Holocaust studies

Once again, conflating anti-Semitism, a hideous evil, with opposition to Israel's heinous crimes against the Palestinian people, up to and including a genocide.

Genocide as considered by the consensus of genocide scholars Including Israeli genocide scholars such as Professor Omer Bartov, the Dean's Professor of Genocide and Holocaust Studies at Brown University, NGOs like Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, a UN independent commission.

This conflation of opposing the hideous crimes of a state which has wiped Gaza from the face of the earth, slaughtered well over 100,000 people according to multiple studies, bombed hospitals, slaughtered medics, wiped out homes, schools, all the pillars of a civilization, deliberately starved its population, slaughtered so many little kids, children, babies, toddlers.

Conflating that with hatred of Jewish people is disgusting.

She became Professor of German Literature there in 2024.

Professor Finch's research ranges across German literature, comparative literature, and Holocaust studies, as well as identity, gender, and queer studies.

Her monographs include German Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust: Beyond Testimony, which was published by Camden House in 2023, and Sebald's Bachelors: Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life, published by Legenda in 2013.

With Lynn L. Wolff, she has co-edited the volume Witnessing Memory Poetics: H.G. Adler and W.G. Sebald, which appeared with Camden House in 2014.

Recent articles include "Constructing a Gay German Jewish Identity in Holocaust Memoirs", published this year in Holocaust Studies, and "Avenda in Representing the Holocaust in German Literature: From Jurek Becker to W.G. Sebald", which was published in German Quarterly in 2023.

She is one of the co-editors of Peter Lang's Women, Gender, and Sexuality in German Literature and Culture book series.

Helen Finch has been principal investigator and co-investigator on several major externally funded research projects, including the project Literary Testimony, Transnational Memories: the Politics of Transmission of Holocaust Testimony in the German Cultural Field, which ran from 2013 to 2014; Performing the Jewish Archive, which ran from 2014 to 2018; and the Transnational Holocaust Memory Project, which ran from 2015 to 2018.

I also did some work on the fantastic East German writer, Antje Rabeck-Schröbel, and queer memories in her work.

Her online index of Canadian Jewish community cookbooks, Northern Noshs, is a treasure trove of information.

Based in Hamilton, Ontario, Kay specializes in Jewish genealogy and Holocaust research, and she uses that expertise to work on reuniting searchers with familial recipes through her Substack, Paper Trails, where she publishes vintage recipes together with a dash of biographical context that connects readers to the recipe's origins.

Kay, welcome to Tête-à-Tête.

Thanks so much for having me.

I would imagine these types of experiences are a natural part of what you do and who you are.

Just from our conversation, I can see that you genuinely care about people and their stories, yet everything you and I have been talking about today is clearly more than avocational.

What does your professional life as a librarian bring to your, and dare I say, equally professional life as a genealogist, Holocaust research, and if I can call it that, an archeologist of Jewish culinary traditions and vice versa?

Well, it's funny you should actually mention archeology, because that was my original major when I was in university.