Search Results (6)

This article examines Marcel Janco’s Holocaust drawings, positioning them within the broader discourse of Holocaust representation, trauma, and avant-garde aesthetics. Created in response to the Bucharest Pogrom of January 1941, these works resist both forensic realism and pure abstraction, instead embodying rupture, instability, and fragmentation. Janco’s grotesque distortions neither document events with the precision of testimony nor dissolve into conceptual erasure; rather, they enact the instability of Holocaust memory itself. This essay argues that Janco’s Holocaust works, long overshadowed by his modernist and Dadaist contributions, challenge dominant frameworks of remembrance. Through comparative analysis with artists, such as David Olère, Anselm Kiefer, and George Grosz, it situates Janco’s approach at the limits of witnessing, exploring how his figures embody violence rather than merely depict it. While Olère reconstructs genocide through forensic detail and Kiefer engages with the material traces of memory, Janco’s grotesque forms share an affinity with Grosz’s politically charged distortions—though here, fragmentation serves not as critique but as testimony. Furthermore, the study interrogates the institutional and critical neglect of these works, particularly within Israeli art history, where they clashed with the forward-looking ethos of abstraction. By foregrounding Janco’s Holocaust drawings as both aesthetic interventions and acts of historical witnessing, this article repositions them as crucial yet overlooked contributions to Holocaust visual culture—demanding recognition for their capacity to unsettle, resist closure, and insist on the incompleteness of memory. Full article

This paper explores the Polish Jew journal as a pivotal second-tier record for advancing Holocaust studies and Jewish genealogy. Traditionally underutilized in academic research, this periodical provides a unique repository of names and narratives of Holocaust victims, filling crucial gaps in primary record collections. The investigation centers on the journal’s potential not only to contribute names to existing databases of Holocaust victims—many of whom are still unrecorded—but also to enhance genealogical methods through the integration of network analysis. By examining Polish Jew, this study illustrates how second-tier records can extend beyond mere supplements to primary data, acting instead as vital tools for reconstructing complex social and familial networks disrupted by the Holocaust. The paper proposes a methodological framework combining traditional genealogical research with modern network analysis techniques to deepen our understanding of Jewish community dynamics during and after World War II. This approach not only aids in identifying individual victims and survivors but also in visualizing the broader interactions within Jewish diaspora communities. This research underscores the significance of Polish Jew in the broader context of Holocaust remembrance. It offers a novel pathway for the future of Jewish genealogical research, advocating for the strategic use of second-tier records in scholarly investigations. Full article

By articulating a shared victimhood or guilt or responsibility, memorial museums are designed as ethical projects that encourage visitors to learn from the past to build a “better future”. In contemporary Europe, Holocaust memorials and museums constitute a trajectory of remembrance about public Holocaust memory that consolidates political legitimacy and articulates national narratives of the legacy of WWII. In parallel, increasing adoption and spread of digital technologies have resulted in a convergence and a globalisation of themes and user interests associated with Holocaust memory. The purpose of this study is to investigate the perspectives and interests of users of the social media profiles of a group of Holocaust museums and memorials in Germany and Italy. Using a primarily quantitative approach, the study sought to understand the motivations, interests, and online activities of users of nine Holocaust museums and memorials. While national narratives regarding public policy continue to diverge in the two countries, users express a convergence of interests and motivations when using these social media profiles. This dual venture of Holocaust memory is a complex yet powerful example of how the globalisation of digital media is playing an increasingly significant role in European contemporary society. Full article

With the passing of the last testimonies, Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust education progressively rely on digital technologies to engage people in immersive, simulative, and even counterfactual memories of the Holocaust. This preliminary study investigates how three prominent Holocaust museums use social media to enhance the general public’s knowledge and understanding of historical and remembrance events. A mixed-method approach based on a combination of social media analytics and latent semantic analysis was used to investigate the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube profiles of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Auschwitz–Birkenau Memorial and Museum. This social media analysis adopted a combination of metrics and was focused on how these social media profiles engage the public at both the page-content and relational levels, while their communication strategies were analysed in terms of generated content, interactivity, and popularity. Latent semantic analysis was used to analyse the most frequently used hashtags and words to investigate what topics and phrases appear most often in the content posted by the three museums. Overall, the results show that the three organisations are more active on Twitter than on Facebook and Instagram, with the Auschwitz–Birkenau Museum and Memorial occupying a prominent position in Twitter discourse while Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had stronger presences on YouTube. Although the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibits some interactivity with its Facebook fan community, there is a general tendency to use social media as a one-way broadcast mode of communication. Finally, the analysis of terms and hashtags revealed the centrality of “Auschwitz” as a broad topic of Holocaust discourse, overshadowing other topics, especially those related to recent events. Full article

Every year around 3000 British school pupils and teachers visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as participants on a Lessons from Auschwitz Project organized by the Holocaust Educational Trust. Each visit ends with a memorial ceremony held at the end of the railway tracks at Birkenau. This article analyses interview and survey data from participating students and educators to explore their experiences of these ceremonies. The research findings indicate that the context and content of the ceremony are significant for both groups, with a general consensus that the ceremony is an important and appropriate way to end the day visit to Poland and the museum. The students’ responses also particularly raise issues around their emotional engagement with the ceremony and the impact it had on them in this way. In conclusion, this article suggests how similar reflective spaces might be created in other educational contexts at similar sites of memory. Full article

In literary narratives by Nava Semel (1954–2017) and Etgar Keret (b. 1967), both Israeli children of Holocaust survivors, readers encounter the kinds of searching questions about inheriting the burden of traumatic inheritance, witnessing, and postmemory frequently intrinsic to second-generation literature in other national contexts. However, their works are further distinguished by acute examinations that probe the moral fabric of Israeli society itself, including dehumanization of the enemy through slogans and other debased forms of language and misuses of historical memory. In addition, their fiction measures the distance between the suffering and pain of intimate family memory (what Semel once dubbed their “private Shoah”) and ceremonial, nationalistic forms of Holocaust memory, and the apartness felt by the children of survivors who sense themselves somehow at odds with their society’s heroic values. Semel’s numerous articles, and fiction as well as nonfiction books, frequently address second and third-generation trauma, arguably most impressively in her harrowing five-part novel And the Rat Laughed (2001) that spans 150 years but most crucially juxtaposes the experiences of a “hidden child” in a remote wartime Polish village repeatedly raped with that of her grandchild writing a dutiful report for her class in contemporary Israel. Elsewhere, in a distant future, a bewildered but determined anthropologist is set on assembling a scientific report with coherent meaning from the fragmented “myths” inherited from the barbaric past. Over the years, Keret (generally known more for whimsical and surreal tales) has often spoken in interviews as well as his memoir about being raised by survivors. “Siren”, set in a Tel Aviv high school, is one of the most acclaimed of Keret’s realist stories (and required reading in Israeli high schools), raises troubling questions about Israeli society’s official forms of Holocaust mourning and remembrance and individual conscience. It is through their portrayals of the cognitive and moral struggles of children and adolescents, the destruction of their innocence, and gradual awakening into compassionate awareness that Semel and Keret most shine, each unwavering in preserving the Shoah’s legacy as a form of vigilance against society’s abuses, whether toward “internal” or “external” others. Full article