Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2010

This essay examines the relationship between contemporary racialized subjects in Germany and the process of Holocaust memorialization. I ask why youths from these contexts fail to see themselves in the process of Holocaust memorialization, and why that process fails to see them in it. My argument is not about equivalences, but instead I examine the ways in which the monumentalization of Holocaust memory has inadvertently worked to exclude both relevant subjects and potential participants from the process of memorialization. That process as a monumental enterprise has also worked to sever connections between racialist memory and contemporary racism. The monumental display of what presents itself, at times, as moral superiority does not adequately attend to the everyday, mundane, repeatable qualities of racialized exclusion today, or in the past.

The Politics of Heritage: Legacies of Race, 2005

Holocaust Memorial Day was first held in Britain on 27 January 2001, the 56th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. This chapter addresses the question of why, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a state-sponsored commemoration should be initiated of an event which took place over half a century ago and outside Britain’s shores. The creation of a new, national, ritual – even one ostensibly about a past event – is not just an outcome of a mounting impetus to remember: it also speaks of, and to, the time and place of which it is part. Among other things, I argue, Holocaust Memorial Day articulates a reconfigured vision of a (multicultural) national identity, legitimated through reference to the past and the iconic evil of our times.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu Centre for War & Peace Studies, 2013

German Politics and Society, 2005

In 1997, Hinrich Seeba offered a graduate seminar on Berlin at the University of California, Berkeley. He called it: "Cityscape: Berlin as Cultural Artifact in Literature, Art, Architecture, Academia." It was a true German studies course in its interdisciplinary and cultural anthropological approach to the topic: Berlin, to be analyzed as a "scape," a "view or picture of a scene," subject to the predilections of visual perception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This course inspired my research on contemporary German history as represented in Berlin's Holocaust memorials. The number and diversity of these memorials has made this city into a laboratory of collective memory. Since the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, memorials in Berlin have become means to shape a new national identity via the history shared by both Germanys. In this article, I explore two particular memorials to show the tension between creating a collective, ...

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.

International Journal of Advances in Social Science and Humanities, 2019

The concept of Holocaust memory hails from a past process, which sought to define the existence of the Holocaust in the years succeeding the tragedy, in various forms of commemorative exercises. The Holocaust museums, commemorative sites, and annual commemorative events formed the hallmark of these exercises. This paper examines the nature of Holocaust Memory in the 21 st Century and its relevancy as to public sentiment under current geopolitical realities. To begin with, it is a presupposition by the author that Holocaust shaped memory has shifted within world Jewry from what was at one time linked to variations of survivor testimonies and second and third generational syndromes toward newly embedded cultural sentiments that are related to a designed public memory, without linkage to specific events, people or places. Along with the shifting of Holocaust Memory the Israeli State narrative has developed alternative mythologization that serves the nation-state by inserting the notion of military might. It is paramount that newly minted memory sets become identifiable and definable. A mixture of Jewish religiosity along with Israeli statehood ideology largely drives the morph sis of this memory. While seemingly disconnected from geographic boundaries, it is linked to political sentiments, which are surprisingly similar in Israel and the Diaspora, and are seen as trending along Right vs. Left ideologies. The objective of this work is to inform the public about a current configuration of Holocaust Memory that has evolved rather recently and is currently poorly defined in academic and social discourse.

Holocaust Studies, 2017

International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2016

The debate about a German Leitkultur (leading culture), as it attempts to address issues around the integration of immigrants, contributes to the discourse of “normalization” i that began in the early 1980s. With an attack on the Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance), conservatives aimed to reestablish a ‘normal’ German national consciousness within a European context. However, forty years after the end of WWII, President Richard Weizacker reminded the public that the traumatic Nazi past should be in the memory of every Germanii. Within Leitkultur narratives, Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to terms with the past) raises further questions about what constitutes a contemporary German identity, particularly as Germany becomes increasingly dynamic within global political and cultural spheres. The collapse of the Berlin wall and subsequent influx of a large numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers led to one of the greatest challenges Germany faces today: how to reconcile the dif...

2006

Assuming that the consequences of devastating events for individuals and collectivities run different courses, why do we use the word " trauma " to explain a wide array of social and cultural phenomenon? Trauma has traveled far to become a key not only to explain, like originally conceived wounds to the body, but injuries to spirit, culture, society and politics. Trauma has proliferated into a metaphor deployed to explain almost everything unpleasant that happens to us as individuals and as members of political communities. How do we conceptualize the transition from the trauma of the individual to the traumatized community? What does trauma mean for a theoretical formulation of collective memory? What are the social, legal and political dimensions that inform representations of collective traumata? Wulf Kansteiner (2004) provides an insightful history of the metaphoric diffusion of trauma, criticizing its loose deployment as inadequate. He points out that it is misleading...