Abstract: The interest in the Holocaust – Nazi Germany's concentrated attempt to exterminate European Jewry – has become increasingly noticeable in the Scandinavian countries during the last decades, with a growing number not only of dissertations, monographs and other publications, but also public debates and controversies relating to this event. This new upsurge of interest in the Holocaust reflects the dynamics and the contested nature of collective memories of wartime Scandinavia more broadly. This article highlights, broadly speaking, the development of Holocaust historiography in Scandinavia; the changing perspectives, interpretations, debates and focus from the immediate post-war years to the present day. It argues that, despite the fact that the Holocaust was truly a European-wide phenomenon transcending national borders, Holocaust studies have mainly been produced as nation-centred histories. Only with the end of the Cold War and with a paradigmatic shift from ‘the event’ to ‘the memory’ has a new form of Holocaust remembrance begun, ‘the cosmopolitanization of Holocaust remembrance’, which transcends borders and makes memory cultures coincide. In Scandinavian historical cultures and historiography, then, the 1990s marks the starting point of a process by which Holocaust remembrance has become officially embedded into European memory.
Abstract: Since the end of the Cold War, most European nations – including those in Eastern Europe – have reassessed their role in the Holocaust. Although the Finnish scholarly community, as well as the wider public, is now beginning to participate in this process, Finland has been one of the last countries in Europe to recognize that it cannot assume a total immunity or innocence in this Europe-wide event. This article examines the ways in which the Holocaust has entered Finnish historiography over the last decades. Holmila and Silvennoinen's argument is two-fold. First, they hold that there are many contextual matters, such as the absence of visible anti-Semitism, which have for a long time worked as a sufficient barrier to keep Finland disconnected from the Holocaust. Second, they argue that there are important theoretical and methodological underpinnings, especially the so-called ‘separate war thesis’, which has been utilized as a convenient, if no longer tenable, explanation that Finland was very different from all other Axis nations. They also seek to point out the directions in which the Finnish scholarly community is now going in its search for a more nuanced approach to the Holocaust.
Abstract: Seven-hundred-and-seventy-two Jews were deported from Norway during World War II, and Norway was de facto the only Scandinavian country incorporated in the Nazi Final Solution. Holocaust discourse in Norway has concentrated on only a few, but vital, topics: the awareness of the Final Solution among Norwegian perpetrators, the ‘image’ of the perpetrator, the role of the Norwegian police, and, finally, to what extent the Jews were offered help by the organized resistance.
The views on these topics have changed considerably in the years since 1945, both in public discourse and in academic research. In the public discourse, the topics have regularly re-emerged, from the early 1960s until today. Academic works, however, appeared late; not until the 1980s. From the mid-1990s, the interest in Holocaust-related topics has become far more present, resulting in more academic, as well as public, interest.
Abstract: This article deals with a subject that has been sensitive in the Jewish community in Sweden since the time of the Holocaust, namely the widespread image of the Stockholm Jewish Community as being negative towards letting Jewish refugees find a safe haven in Sweden during the Nazi persecution and mass murder. This image has previously been explained by the alleged ineffectivity of the Stockholm Jewish Community to aid the refugees and Swedish Jewry's failure to integrate them into the community. The present article, however, shows that this image was also a result of political differences between Jewish organizations, groups, and individuals, internationally as well as in Sweden. It was also due to an exaggerated belief in, and misconception of, the influence of the Swedish Jews on the Swedish administration of refugee aid, and resulted in personal feuds in which this negative image was accentuated. Furthermore, the image of the reluctant Swedish Jews has been reproduced and used by Swedish officials to avoid taking responsibility for the country's previous restrictive policy towards Jewish refugees. These accusations have cross-fertilized with the allegations from the inter-Jewish debate, further cementing the negative image of the Stockholm Jewish Community's responses to the Holocaust and the preceding persecutions.
Abstract: The study, preservation and dissemination of the synagogues of Greece has been a 30-year project initiated by the author in 1993. It included a journey to cities throughout Greece, documenting synagogues—some in use, others abandoned or in ruins—engaging in surveys and interviews. The project focused on people, architecture, the urban context and local history. Over the years, the work evolved to give a form and a voice to invisible buildings and places once vibrant with Jewish life. Through digital tools, books, exhibitions and in-situ journeys, the author aims to make this invisible architectural and historic evidence visible again, and accessible to a wider audience. This chapter addresses the question “How lost synagogues become visible again?” The author unfolds a methodology that combines low and high tech, and examples of restoration and dissemination projects, spanning three-decades until today. The survey and study of the synagogues of Greece that began between 1993 and 1999 is still in progress. Architectural restorations were completed between 2016 and 2023, while numerous exhibitions, presentations and publications has made his work accessible to a wider audience since 1997.
