Aftandilian Publishes Journal Article on Armenian Genocide
Gregory Aftandilian, Lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent journal article on how the Armenian genocide impacted the children of the survivors.
Aftandilian’s article, entitled “The Impact of the Armenian Genocide on the Offspring of Ottoman Armenian Survivors,” was published in The Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies.
From the text of the article:
The genocide perpetrated by the Young Turk regime against its Ottoman Armenian citizens during World War I had a lasting and debilitating effect on the survivors of that horrendous calamity, as documented by many oral histories conducted during the 1970s and 1980s with survivors as well as by written accounts by the survivors themselves. What is less known is how the genocide affected the offspring of these survivors. From my own interviews with members of the Armenian-American “second generation,” many of whom are now in their 80s and 90s (those born in the 1920s and 1930s), and my examination of the few scholarly articles that have delved into this issue, I argue that there was indeed a transfer of trauma from one generation to the next. In addition, I argue that the extensive scholarship within the Jewish community, both in Israel and in the Jewish diaspora, on how the Holocaust has impacted the offspring of that genocide, can teach us much about the transgenerational
passing of trauma with regard to the Armenian Genocide. Finally, I examine how the issue of genocide denial has also impacted the second generation.
You can read the entire article here.
Aftandilian spent over 21 years in government service, most recently on Capitol Hill where he was foreign policy adviser to Congressman Chris Van Hollen (2007-2008), professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and foreign policy adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes (2000-2004), and foreign policy fellow to the late Senator Edward Kennedy (1999). Learn more about him here.