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.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2015

Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London, 2020

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.

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.

Jewish Historical Studies, 2020

Here, we maintain that cosmopolitan memory is being trumped by national memory. Rather than arguing that the national and transnational undergo a productive, as it were mutually respectful fusion, we contend that the national simply usurps the transnational, transforming it into another tool in the armoury of national memory. This article is a developed version of a blog first published on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance website: Bill Niven and Amy Williams, “The Role of Memory in the Negotiation of the Refugee Crisis”, IHRA Blog, 20 Nov. 2018, https://holocaustremembrance.blog/2018/11/20/the-role-of-memory-in-the-negotiation-of-therefugee-crisis/ (accessed 30 June 2019); see also Amy Williams and Bill Niven, “Britain remembers the Kindertransport but is in Danger of forgetting its Lessons”, The Conversation, 10 Sept. 2019, https://theconversation.com/britain-remembers-the-Kindertransport-butis-in-danger-of-forgetting-its-lessons-123227 (accessed 17 Nov. 2019).

Holocaust Studies

Education and the First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme. His research interests include the teaching, learning and assessment of history, Holocaust education, and the study of school history textbooks and curriculum, nationally and internationally. He has written more than fifty scholarly articles and book chapters focused on teaching and learning history and he has authored or co-authored six books. His most recent co-authored publication was the groundbreaking national study: What do students know and understand about the Holocaust? (2016). Dr Eleni Karayianni works as a Research and Evaluation Officer at the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education. She is currently involved in the dissemination of the Centre's latest research to educational practitioners and also participates in the design of future research. She holds a PhD in History Education awarded by the UCL Institute of Education in 2012. Her research interests focus on issues of national and international identity formation in history education. She also has wide teaching experience at both primary and university level.

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.