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Even though a gender perspective, in reference to various aspects of museums and their exhibits, permeates the reflection on museums, gender is not explicitly taken up as a category of knowledge within the self-reflective narratives about the core exhibition or the conceptualization of the Holocaust gallery in POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jewish, which opened in Warsaw, Poland in 2014. Building upon the research gendering the memory of the Holocaust, especially with regard to historical exhibitions, and using a cultural studies framework to the study of representation, this article asks how femininities are framed by the representation of masculinities and how museum technologies work to produce gendered meanings. It concludes that most of the Holocaust gallery in POLIN problematically instrumentalizes gender relations to underpin a chronological historical narrative. In a dialogue with queer research on temporality, underscoring the coincidence of normative gender/sexuality and linear progressive narrative, it analyses this strategy as gender chronotechnology.

This chapter focuses on literary texts by Jewish North American authors writing in English who as children or teenagers arrived from the (former) Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s and who have successfully carved out a niche for themselves on the American literary scene. These “post-Soviet Jewish North-American writers” are of the same age cohort as the generation producing canonical third-generation Holocaust narratives. Yet the presence of Holocaust postmemory in their writing is in stark contrast to such writers as Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nathan Englander. In David Bezmozgis’s, Lara Vapnyar’s, and Boris Fishman’s work, this contrast stems from the different modes of memory and postmemory punctuating their texts. In their often autobiographical novels, short stories, and graphic memoirs, these writers produce a new mode of Holocaust postmemory that is inflected by their immigrant positioning and Soviet memory.

The article explores prominent contemporary texts by David Bezmozgis, Nadia Kalman, and Nicole Krauss to juxtapose the narratives of generationality they produce. I argue that these narrati...

The article interprets an emblematic segment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibition, The Tower of Faces and the installation on the 1941-2 pogroms in Nazi-occupied Poland in the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews to compare the aesthetic experience of these examples of Holocaust memorialization. It argues that using the concept of “Americanization,” as it is employed in American Studies in Europe and in Holocaust and memory studies, respectively, is instrumental in analyzing the museum experience and as such may contribute to the debates on POLIN and its representation of memory.