Abstract: Our point of departure being that free speech by all sides must be protected and that pro-Palestinian speech is not antisemitic by definition, this chapter examines the extent to which Greek political parties’ critique of Israeli policies diachronically might implicitly or explicitly contribute to the dissemination of antisemitic mythopoesis. Moving beyond the conventional focus on far-right rhetoric, this analysis explores how antisemitic tropes are reproduced within the discourses of mainstream political actors, including the conservative party New Democracy and the socialist PASOK. Particular emphasis is placed on the Greek left, a heterogeneous political formation encompassing a broad spectrum of ideologies that ostensibly uphold human rights and progressive values. The presence of discriminatory discourse within such frameworks reveals the deep entrenchment of antisemitic attitudes in Greek society, where they function as a form of ideological common sense. By examining periods such as the Greek debt crisis and the War in Gaza starting in 2023, we argue that this latent antisemitism tends to resurface during periods of socio-political crisis and permeates the entire political spectrum, challenging assumptions about its marginality or exclusivity to far right politics and rhetoric. At this point, and in light of the turbulent historical moment we are witnessing—marked by an ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, the endless suffering of the Palestinean people and the widespread instability throughout the Middle East—we deem it necessary to clarify that it is not our intention to intervene in the broader debate surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In contrast, our objective is to examine the phenomenon of antisemitism through a historical, cultural, and political lens, with a specific focus on how public opinion is shaped with regard to Greek Jewish citizens—and Jews more broadly—within the discourse articulated by Greek political actors. We would like to explicitly state that antisemitism, in this context, is not to be understood solely as a contemporary political manifestation, but as a multidimensional and diachronic phenomenon. With reference to the events of October 7th and their aftermath, we align ourselves with the position articulated by Gabor Maté, who, discussing the trauma and Palestinian suffering, emphatically stated that: “Any colonial power does precisely what Israel is doing and has been doing. (…) So, there is nothing specifically ‘Jewish’ about this. It also goes along with the colonial trajectory
Topics: Antisemitism: Far right, Antisemitism: Muslim, Attitudes to Jews, Attitudes to Israel, Islamophobia, Jewish Perceptions of Antisemitism, Holocaust Commemoration, Authoritarianism, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Populism, Political Parties, Politics
Abstract: In the early 2020s, two seemingly unrelated political developments came to a head in the Netherlands. First, in January 2020, then-Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the center-right VVD party issued an official apology on behalf of the Dutch government for its complicity in the deaths of more than 100,000 Dutch Jews in the Holocaust. Second, in the November 2023 national elections, Geert Wilders’s anti-Muslim, pro-Israel PVV party won the highest percentage of votes, leading to the formation of a far-right cabinet under Prime Minister Dick Schoof in July 2024. In this article, we argue that this double consolidation of the historical legacy of the Holocaust and of racist, right-wing politics has put Dutch Jews in a dangerous bind. On the one hand, the memory of the Holocaust and the contemporary safety of Dutch Jews have been elevated as a paramount concern in Dutch institutional, legal, and political life. On the other hand, Dutch Jews have been positioned as the perennial would-be victims of violent antisemitism—virtually always, it is falsely imagined, at the hands of Dutch Muslims. The historical persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust is now used to underwrite a “proprietary” form of Jewish victimhood in the present: non-Jewish white Dutch people position themselves as the saviors of Jews, and thereby claim ownership over their past, their collective fate, and the political means to secure their safety.
Abstract: Introduction. This study addresses the representation of ethnic minority cultures in online museum collections, which often reflect diverse viewpoints. We propose a data-driven methodology to construct a large-scale multi-viewpoint knowledge graph, using Jewish cultural heritage as a case study.
Method. We developed an LLM-based pipeline that combines object typing, named entity recognition, relation extraction, enrichment, and clustering.
Results. An analysis of 647,951 records and 178,444 extracted subjects from the collections of Jewish museums across the globe revealed diverse thematic emphases: Israel and the Netherlands prioritised religious themes, while others highlighted everyday life. Surprisingly, only Australia emphasised the Holocaust.
