Shamai Davidson (1926–1986) was an Israeli professor, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who spent 30 years working with Holocaust survivors, trying to understand the nature of their experience. He was Medical Director of Shalvata Mental Health Center and served as Head of the Elie Wiesel Chair for the Study of the Psycho-Social Trauma of the Holocaust.
Davidson witnessed the Nazi terror and the death of his aunts and cousins in the Warsaw Ghetto, Łódź Ghetto, and the gas chambers of Treblinka. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow and in Oxford University Medical School. In 1979 he became the co-founder of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide along with Israel W. Charny and Elie Wiesel, and worked as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, treating Holocaust survivors, until his death.
Davidson is best known for his work Holding on to Humanity which he started in 1972. According to Jerusalem Post, "In this intensely fascinating book, Davidson succeeds in conveying a systematic understanding of trauma and survival as a whole, while emphasizing individual difference."
Famous quotes containing the word davidson:
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)