Abstract: This study develops a novel analytical framework to advance studies of monuments. It does so by systematically integrating four elements of a monument’s assemblage – design, surroundings, rituals, and narratives – to examine their combined potential affective impact on visitors’ bodily and emotional engagement with monuments and the past these represent. These four elements will be applied in the comparison of two Dutch Second World War monuments, the National Monument on Dam Square and the National Holocaust Monument of Names. The article reflects on who or what shapes these monuments’ four elements and what kind of potential affective experiences they engender. The results show that the Holocaust Names Monument creates a sacred space for personal and active Holocaust remembrance. In contrast, the National Monument allows more profane, non-commemorative behaviour, except on 4 May, when the Annual Remembrance Day turns it into a sacred site, evoking collective sentiment and remembering of diverse victims. Despite these differences, both monuments seek to foster empathy for individual victims and a sense of responsibility through reflection. These similarities and differences have emerged over time, reflecting the influence of both individual and institutional actors involved in the monument’s design and management, as well as broader socio-political shifts in commemoration.
Abstract: Historical commissions have played an important role in the most recent efforts to garner restitution and reparations for Holocaust victims and their families. Several dozen Holocaust commissions were convened in the late‑1990s and early‑2000s in European countries where histories of collaboration and complicity with the Nazi regime were either under‑documented or suppressed in the official discourse. This essay examines the Holocaust commissions from a historiographical perspective with special attention given to the methodological and rhetorical strategies they employed when confronted by the traumatic experiences and memories of victims and survivors. While the work of these commissions was shaped and influenced, to varying degrees, by external political forces and interest groups, this essay explores the ways in which “the politics of history” entered into their written reports and, consequently, obscured and silenced fundamental aspects of Holocaust history. Three commissions, in particular, are held up for scrutiny (i.e., Austria’s Jabloner Commission, the International Commission for Holocaust‑Era Insurance Claims, and France’s Mattéoli Commission), and an assessment of their work is given against the backdrop of ongoing debates within the field of trauma studies and in response to questions concerning the Holocaust and the “limits of representation.”
Abstract: La création de l’État d’Israël, en 1948, reconfigure profondément les migrations juives internationales, et la France devient, surtout après 1967, l’un des foyers réguliers de l’alya, terme désignant l’immigration juive vers Israël. Depuis les années 2000, les départs s’intensifient et se diversifient, désormais motivés moins par l’idéologie sioniste que par un sentiment d’insécurité croissante en France. Malgré le paradoxe d’une installation dans un pays en guerre, les migrants placent en Israël une confiance forte, parfois idéalisée, dans sa capacité à assurer leur protection. Cette migration en provenance de France apparaît alors comme un mouvement ambivalent, pris entre urgence ressentie et avenir incertain, et marqué par une structuration communautaire exposée aux enjeux sécuritaires en France comme aux influences du sionisme religieux en Israël.
Abstract: This article examines how rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust are represented in the Polish elementary school core curriculum and history textbooks, offering a critical assessment of the current approach to Holocaust education in Poland.
The inclusion of the Holocaust as a distinct educational topic in schools in Poland is a relatively recent development, marking a shift from earlier decades when it was marginalized or instrumentalized for political purposes. The article traces the evolution of Holocaust education in Poland and highlights the changes introduced after the 2015 parliamentary elections, when the Law and Justice (PiS) government, within its historical policy, began emphasizing Poland’s ‘heroic past’ and the rescue of Jews. This narrative, the authors argue, risks overshadowing the complexities of Polish–Jewish relations during World War II. Trojański and Szuchta demonstrate that current curricula and textbooks often present a simplified, hero-centered narrative that neglects the broader historical context, including collaboration, blackmail, and violence against Jews. Such omissions contradict recent scholarship and hinder the ability of students to understand the multifaceted nature of the Holocaust. Because elementary school materials shape foundational historical knowledge, this imbalance has lasting implications. Finally, the article briefly notes the early steps taken by the new government to broaden the historical framework, but emphasizes that meaningful change will require time, resources, and careful revision of teaching materials.
