https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/at-home-with-the-holocaust/
On March 11, 2025, Rutgers University Press released At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives by Lucas F. W. Wilson, PhD. At Home is 188 pages long, inclusive of an index, end notes, and a bibliography. The book’s goal is to analyze how children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are traumatized by their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences. The book focuses on how homes – that is, houses and geographic locations – can transmit trauma from one generation to the next.
In an online biography, author Wilson says, “I am the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary.” On a University of Calgary page, Wilson follows his name with “Pronouns: he/him/his.” In an interview, Wilson says, “My work has largely centered on the Holocaust, but given the rise in anti-queer and anti-trans violence, public policy, and legislation, I redirected my attention on a main catalyst of homophobia and transphobia today: white Christian nationalism … Both the Holocaust and conversion therapy are inextricably connected to Christianity … The Christian scriptures and Christian theology laid the seedbed for the Holocaust … Christianity has so easily lent itself to such hatred.” Christians have “genocidal intentions” toward GLBT people, Jews, and “Indigenous folks in North America.”
Wilson, though young, is an exceptionally successful scholar, enjoying a degree of financial support and accolades that most scholars can only dream of. “I have received several fellowships and awards for my work.” An incomplete list of his honors: The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi’s Dissertation Fellowship; a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellowship; The Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman Memorial Fellowship from the American Jewish Archives; a Regent Scholarship, two Edwin L. Stockton, Jr., Graduate Scholarships from Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society, an Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, and a Zaglembier Society Scholarship awarded by The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.
At Home with the Holocaust has received high praise. Scholar and author Victoria Aarons says that the book “makes a vital contribution to the research on second and third-generation Holocaust descendants with the Holocaust meets the needs of a reader happily immersed and unquestioningly invested in academic trends in writing styles, thought processes, ideology, and ethics. I am not that reader. This book exemplifies serious problems in contemporary academia, as I will detail in the review, below. First, a word on why I care about this topic.
As soon as I saw the Rutgers University Press ad for this new book, I was eager to read it. I have been swimming in the water of post-World-War-Two trauma for my entire life. I’m a baby boomer, a drop in the post-World-War-II demographic surge. I didn’t give it much thought in my childhood, but I was surrounded by post-war trauma.