Dr. Amy Kerner, Fellow of the Jacqueline and Michael Wald Professorship in Holocaust Studies and Assistant Professor in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies, kicked off the first of the Ackerman Center's annual Spring Lecture Series. This yearly forum provides an opportunity for Ackerman Center faculty to present research and discuss topics related to Holocaust, genocide, and human rights studies. This year's theme concentrates on “Jewish and National Memory of Dictatorships in Latin America.”

Dr. Kerner presented her lecture “Language and Trauma: Yiddish in Post-Dictatorship Argentina” where she discussed the various ways that the Yiddish language mediates the traumatic history, memories, and experiences of Jewish Argentines during the “Dirty War." (1976-83). She emphasized that shifting Jewish attitudes toward Yiddish before, during, and after this period play an important role, not only in how Jewish Argentines tell their stories, but also in the ways of understanding the historical, cultural, and social contexts of national trauma.

Dr. Kerner contrasted the conception of Yiddish in American and Israeli culture to that of Jewish Argentines in order to better illustrate the importance of the social and cultural geographies in order to understand what Yiddish meant in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas the U.S. and Israel experienced a resurgence in nostalgia for Yiddish folk and popular culture, the 1970s are generally considered to be a time of Yiddish language loss and decline. She stressed that the entanglement of memory and dictatorship has had a huge impact on contemporary attitudes and thought about the meaning of the Yiddish language and representation in Argentina.

Dr. Kerner explained that the so-called “Dirty War" is a euphemism for state-sponsored violence and murders that ensued after the regime came to power in 1976 and continued until the fall of the dictatorship in 1983. At the time, knowledge of the scale of the crimes committed by the regime was not widely known, however, historians estimate that between 10,000 to 30,000 people were “disappeared” and murdered by the dictatorship. She emphasized that the “Dirty War” represents a recent trauma in Argentina’s national collective memory that has in many ways been understood as a collective silence, and the imprint of this trauma is what sets it apart from other contexts of the Yiddish language.

Dr. Kerner began by providing a brief historical outline of the “Dirty War” in Argentina. In March of 1976, The Process for National Reorganization, also known as the General’s regime, staged a coup that brought the dictatorship to power. Between 1976 and 1982, the state waged war on politically active citizens, especially targeting the youth, alleging their involvement in “left-leaning” subversive movements. Many university students were drawn to the rhetoric and activities of revolutionary movements. Dr. Kerner noted that Jewish Argentines are disproportionately represented as victims of the regime for several reasons. Although anti-Semitism and anti-Judeo-Bolshevism were both factors that formed the ideological background of the “Dirty War” and policy-making on behalf of the regime, Dr. Kerner stressed that the victims were not specifically targeted as Jews, but rather by their status as Jewish youth of the middle class, and as such attended university in much larger numbers. Many young Jewish revolutionaries came from Yiddish-speaking homes, and their parents were often European Jewish immigrants. In the 1960s and 1970s, anti-Yiddish sentiment was a common sentiment among Jewish Argentine youth who had grown up in Yiddish households. Often stigmatized as the outdated language of their parent’s generation.

Dr. Kerner called attention to an increasing post-dictatorship phenomenon in which the writing and publishing of works of fiction and nonfiction concerning Jewish Argentines’ experiences of detention and torture incorporate memories of Yiddish in their texts. She identified three different trajectories in Jewish Argentine memory, each of which stems from the association of the Yiddish language with the Holocaust and serves as an important turning point in the history of the Yiddish language in Argentina. The first emerges in the immediate postwar period. There was an urgent need to commemorate both the Yiddish language and culture in the wake of the destruction wrought by the Final Solution which had decimated the whole of Eastern European Jewry. In the1960s and 70s, the second trajectory emerged in which the post-Holocaust generation of young Jewish Argentines collectively reject and rebel against the Yiddish language and culture. The third trend starts after the fall of the dictatorship in 1982 and continues until the present day, in which there is a renewed interest in both the Yiddish language and culture. Dr. Kerner emphasized that as a whole the three represent the constantly changing meanings of Yiddish both after the Holocaust and the “Dirty War.”

One significant facet that has emerged from Dr. Kerner’s research is an opportunity to juxtapose the memories and experiences documented by the post-Holocaust generation to those of their Holocaust survivor parents. In essence, these narratives of wartime suffering and violence help to form a deeper understanding [from which] which serves as a metaphorical bridge linking the once foreign and inaccessible experiences of their survivor parents to their own memories and encounters of wartime violence and oppression.

Dr. Kerner concluded by emphasizing how the Yiddish language in Argentina serves as a jarring contrast to a conception characterized by comedy and nostalgia. She stressed that in contemporary Argentine society, memory reconstruction of this national trauma is still in an ongoing process, and for many Jewish Argentines, these issues remain fundamentally unresolved. The aura of trauma haunts the legacy of Yiddish in Argentina in the post-dictatorship era, and this is reflected in the ways that Jewish Argentines have dealt with the memory of the dictatorship. Ultimately, what these works represent is a re-emergence of Yiddish in Spanish cultural reproductions connected to a collective working through of these traumatic histories and experiences of the regime.

We hope that you can join us for the next two lectures of our annual Spring Lecture Series. You can find more information regarding each lecture and register for these and other events by visiting our events webpage.

Each episode has corresponding primary source documents, which can be viewed by clicking on the episode names below:

Ackerman Center Podcast Episodes: Season 2:

Jan. 31: 1933 | The Reichstag Fire and the Enabling Act

March 14: 1934 | Hitler and Mussolini Meet in Venice

Mar. 24: 1935 | Nuremberg Laws

April 25: 1936 | The Olympics in Berlin

*May 30:1937 | The Pacific War: The Rape of Nanking
-and- 1938 | Eichmann and the “Office of Jewish Emigration”

All past and future episodes are available for streaming on the podcast's website and other streaming platforms.

*Note: the season finale on May 30th will have two episodes.