Please Join the Folklore Program for our May Graduate Colloquium presented by Vanessa Cutz

“We Have Returned to a Place of Loss: Pilgrimage to Poland as a Holocaust Memorial”

Thursday, May 21, 6-7:30 in the Maple Room at the EMU

Each year, thousands of individuals participate in The March of the Living, a journey that is both a Holocaust memorial and educational tour. This presentation, based on my own journey and recent fieldwork, considers the cultural intergenerational transmission of trauma and how the losses suffered in the Holocaust are memorialized during the March of the Living. The master narrative structured by the tour attempts to come to terms with Holocaust trauma in a culturally meaningful way; I explore how my informants interact with that narrative in the construction of their Jewish identities and through vernacular practices of memory and memorialization.