Bøker av Jordana Silverstein

Cruel Care tells a story of government, politics and the emotions that drive decisions. It asks why Australia has treated child refugees with violence and why governments say that the cruel acts they perpetrate are a form of care. Based on extensive research - including 35 oral history interviews with key policymakers, along with a rich set of archival sources - this book traces how governmental authorities can make decisions designed to control and disenfranchise children in their care. It explores how legislation, ministers, political parties and the public service have combined to create a sentimental rhetoric of welfare while enacting repressive policies. And it details the weaponization of rhetoric such as 'best interests of the child' and the histories of race - and racism - that shape Australian discourses of national security. At the heart of this book is a study of the stories of the people who shape refugee policy. Cruel Care asks provocative questions about how policymakers are shaped by, and in turn shape, their histories, communities and the nation, in order to offer bold suggestions for how we could achieve collective justice for refugees.

Over the last seventy years, memories and narratives of the Holocaust have played a significant role in constructing Jewish communities. The author explores one field where these narratives are disseminated: Holocaust pedagogy in Jewish schools in Melbourne and New York. Bringing together a diverse range of critical approaches, including memory studies, gender studies, diaspora theory, and settler colonial studies, Anxious Histories complicates the stories being told about the Holocaust in these Jewish schools and their broader communities. It demonstrates that an anxious thread runs throughout these historical narratives, as the pedagogy negotiates feelings of simultaneous belonging and not-belonging in the West and in Zionism. In locating that anxiety, the possibilities and the limitations of narrating histories of the Holocaust are opened up once again for analysis, critique, discussion, and development.