Franklin Bialystok Delayed Impact

Annotation

Bialystok begins by examining the years immediately following World War II, showing that Canadian Jews were not psychologically equipped to comprehend the enormity of the Holocaust. Unable to grasp the extent of the atrocities that had occurred in a world that was not theirs, Canadian Jews were not prepared to empathize with the survivors and a chasm between the groups developed and widened in the next two decades. He shows how the efflorescence of marginal but vicious antisemitism in Canada in the 1960s, in combination with more potent antisemitic outrages internationally and the threat to Israel's existence, led to an interest in the Holocaust. He demonstrates that with the politicization of the survivors and the maturation of the post-war generation of Canadian Jews in the 1980s, the memory of the Holocaust became a pillar of ethnic identity.