Dr. Alan Berger

In Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, & Memory, Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger show that Holocaust literary representation has continued to flourish well into the twenty-first century—gaining increased momentum even as its perspective shifts, as a third generation adds its voice to the chorus of post-Holocaust writers. In negotiating the complex thematic imperatives and narrative conceits of the literature of third-generation writers, this bold new work examines those structures, tropes, patterns, ironies, disjunctions, and overall tensions that produce a literature that laments unrecoverable loss for a generation removed spatially and temporally from the extended trauma of the Holocaust. Aarons and Berger address evolving notions of “postmemory”; the intergenerational and ongoing transmission of trauma; issues of Jewish cultural identity; inherited memory; the psychological tensions of post-Holocaust Jewish identity; the characteristic tropes of memory and the personalized narrative voice; issues of generational dislocation and anxiety; the recurrent antagonisms of assimilation and historical alienation; the imaginative re-creation and reconstruction of the past; and the future of Holocaust memory and representation.

About the Author

Alan L. Berger occupies the Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair for Holocaust Studies, the first Holocaust chair established in the state of Florida, and is Professor of Judaic Studies at Florida Atlantic University where he also directs the Center for the Study of Values and Violence after Auschwitz. Berger founded and directed the Holocaust and Judaic Studies B.A. Program at FAU (1998-2005).  Prior to this, he was a professor in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University where he founded and directed the Jewish Studies Program.  He also served as Acting Chair of the Religion Department and Interim Chair of the Fine Arts Department.

Among his books are Crisis and Convenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction, Judaism in the Modern World (Editor), and Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust, (Foreword by Elie Wiesel), the first systematic study of American films and novels of children of Holocaust survivors analyzing the legacy of the Holocaust on the second generation.

He has lectured on the Holocaust, Jewish American Literature, Theology, and Christian/Jewish Relations throughout America and in Europe, Australia, South Africa, and Israel. Berger has also spoken at Yad Vashem and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is on the Readers Committee for The Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest. Berger is a Founding Associate Director of the Association for the Study of Jewish American and Holocaust Literature. Berger was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa from Luther College in 1999.

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In Conversation With

Asher Z. Milbauer is Professor of English and Director of the Exile Studies Program at Florida International University. Prior to his current appointment at FIU, he taught in the former Soviet Union, Israel, and the University of Washington. Among his publications on exile/immigrant literature and trans generational legacies is a book on literary transplantation, Transcending Exile: Conrad, Nabokov, I. B. Singer a study on exile and return, Eastern Europe in American-Jewish Literature, a co-edited collection of original essays, Reading Philip Roth, as well as essays on a number of major literary figures. He is the co-host (with Dr. Deborah Briggs) of a monthly Yiddish Salon at the Betsy-South Beach Hotel.”