"Constructions of Survival: Framing Holocaust Narratives in Postwar America"
Ms. Rachel Deblinger is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is conducting research for her dissertation on how eyewitness Holocaust accounts became part of an American discourse of the Holocaust in the early postwar period and how the efforts of the Jewish communal organizations to respond to the postwar world shaped both Holocaust survivor narratives and postwar American Jewish communal life. For her Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship, Ms. Deblinger conducted research for her project “Constructions of Survival: Framing Holocaust Narratives in Postwar America.”
Ms. Deblinger is the author of several papers, including “Creation of a Survivor Voice: Radio and Early Holocaust Narratives,” YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York (2012) and “David P. Boder: Holocaust Memory in Displaced Persons Camps,” which was published in After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, edited by David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (Routledge, 2012). She has received several awards and honors, including the 2011–12 Samuel and Flora Weiss Research Fellowship at YIVO and the 2009–10 Skirball Fellowship in Modern Jewish Culture. She has language skills in Yiddish, German, and Czech.
During her tenure at the Mandel Center, Ms. Deblinger conducted research related to the framing of Holocaust narratives in postwar America.
Ms. Deblinger was in residence at the Mandel Center from June 1 to August 30, 2012.