Conclusion(s). The central contribution of this study is the development of a knowledge organisation system capable of tracing major trends and identifying patterns in the polyvocality of perspectives. The methodology provides quantifiable, scalable analysis of multi-viewpoint cultural heritage, extendable to other minorities.
Abstract: This roundtable offers a collaborative, multi-vocal forum on the topic of teaching Jewish Studies in the Nordic region, featuring contributions from scholars and instructors based in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Conceived as a reflective platform, it weaves together critical insights, pedagogical experiences, and institutional perspectives. Topics include national contexts, classroom practices, both conventional and experimental curricular offerings, strategies for integrating Jewish Studies into broader academic frameworks, and reflections on the impact of 7 October 2023. Beyond mapping current conditions, the roundtable aims to envision what Jewish Studies in the Nordics could become, foregrounding both the challenges and the possibilities that shape its future
Abstract: The recent Israeli onslaught on Gaza has sparked bitter arguments on United Kingdom (UK) university campuses. These conflicts have intertwined with wider disputes over politics, cultural identity, freedom of speech, and also empathy. Both sides routinely accuse their opponents of a lack of empathy with the victims of violence with whom they themselves identify. This chapter sets these arguments, in relation to empathy with suffering in particular, in historical context, extending back to the 1930s. The memory of the Holocaust, and the rise since the 1990s, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, of a form of empathy-focused Holocaust education, has fed into the politicization and weaponization of empathy in the context of the Middle East conflict. The chapter closes with four practical suggestions, which might help to unblock these unproductive, acrimonious, and emotionally charged disputes on British campuses.
Abstract: This article addresses the interrelation between the state and its ethnic minorities, and the ideological labor furnished by these minorities, as it applies to postwar German Jewry. The German Jewish community of today is not organically related to German Jewry as it existed before 1933; although, to ennoble its genealogy, its representatives lay claim to that Jewish past. There is a contradiction, therefore, between attempts to connect to prewar German Jewry on the one hand and, on the other, the community’s signaling, for many years at least, a rupture with this past with statements such as “this is not my country” and “sitting on packed suitcases.” However, with significant immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union since the late 1980s, a viable new Jewish community in Germany has come into being. It is increasingly characterized by uniform and central institutions as well as—especially since the war in Gaza and an escalation of antisemitism—an increasingly close relationship to German society and politics.
Abstract: Gdańsk with its multinational past, a thriving Jewish community in the prewar period, the history of the November pogrom and Kindertransporten, and a small, yet rather active Jewish community in the twenty-first century is an example of an attempt at refocusing the memory of the Jewish presence by demarginalising it: just like the Jewish merchants were finally allowed to settle within the city walls in the nineteenth century, the memory of the Jewish history – and presence – might be reconstructed, reconceptualized and redefined both via fleeting actions (walks, performances or barely visible sgraffito), the official educational programmes, state policy, and other memory practices, to mention only a popular Jewish culture festival Zbliżenia, organized in Gdańsk since 2013. Thus, as Kapralski (2017, p. 172) states, “[m]emoryscapes form a matrix of possible attitudes towards the past that can be activated in the commemorative actions of individuals and groups”.
Abstract: In an extremely critical public sphere surrounding Jewish–Muslim relations in Germany, the multi-award-winning miniseries The Zweiflers has uniquely navigated this intense scrutiny, depicting a nuanced subplot of Jewish–Muslim coexistence. Inspired by HBO’s The Sopranos, the series centres on the Zweifler family, exploring their complex intergenerational dynamics, transnational diasporic ties and alleged connections to Frankfurt’’s underworld. While initially lauded for its portrayal of a modern German-Jewish identity, this article takes a closer look at the significant theme of Jewish–Muslim cooperation in post-war Germany. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel (train station district), where the series was filmed, The Zweiflers is critically analysed and compared with insights from that long-term fieldwork. This analysis is further contextualized by engaging with the crucial works of diasporic artists and post-migrant filmmakers, alongside scholarship on urban multiculture and anti-essentialist concepts in sociology and cultural studies. The Jewish–Muslim relationships depicted in the series are not merely fictional; they reflect real, historically evolved partnerships characterized by a collective will to overcome contradictions. This nuanced depiction counters static assumptions about community relations often found in the polarized debates surrounding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, offering a vital contribution to understanding contemporary German society.
