Second Generation Israeli Female Artists: Identity of Holocaust Victim

Children of Holocaust survivors, mostly Second Generation daughters showed emotional identification with Holocaust victims, which was so strong that some of them imagined that events from the Holocaust are actually happening to them. Their explanation is that they did it in order to clarify for themselves how they would have acted had they been "there" instead of their parents and what they would have done to survive. Some were named after a perished child and all felt an obligation to fill the void created by the loss in the Holocaust. The identification of the artists among them is reflected in entering the being, situations and experiences of the victims through depictions of themselves in different situation created by the Holocaust.

In my lecture, I wish to discuss the artistic presentations of Second Generation Israeli female artists` identification with Holocaust victims by showing their self-portrait as camp inmates wearing striped camp uniform, lying in a pile of corpses or like a shadow of the dead.