ABSTRACT
Fear is an intrinsic part of the human condition, and is an emotive force essential for survival. A continued relationship with fear is a recognised feature of trauma. In consequence, many ordinary Jews draw on the language of trauma, particularly the trauma embodied in the Holocaust, as a way of explaining certain feelings of fear generated in the here-and-now. Post-Holocaust ordinary Jewish fear therefore takes its strength, the author suggests, from several interwoven sources which are psychological at least as much as they are actual. For ordinary Jews contemplating their feelings about the Holocaust, their fears contain a puzzling illogicality. Like Jacobson's Maxie Glick, ordinary Jews living in the diaspora have been "born safely, at a lucky time and in an unthreatening part of the world, to parents who loved and protected". As with fear, the author explores how ordinary Jewish emotional reactions to the Holocaust have been deeply coloured by toxic images under whose shadow we still live.