Abstract: Following Russia's 2022 invasion, Ukrainian ethnic and religious communities within the state and diaspora fragmented and reconstituted along linguistic lines. Whereas the Russian language once connected ex-Soviet émigrés, the war transformed language ideologies—particularly in the communities of Ukrainian refugees. This article shows how Ukrainian Jews, many of whom remain Russian-speaking among themselves, have come to draw a line between svoi (one of our own) and others among the larger Russian-speaking population—that is, those who are not Ukrainian or who do not support Ukraine in the war. This ethnographic research focuses on Ukrainian-Jewish refugees in Berlin and beyond, and seeks to shed light on the evolutions, tensions, and contradictions in their practice of the Russian and Ukrainian languages. Viewed against the backdrop of other studies of Russian-speaking diasporas, it illustrates the ideologies that have come to compose the new, developing sense of Ukrainian-Jewish belonging.
Abstract: The events of October 7, 2023, and their aftermath have intensified social and political tensions across Europe, profoundly impacting both Jewish and Muslim communities. This article explores the phenomenon of dual silencing, where members of these communities face exclusion, misrepresentation, and suppression in public discourse. Jewish voices, often conflated with Israeli state politics, encounter rising antisemitism, while Muslim perspectives are increasingly marginalized amid heightened Islamophobic/anti-Muslim rhetoric. Through an analysis of personal accounts, public testimonies, media narratives, political responses, and societal attitudes, this study examines how both communities experience symbolical erasure and selective amplification depending on shifting political agendas. Using the Czech context as a case study, this article argues that the post-October 7 discourse has deepened existing societal fault lines and significantly influenced how Jewish and Muslim identities are negotiated in the public sphere. The study concludes by considering the implications of this dual silencing for intercommunal relations, and the future of pluralism in Europe.
Abstract: With the now-established visibility and electoral success of the contemporary populist radical right (PRR) in Western Europe, existing literature has examined these parties’ refutation of antisemitism in parallel to their continued allusion to antisemitic tropes, to greater and lesser extents. This PhD thesis brings these two strands of literature together in a three-country, three-party, and two-platform analysis of the Facebook and X posts of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the National Rally (RN) in France, and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) between 2017 and early 2023. First, this thesis applies elements of discourse-historical analysis and of populist “style” to social media data in a novel way to contribute a framework of when Jewish inclusion and exclusion are acceptable to the parties. It demonstrates that the parties construct their ingroups as “victims”, and that Jews are included when this is strategically conducive or when Jewish victimhood does not threaten that of the non-Jewish majority. Second, while existing literature on the PRR’s framing of Jews, Israel, and antisemitism has predominantly focused on party output, this thesis uses mixed methods, Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and inductive qualitative analysis, to analyse the comments by users who engage with the parties’ posts. It contributes a novel framework of user victimhood, showing that users are not able to form a common identity with Jews when they see Jews as an Other (rejective), see Jewish victimhood as competing with their own (competitive), and perceive Jewish victimhood as an accusation of antisemitism (defensive). Despite this, a third contribution of this research is an examination of user responses to antisemitic code words, such as “globalists”, and a conclusion that only rarely are these overtly understood and escalated by users. The thesis thus provides both empirical and methodological contributions to scholarship on the PRR: combining influences from psychology, political science, and history, and applying mixed methods in an original way to deepen and widen understanding of both the parties and users, and examining how the strategy of (anti-)antisemitism fits into broader processes of PRR mainstreaming.
Abstract: While public antisemitism after 7 October prominently features references to Israel, forms of Holocaust denial and distortion remain very relevant and are deeply intertwined with other forms of antisemitism.
Acts and manifestations of Holocaust denial and distortion appear in various forms and are adopted by different milieus and groups to serve their own political or religious agenda, regardless of societal and country-specific context.
Our publication „Holocaust Distortion in Europe“ examines the alarming prevalence of Holocaust denial and distortion in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, and Poland; demonstrating how antisemitic narratives adapt to societal crises, are exploited for political gain, often evade legal accountability, erode historical truth—with harmful consequences for Jewish communities, Holocaust survivors, and their descendants—and highlights the urgent need for coordinated action.
