imogen Wiltshire and Dr Fransiska Louwagie. As editor I want to express my gratitude to Dr Sujo for supporting the project and I am joined in that by the guest editors Drs Wiltshire and Louwagie (now based at the Universities of Lincoln and Aberdeen, respectively). They were immediately responsive to the invitation to edit a thematic issue for the journal and were successful in securing additional financing to cover the cost of the colour reproductions that are an essential feature of this publication. I thank them for their work in curating the original conference, reframing it for this new context and for our collaboration that has led to this valuable record. Drawing on both Dr Wiltshire's expertise as an art historian of modern and contemporary art and Dr Louwagie's background in second-generation writing and memory studies, this issue brings together articles by scholars and artists on the underexplored topic of second-generation visual art practices.

This introduction explains the origins, aims and scope of this thematic issue on Displacement, Memory and the Visual Arts: Second-Generation (Jewish) Artists, which builds on a symposium held at the University of Leicester in May 2021. It offers a discussion of key perspectives on the notions of ‘second generation’ and ‘postmemory’ within the visual arts, followed by an overview of the contributions to the publication. The article then identifies and analyses a number of key threads and themes in the volume, including issues of belated memory, the uses by artists of archival images and documents, their engagement with space and embodiment, and the role of art in memory transmission. These discussions serve as a basis for an examination of how postmemory in the visual arts opens up possibilities for considering the relationships of second-generation artists to the past, and, more widely, revisiting contemporary understanding and remembrances of the Holocaust and its aftermath.

Drawing on the influential concept of postmemory first mooted by Marianne Hirsch, and on the links between photography and mortality first explored by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, this article analyses the work of ten largely UK-based visual artists who, as members of the so-called second generation (namely, the descendants of Holocaust survivors and refugees), make use of the photographic medium to engage creatively and conceptually – and often in a conspicuously gendered way – with the legacy of their families’ traumatic histories. Some of the artists (Halter, Tucker) base their handcrafted imagery directly on pre-war family photographs; others (Winckler, Brunstein, Petzal, Gorney, Kerr, Davidmann) incorporate actual photographs, past and present, into mixed media artworks, frequently manipulating and even doing violence to them. Others again (Garbasz) use photographs taken in the present to reach out to an inaccessible past, while yet others (Markiewicz) employ a more abstract and allusive approach to the medium.

The art of Austrian Kindertransportee Helga Michie has been much discussed, particularly in the context of the work of her identical twin, Holocaust writer Ilse Aichinger. This article, however, focuses in particular on Michie's daughter, English-born painter Ruth Rix, and the relationship with her mother. It considers Rix's appropriation of images inspired by Austrian family photographs and more than a hundred picture postcards, provided by Michie. Across two generations, the art of mother and daughter – overshadowed by the Holocaust – is introduced, examining how each influenced the other, with Rix grappling with both memory and postmemory. As she suggests, Michie offered a ‘doorway’ into Austria, and she, conversely, one to Englishness, though both strayed constantly ‘in and out of each other's worlds’. Motifs inspired by private and wider tragedies highlight shared concerns: fracture, family, memory, identity, loss and notions of home, creating a trans-generational body of work which, when taken as a whole, is even more powerful than when viewed apart.

Monica Petzal is an artist, curator and writer with a particular interest in her German-Jewish background. Trained as a painter and art historian, she became a printmaker in mid-career, enabling her to explore more fully a rich family archive of images, texts and objects. In this article she explores the connection between the writing of Victor Klemperer and her maternal family in Dresden before the Second World War, her family archive and the artwork produced for two exhibitions, Indelible Marks – The Dresden Project in 2013–14 and Dissent and Displacement in 2020.

This article is a conversation between Judy Goldhill and Fay Ballard, two second-generation artists, respectively Jewish and non-Jewish. Goldhill's parents escaped from Nazi Germany, whilst Ballard's father, the novelist J.G. Ballard, was interned in a Japanese prison camp. Goldhill works on photography, film and artists’ books and Ballard draws. They have collaborated extensively, following a conversation in 2016 about a shared experience of generational trauma and early parental loss. Both artists have been using recovered objects, photographs and letters in their artwork and this collaboration has led to several joint exhibitions including Breathe (Freud Museum, 2018), Travelling Companions (Alison Richard Building (ARB), University of Cambridge, 2020–21) and Mending the Psyche (Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck, University of London, 2022).

