This paper attempts to explain the concept of radioactivity of trauma with respect to Jewish immigrants who came to America during and after the Second World War from the perspective of trauma studies. Trauma theory is a discourse of the unrepresentable, a discourse of the event or object that destabilizes language, consciousness and perceptions. Radioactivity of trauma takes place when an external reality of enormous proportions like holocaust enters the psychic spaces without the individual having any control over its entry, implantation and effects. Focusing on select Jewish American fiction, I would like to elucidate this concept