In Person Talk: Jewish Men and the Holocaust: Sexuality, Emotions, [...]

As part of its New Academic Book Series, The Wiener Holocaust Library is pleased to announce a lecture with Dr Florian Zabransky on his new book 'Jewish Men and the Holocaust: Sexuality, Emotions, Masculinity'.

During the Holocaust, amid death and violence, Jewish men were not mere powerless victims. Linking gender studies with a history of sexuality and emotions will highlight intimate agency, power struggles, negotiations of relationships, social dynamics, and representations of masculinities. Considering the agency and vulnerability will further convey intimate choices, the representation of masculine ideals, intimate violence, and the expression of various emotions such as honour and love. As research on the Holocaust often links women with sexuality or portrays women as gendered beings, it is crucial to excavate the intimate, hidden lives of Jewish men and their specific intimate experiences as men.

The analysis not only demonstrates how Jewish men remember and make sense of their experiences, but also how they chose to form the narrative and how they represented their ordeal in four chapters, namely ghettos, concentration camps, Jewish resistance in the countryside, and finally, DP camps in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The consideration of these four spaces allows a nuanced, innovative understanding of the intimate history of Jewish men during the Holocaust, i.e. how some men established male dominated structures and established intimate strategies to find solace and pleasure.

About the Speaker

Florian Zabransky is a programme manager at the Federal Agency for Civic Education in Germany with a focus on antisemitism and memory cultures. He completed his PhD in 2022 at the University of Sussex, where he was awarded the Clemens N. Nathan Scholarship for his research on male Jewish intimacy during the Holocaust. He is a trained sociologist, and during his studies worked at institutions commemorating the Holocaust, such as the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial Site near Hamburg and the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main.