In this paper I want to look at the Holocaust story as an example of a value-laden story which might become one of the foundation stones of the emergent global ethics, indispensable for bridging ideological divides that so often prevent a global society from living in peace and solidarity. My key suggestion will be that the stories that have the potential of becoming truly 'global stories', will in reality become carriers of global values only after undergoing interpretative transformation which will enable all citizens of the global village to identify with ethically positive aspects of the story, so that they will perceive this story as their own.

Amy Sodaro, Adam Brown & Yifat Guttman, eds., Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics, and Society (London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Holocaust Studies, 2005

This essay looks at the way the Holocaust and ‘Holocaust memory’ comes to be subsumed within contemporary forms of antisemitism. The most recent and paradoxical illustration of this phenomenon concerns recent ‘debates’ around its now annual commemoration, Holocaust Memorial Day. At the core of these debates is the idea that Holocaust Memorial Day’s seemingly singular focus on nazi crimes against Jews which serves not only to ‘privilege’ its Jewish victims at the expense of others, but also, serves particularist Jewish interests, most notably, Jewish nationalism or ‘Zionism’. One of the articulations of these ‘debates’ is through the language of ‘universalism’ and ‘particularism’. From this perspective, nazi crimes against Jews are presented as ‘universal crimes against humanity’. As a consequence, any emphasis or, indeed, recognition of their specifically Jewish dimensions is read as the illegitimate usurpation of universalism by narrow and parochial particularism, It is as a violation of the seemingly progressive standards of an abstract ‘humanity’ and of ‘universal human rights’ that the alleged specificity of Holocaust Memorial Day stands accused. This essay examines the genealogy of these ‘debates’. The first section offers a critique of critical thought’s treatment of the Holocaust from the late 1980’s onward. In these works we see what I have termed the dissolution of the specifically or ‘particular’ Jewish aspects of nazism into a more generic and abstract ‘universalism’. In the second section, I discuss the consequences of this dissolution when re-articulated in the index of ‘morality’; that is, in the development of the Holocaust as moral symbol or ‘icon’. In the section that follows, I examine the ways in which the allegation of Jewish ‘particularism’ around the question of Holocaust memory and memorialization is said to stimulate the unravelling of the post-national and post-modern project of the ‘New Europe’. The final section looks at similar negative presentations of the Holocaust in the recent critical rejection of ‘ethics’ and a return to what is termed ‘the political’. I conclude by arguing that together, these attempts to understand the antisemitism run the risk of reproducing the very phenomenon it seeks to challenge.

European Journal of Social Theory, 2002

This article analyzes the distinctive forms that collective memories take in the age of globalization. It studies the transition from national to cosmopolitan memory cultures. Cosmopolitanism refers to a process of 'internal globalization' through which global concerns become part of local experiences of an increasing number of people. Global media representations, among others, create new cosmopolitan memories, providing new epistemological vantage points and emerging moral-political interdependencies. The article traces the historical roots of this transformation and outlines the theoretical foundations for the emergence of cosmopolitan memories through an examination of how the Holocaust has been remembered in Germany, Israel and the USA in the course of the last fifty years. It is precisely the abstract nature of 'good and evil' that symbolizes the Holocaust, which contributes to the extra-territorial quality of cosmopolitan memory. As such, memories of the Holocaust contribute to the creation of a common European cultural memory.

Journal of Genocide Research, 2022

This article argues that there exists an undesirable link between the factual specificity of the Holocaust and its commemorative prioritization. Following a discussion of the rise of the Holocaust to the moral pinnacle of global memory culture, two primary examples of the enduring nature of this problematic link are advanced. In the first place, the importance afforded to factual specificity functions as an obstacle to the betterment of Eastern European memory. Though disingenuous actors certainly seek to play down local responsibility for the Holocaust, the commemorative primacy afforded to the Holocaust, on the basis of its factual specificity, clouds efforts to distinguish between collaborator apologists and those who inaccurately draw factual comparisons between the Holocaust and other events in order to attain commemorative equality. Second, present-day historians retain the use of words such as “unique”, “unprecedented” and “singular”. These words are often applied to the Holocaust in such a way that implies that the Holocaust is the only such event, thus mixing the inherently political into scholarly debate. This article argues that both sides of, for example, the recent “German Catechism Debate”, ought to abandon the notion that the facts of an event are relevant to commemorative prioritization. Instead, scholarly disagreements over comparative studies should be definitively separated from commemorative decisions. A failure to achieve this separation has repeatedly blocked intellectual progress. Importantly, in criticizing the link between factual specificity and commemorative prioritization, this article avoids a universal denunciation of Holocaust memory (which is often multidirectional) and instead offers a way forward.

Journal of Intercultural Management and Ethics, 2022

The Holocaust signifies an immense human failure. Historians are now very open to the way other disciplines can illuminate areas of the past and of past behavior. The difference between historical and intercultural approaches is less problematic than it once was, due to recent research regarding national cultures and cultural dimensions. We consider that intercultural analysis has a great deal to offer to Holocaust studies. Indeed, the intercultural issues have received relatively little attention in relation to the study of the Holocaust. A classical taxonomy—perpetrator, victim, bystander—has long dominated studies of the Holocaust, genocide, and other mass atrocities. We specifically chose to study these aspects, from the point of view of the interculturalist, and show that a person is not by nature—born or preordained—to be one or the other. A person becomes a perpetrator, a victim, or a bystander. Our paper reveals that individuals behavior depends on cultural values (especially uncertainty avoidance and collectivism) and cultural practices (languages, felt and attributed identities, interpretations of history), which affect the ideology of the majority. This article investigates the connection between cultural dimensions and human behavior using intercultural analysis. Thus, an intercultural perspective suggests that cultural dimensions influence behavior.

European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire, 2011

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