Based on a pre-recorded video conversation between artist Lorna Brunstein and 44AD gallery director Katie O'Brien, this written interview discusses Brunstein's experience of growing up as a second-generation survivor and the ways in which she has explored this identity in her creative art practices. The conversation offers insight into Brunstein's family history and discusses the role that inherited trauma, place and embodied memory play in her installations and interactive artwork.

This article analyses key changes in public memory in the Netherlands. Its examination of memorials, and their relationships to official memory and creative practices, shows a gradual shift in focus from war heroes to collective and individual victims of the Nazi persecution. The second part of the article focuses on contemporary visual artists, whose works are inspired by their own family histories and by changing attitudes to the memory of the Shoah, which has gained increasing public visibility. In line with the changes observed in some memorials, their artworks demonstrate a key development of Holocaust remembrance since the end of the war, with a shift in emphasis towards remembering individual victims and circumstances. This shows a transition from commemorating the unpronounceable through symbols, towards a detailed memorialising of the Shoah through the names of victims and minute reconstructions via maps, models and portraits.

The Jewish secOnd generation art & family Museum Amsterdam (JOMA) opened in 2022. It combines the artwork of Maarten van der Heijden with the stories of his Jewish family. This article presents the various stages of van der Heijden's work and elucidates his practice as a second-generation artist, drawing on the notions of postmemory and sublimation. The article concludes by discussing the JOMA as a highly personal as well as a collective memory project and its role in human rights education.

Sigalit Landau is an internationally recognised artist born in Jerusalem whose works have been exhibited in major museums worldwide. This article seeks to analyse the sculpture Father and Tufik (2014), in which the artist relates for the first time to the story of her father, a Holocaust survivor from Transnistria. Starting with the creative process that led to the sculpture and examining unpublished sketches, the study shows how the work involves a multigenerational tale and a desire for communication and transmission which is further developed in a series of large-sized sculptures. Furthermore, elements of play, which Ernst van Alphen identifies as a means used by younger generations of artists to confront Holocaust remembrance, can be found in this sculpture and in other key works including Barbed Hula (2000) and One Man's Floor Is Another Man's Feelings (2011) which can thus be interpreted in the context of the Shoah.

Autobiography and self-reflection on Jewish identity are recurring subjects of the works of Miriam Libicki, a third-generation American-Israeli comic artist. Drawing on a semi-structured interview with Libicki, this article explores how the concept of Jewish identity, both personal and collective, has influenced the artist's creative process throughout her career. Libicki's positionality as a third-generation artist is examined, alongside her oeuvre's place within the current trends of third-generation comics. Libicki's recent work on an SSHRC-funded Holocaust graphic novel project, A Kind of Resistance (2022), led her to undertake a more personal project which examines her grandmother's survival experience, Glasnost Kids (forthcoming). This most recent work on Holocaust narratives has brought Libicki closer to her own Jewish ancestry and has allowed her to further analyse and position her own Jewish identity within both historic and contemporary contexts.

Rabbi Tovia Ben-Chorin was born on 15 September 1936 in Jerusalem, the son of journalist and religious scholar Schalom Ben-Chorin (formerly Fritz Rosenthal) and artist Gabriella Rosenthal, the couple having moved from Germany to Palestine in 1935. He graduated with a BA in Bible and Jewish studies from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and was ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati in 1964. He served initially as a rabbi in Israel in Ramat Gan, then in Manchester Reform Synagogue, Jackson's Row (1977–81), and from 1981 to 1996 at the Har El congregation in Jerusalem, which he had helped to establish with his father and stepmother, and which became the ‘mother community’ of today's Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism (IMPJ). During this period, he established the Israeli Progressive Youth Movement and guided the ‘garin’ which established the second Reform kibbutz in the Arava, Kibbutz Lotan. He has written that ‘wanderlust’ led him to become the rabbi of Or Chadash congregation in Zurich (1997–2007) and subsequently Berlin's Pestalozzi Strasse Liberal synagogue from 2009 to 2015, and to a small congregation in St Gallen in Switzerland where he served until his death.