Abstract: This article examines how local complicity in the Holocaust is negotiated, silenced, and revealed through the spatial memoryscape of Rajgród, a small town in northeastern Poland where Poles participated in the murder of their Jewish neighbors in the summer of 1941. Using a microhistorical lens, it analyzes how knowledge, denial, and memory are inscribed in physical spaces and communal practices, rendering space a cultural text. Drawing on personal and municipal records and ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows how Catholicism, nationalism, and ritual symbolism shape collective remembrance and moral hierarchies of suffering in post-socialist Eastern Europe.
Abstract: Marking the 75th anniversary of The Authoritarian Personalityin 2025, this article revisits its insights into the persistence of authoritarianism in contemporary society, drawing centrally on the work of Theodor Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik. Based on the results of their studies, it can be demonstrated how antisemitism, sexism, anti-feminism, and queerphobia are interconnected rather than separate phenomena—a concept expanded here as the "intersectionality of ideologies." Examining rigid gender norms in authoritarian systems, the article explores their role in reinforcing antisemitic narratives, with examples from Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Additionally, it analyzes the culture industry as a site of ideological entanglement, using the 2022 documenta 15 exhibition as a case study. By reassessing authoritarianism's links to antisemitism and gender oppression, the article highlights its enduring relevance.
Abstract: The afterword reflects on the various contributions in this special issue of Ethnoscripts, which explores the dynamics of contemporary Jewish agency in the context of Jewish cultural heritage. It emphasises the complexities and tensions that arise as Jewish subjects engage with their heritage, highlighting negotiations within communities, intergenerational dialogues, and the interplay between State and minority interests. The afterword revisits several matters discussed in the contributions, such as post-vernacularity, counter-heritagisation, and State and national narratives and policies. It highlights dimensions of critical reflection and attention to complexity. It argues that Jewish heritage should not only be revived and enlivened but also critically engaged with, fostering a dialogue that recognises its complexities and contradictions across different contexts and historical narratives. This text introduces the concept of iridescent heritage, which articulates heritage as dynamic, multifaceted, and shaped by the interactions between subjects, heritage objects, and interpretive frameworks. This idea moves away from fixed and flat conceptions of heritage towards a more processual and complex understanding of its meanings. The afterword suggests the explanatory resonance of a conceptualisation of iridescence with the insights from several contributions in the special issue.
Abstract: Haketia, a hybrid Judaeo-Spanish trans-language suppressed under imperial rule in the Maghreb, is being actively reanimated through digital heritagisation practices amongst dispersed communities of speech. How do digital heritage practices enable the postvernacular transformation of Haketia from suppressed vernacular to an active tool of cross-cultural coalition-building? Drawing on virtual ethnography of the eSefarad online platform, this study examines how such platforms operate not as static preservation but through processes of ‘trans situ’ heritagisation, where cultural elements are exchanged across multiple sites, temporalities, and modes of presence. The analysis traces Haketia’s transition to postvernacular performance, where using the language becomes a conscious cultural enactment that forges virtual communities across historical rupture. Rather than representing continuous transmission, these digital practices are marked by inventive reconstruction and purposeful reassembly, conceptualised here as ‘open-source Sephardism’ – a framework grounded in diasporism that privileges relational ‘hereness’ over territorial return. Through collaborative negotiation and cross-cultural coalition, this digital heritage practice fosters the revival of Judaeo-Muslim virtual worldly commons, demonstrating how minoritised vernaculars can be reactivated as living threads of diasporic connection that transcend traditional boundaries of heritage preservation.
