"Comfort Women" Activism in the United States: The Example of the Kupferberg Holocaust Center

Fully seventy years after the end of World War II, debate on the “comfort women” system is still going on, within and beyond Asia. This paper explores movements and responses related to the comfort women issue in the United States since the early 2000s. Fifteen comfort women survivors filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court of Columbia in 2000; the U.S. House of Representatives passed Resolution 121 on the comfort women system in 2007; various state legislatures and city councils passed similar resolutions; and comfort women memorials were erected in various cities, including Palisades Park, New Jersey (2010), and Glendale, California (2013). Despite the general American public’s relative lack of knowledge on the issue, such accomplishments indicate that activism and awareness movements have become increasingly effective in American society in recent decades.

In particular, this paper focuses on the efforts of the Kupferberg Holocaust Center (at Queensborough Community College) in raising awareness of the comfort women issue as a case study. Since a 2010 exhibition on comfort women co-organized by the Holocaust Center and KACE, a local Korean American NGO in the New York/New Jersey area, the Kupferberg Holocaust Center has developed a series of events, educational programs, and a full-scale exhibition on the plight of comfort women. This paper examines those activities, how the holocaust center came to be involved in this “Asian” issue, the approaches it takes to the issue, and how the campus and local community have responded.