scholarly journals Pillar of Fire – from Auschwitz to Casablanca

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 390-412
Author(s):  
Nitza Davidovitch ◽  
Ruth Dort

Aim. This study examines the characteristics of the individuals who go on the journey to Poland, which is a key element of the Holocaust education curriculum in Israel, their personal connection to the Holocaust, as well as the socio-political developments in Israel that attempt to bridge the gap between the various poles in society – between East and West. Concept. Holocaust education includes the formal part, which is the historical narrative, and the informal part, which is the journey to Poland. This study follows the development of Holocaust education and commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust – from the narrative of the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe to the narrative of the Holocaust among the communities of North African descent. Results and conclusion. The findings of the study indicate a link between family support and ties to the Holocaust, and the journey to Poland, which appears to be in line with findings of Nitza Davidovitch and Dan Soen (2011), who found a correlation between the students participating in the journey and their personal connections to the Holocaust, in contrast to students with no family connection with the Holocaust. For all its importance, the journey to Poland has been found to perpetuate social polarisation. Practical applications. The current study highlights the challenge of Holocaust education in order to build a bridge of shared historical destiny through this seminal event of the twentieth century. Originality. This work sparks the question of how to make the journey to Poland a unifying factor in collective national memory.

2014 ◽  
pp. 803-822
Author(s):  
Marta Witkowska ◽  
Piotr Forecki

The introduction of the programs on Holocaust education in Poland and a broader debate on the transgressions of Poles against the Jews have not led to desired improvement in public knowledge on these historical events. A comparison of survey results from the last two decades (Bilewicz, Winiewski, Radzik, 2012) illustrates mounting ignorance: the number of Poles who acknowledge that the highest number of victims of the Nazi occupation period was Jewish systematically decreases, while the number of those who think that the highest number of victims of the wartime period was ethnically Polish, increases. Insights from the social psychological research allow to explain the psychological foundations of this resistance to acknowledge the facts about the Holocaust, and indicate the need for positive group identity as a crucial factor preventing people from recognizing such a threatening historical information. In this paper we will provide knowledge about the ways to overcome this resistance-through-denial. Implementation of such measures could allow people to accept responsibility for the misdeeds committed by their ancestors.


2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (1 (8)) ◽  
pp. 150-161
Author(s):  
Siranush Chubaryan

The article refers to the organization of Genocide and Holocaust Education at secondary schools in Armenia. The survey and investigation indicate the key direction of the reforms in the national program of education. Special attention is paid to reforms in the fields of social sciences, as well as human rights (including the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust) at the secondary schools in Armenia which significantly contribute to the establishment of civil society in our country.


2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-88
Author(s):  
Jenny Wüstenberg

Claus Leggewie and Erik Meyer, “Ein Ort, an den man gerne geht” Das Holocaust-Mahnmal und die deutsche Geschichtspolitik nach 1989 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2005)Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005)


2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 968-997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly A. Arkin

AbstractDrawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the “European” Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, which divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new pedagogical narratives relied on a very different historicity, or way of reckoning time and causality, than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. By reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, they offered an expansive and homogenously “European” Jewishness. This argument works against a growing postcolonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing “Jewishness” as transparently either “European” or “French.” It also highlights the role played by historicity—not just history—in producing what counts as group “identity.”


Author(s):  
Olga Gershenson

The study of Holocaust representation in cinema is located at the intersection of film studies and Holocaust studies. The scope of issues dealt with in the field is defined by two sets of tensions: first, tensions between history and narrative, and second between Eastern and Western understanding of the Holocaust. The tension between history and narrative emerges in response to the famous dictum by Adorno that there is no poetry after Auschwitz. The filmmakers—and the scholars studying their films—must engage with the thorny questions about the representability of atrocities on screens. Consequently, a body of scholarship, grounded in the theories of visual culture and psychanalytical theory focuses on the challenges of portraying tragic history authentically and in ways that honors the victims. The question is to what extent can historical facts be fictionalized, and which genres of fiction and documentary are appropriate. Specifically debated is the representation of the Holocaust in comedy, fantasy, and other popular genres. Scholarship also deals with questions of memory—how do the cinematic representations reflect and shape our understanding of history and transmission of memory. The second set of tensions emerges as a result of complex history both during World War II and the Cold War, which divided the world into the “West”—including the United States, Western Europe, and Israel, vis-a-vis the “East,” that is, the Soviet bloc. Under Soviet rule, the story of the Holocaust was largely subsumed into that of the “Great Patriotic War,” silencing the fact that its victims were Jews. Consequently, representation of the Holocaust in Soviet and other East European national cinemas was censored. Alternatively, the Western narrative of the Holocaust was mainly concerned with stories of Nazi concentration and death camps, obfuscating the history of the Holocaust in the Soviet territories. Only recently has the Western historical narrative of the Holocaust started turning to the East and film scholarship expanded its focus to include Soviet and Soviet-bloc national cinemas. This scholarship also asks questions of representation, but mainly in the context of censorship and suppression, as well as of comparative analysis of the visual culture of the Holocaust in national cinemas. Such scholarship uncovers hitherto unknown films and also analyzes the Eastern and Western narratives of the Holocaust in the post–Cold War era. Finally, some scholarship on Holocaust films is also concerned with periodization, that is, discussing films in the context of the historical period in which they were produced and circulated, whether in a particular national context or comparatively. This bibliography makes note of periods, from early Holocaust cinema to current films.


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