Abstract: This article examines contemporary curatorial practices in France as contested sites where North African Sephardic Jewish cultural heritage intersects with broader questions of memory, transmission, and return. It is based on an ethnographic analysis of four case studies: an academic meeting in Cassis in 2019, two exhibitions at the Palais de la Porte Dorée and the Institut du Monde Arabe in 2022, the grassroots Dalâla festival in Paris in 2023, and the 2024–2025 ‘Revenir’ exhibition at the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille. The article explores how ‘interrupted transmission’ shapes intergenerational creative memory work among Maghrebi Jewish communities and individuals in France. The study contributes to critical heritage studies by illuminating how minority communities navigate state-sanctioned representations while creating alternative spaces for cultural transmission. Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia, Marianne Hirsch’s theory of post-memory, and David Berliner’s work on heritage temporality, the analysis reveals how different curatorial modes – from institutional to grassroots – negotiate the complexities of colonial legacies, displacement trauma, and cultural reclamation. Central to the analysis is the examination of ‘return’ – both the physical journey to an ancestral homeland and the imaginative process of cultural reconnection – as an agential mode of self-affirmation for French-born Jews of Maghrebi descent. I argue that effective engagement with Maghrebi Jewish memory requires multilayered approaches that balance institutional resources with community agency, moving beyond binary frameworks of assimilation/marginalisation or a Jewish/Arab division.
Abstract: State-approved and -funded Jewish cultural heritage has largely focused on concrete tangible spaces or structures, such as synagogues and mikvaot (ritual baths), and material objects. They often represent and evoke an idealised, unchanging Jewishness of the past that is presumed to be acceptable to non-Jewish audiences, yet one that bears little resemblance to lived Judaism, whether past or present. Using hip-hop by Jewish subjects in Germany as a case study, with a special focus on rapper Dimitri Chpakov, this article investigates the mobilisation of popular culture in the twenty-first century by diverse Jewish subjects under the radar of state-sanctioned conceptualisations and representations. Past studies have examined Jewish hip-hop in Germany within the authorised heritage discourse around Holocaust commemoration and anti-Semitism. This article argues that Jewish hip-hop initiatives need to be explored as alternative statements of Jewish heritage, Jewish communal identity, and Jewish diversity, geared towards young living Jewish community members. Such functions tend to be ignored or misunderstood in top-down discourses perpetuated in the public sphere. This article examines the extent to which present-day German Jewish hip-hop prompts a counter-heritagisation process: by creating compelling, deeply personal, and imitable musical forms, it reimagines and reforms conventional definitions of heritage in the service of young Jews living in Germany.
Abstract: Using an interdisciplinary perspective at the intersections of anthropology, Jewish Studies, and critical academic scholarship of heritage, this special issue presents ethnographic examples to explore the relationship between minority groups and the state through the prism of representations of Jewish cultural heritage in the European public sphere. On an empirical level, the articles focus on personal, community-led, and wider public discussions of the way Jewish experience and histories of migration have been (or should be) represented in museums and historical sites, in musical productions and open-air displays, at sites of restitution and in virtual spaces. In this introductory article we summarise the main points of each contribution and some of their connected themes. We then briefly discuss the articles we brought together and outline the main matters of theoretical concern they raise. Key are the aspirations that members of Jewish communities have in negotiating representations of Jewish heritage in Europe and the agentive capacity that diverse Jewish publics, including individual artists and professionals, demonstrate in shaping these representations to achieve, disrupt, or suspend state-sponsored consensus about the preservation of minority heritage.
Abstract: The terrain of the past remains a battleground in Ukraine, where policymakers, interest groups, and individuals continue to use and abuse history for contemporary gains. The recent escalation of Russian violence has only exacerbated these processes. Apart from discussions of Ukraine and Russia’s historical relations and the Holodomor, nothing looms larger than the Holocaust in Ukraine’s ongoing memory wars, whether in discussions and denials of local collaboration and complicity in anti-Jewish violence or exercises in comparative and/or competitive suffering. This article examines the Holocaust as it played out in Ukraine and the evolving memoryscapes that emerged in its wake, homing in on two major massacres, Babyn Yar and Bohdanivka, and their memorial afterlives in Soviet Ukraine (ca. 1945–91) and independent Ukraine (1991–today). While this project briefly engages the well-trod topics of local collaboration and competitive suffering, as evidenced in competing monuments on the site of Babyn Yar itself and the larger commemorative landscape of Kyiv, it draws attention to understudied sites like Bohdanivka, which fell within the Romanian occupation zone during the war.
