Conceptions of the Catastrophe. Discourses on the Past before the Rise of Holocaust Memory

Analysis of early-ypost war institutinonal discourses on the recent past

Portrayals of the Holocaust in English history textbooks, 1991–2016: continuities, challenges and concerns

This study examines portrayals of the Holocaust in a sample of 21 secondary school history textbooks published in England between 1991 and 2016. Evaluated against internationally recognized criteria and guidelines, the content of most textbooks proved very problematic. Typically, textbooks failed to provide clear chronological and geographical frameworks and adopted simplistic Hitler-centric, perpetrator-oriented narratives. Furthermore, textbooks paid limited attention to pre-war Jewish life, the roots of antisemitism, the complicity of local populations and collaborationist regimes, and the impact of the Holocaust on people across Europe. Based on these critical findings, the article concludes by offering initial recommendations for textbook improvement

Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck as a parody of the fable or the Holocaust universalized

This article examines Philippe Claudel’s 2007 novel Brodeck (French title: Le Rapport de Brodeck) that allegorizes the Holocaust by parodying tropes and narrative structures characteristic to fairy tales and fables. While analyzing the author’s simultaneous inscription and subversion of the two ancient genres, I speculate about the possible reasons for his narrative choices and consider the meanings generated by his indirect representation of the Nazi genocide. Considering the widespread view of the Holocaust as sacred and unique, the article problematizes the novel’s universalization of the Jewish tragedy, which Claudel achieves by drawing on genres shunning historical and geographical specificity, and aiming to convey timeless and universal truths

The dynamics of diaspora: the transformation of British Jewish identity

The classic model of diaspora constructs the process of population change as spatial, along a horizontal axis, and sequential, with one wave following another. Taking the history of the Jews in modern Britain as a case study, this article argues that we need to take account of the multi-layered character of diasporas, the possibility that vertical alignments are as important as horizontal ones, and that ideological currents may sweep through the different layers of a diaspora simultaneously. The differentiation between types of diaspora is crucial for understanding the internal dynamics of Jewish history and Jewish/non-Jewish relations. Each type engenders a different sort of identity and entails different relations with the ‘host society’