Abstract: In 2009, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum took the experimental initiative of creating a Facebook page; since then, it has established accounts on other social media platforms, such as Instagram and Twitter, and is now followed by more than one million users across these networks. This chapter investigates the ways in which the Museum utilises social media, particularly with regard to its authority as an institution and site of Holocaust education and remembrance. On one hand, the Museum has fostered an online virtual community where Auschwitz victims are commemorated, the ethics of remembrance are discussed, and users’ feedback is sought and acknowledged. On the other hand, the institution uses social media to fact-check and criticise certain representations of Auschwitz, suggesting only those explicitly approved by the Museum are acceptable. This demonstrates a wider Museum dichotomy between retaining traditional, didactic practices and establishing contemporary, participatory ones.
Abstract: In this chapter, we investigate how four Italian and five German Holocaust memorials and museums, as well as three major internationally relevant Holocaust organizations, employed Facebook for Holocaust remembrance purposes during the period of pandemic lockdown. A comparison was made of the quantity and variety of activity on their Facebook pages during the months of April and May 2020, as compared with the same time span in 2019 and 2021. Although the study revealed major changes and adjustments in Holocaust institutions’ Facebook activities, both in terms of volume and type of content and regarding interaction strategies, the results show that the COVID-19 lockdown did not appear to trigger a radical change in Holocaust remembrance institutions’ use of social media. Despite the changes found in many Holocaust remembrance practices on Facebook and their growing use of digital media, the memorials and museums considered in this study appear to adopt a conservative stance in terms of the topics and themes addressed via social media and a general little change in the framework of commemoration policies. Also, despite a drive toward internationalization, as demonstrated by the Holocaust institutions’ increased use of English, there still appears to be a certain tension between local and global memories of the Holocaust.
Abstract: The severe restrictions on public life following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic affected Holocaust memorials and museums worldwide, especially in Europe, Israel, and the United States. These measures posed significant challenges to contemporary forms of Holocaust commemoration, which were based on collaborative practices of remembering, particularly related to the experience of presence at the memorial sites. In our chapter, we ask in which ways the pandemic had an accelerating effect on global Holocaust memory by tracing, analyzing, and identifying the institutionalized use of online platforms and digital formats on social media. We present results from an online survey conducted with 32 key institutions in the field of Holocaust commemoration in the Spring and Summer of 2020 and discuss them in the context of various forms of digital activities initiated by Holocaust memorials and museums in response to the pandemic. For that purpose, we have created a comprehensive database of 45 digital projects, which were released in the first months of the pandemic, and conducted a multimodal analysis of selected projects. We identified a significant increase in social media use and digital tools, in particular video formats, helping institutions to communicate virtually with potential audiences. Memorials utilized various social media features like live streams, stories, and hashtags to implement elements of participatory memory culture that offer users the possibility to participate in new collaborative forms of mediated commemoration. In doing so, they helped to establish like-minded and co-creative commemoration communities.
Abstract: In our chapter, we investigate how the Covid-19 restrictions affected the translation of in-person commemorative ceremonies into online-only events. Whilst the majority of existing research has a relatively small scale, we have turned to the larger scope of social media data to examine wider online memory culture. To do so, we conduct comparative analysis of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram data from institutions organising commemorative events for the liberation of Neuengamme, the massacre at Srebrenica, and the liberation of Beau Bassin together with non-institutional posts using the hashtags from these institutions. Through this analysis, we aim to answer our main research questions: how do the online discourses by institutions and the wider public compare in relation to posts using shared hashtags during major commemoration periods during Covid-19 lockdowns? To what extent did the move to remote engagement during the pandemic reconfigure the so-called bifurcation of memory culture, between institutional and popular memory discourse (Hoskins, 2014) in any way that might suggest that the lockdowns evidence a change in commemoration practices? Our findings demonstrate that despite the major anniversaries marked in 2020, related memory institutions had little impact on social media, and their commemorative approaches in these spheres were not transformed by the pandemic.
Abstract: Virtual reality and augmented reality experiences play an increasingly significant role in Holocaust memory and education as professional memory institutions continue to explore the affordances of integrating digital technologies into visitor and user experience. There is a rapidly expanding list of projects experimenting with cinematic virtual reality, photogrammetry, digital mapping, 3D modelling, 360-degree on-location survivor testimony as well as a growing portfolio of augmented and mixed reality mobile and tablet applications.
Principally being implemented as spatial technologies, several memorial sites and museums are exploring the possibilities of creating 3D graphic reconstructions of former sites of Nazi persecution in AR/VR such as the digital reconstruction of Falstad Concentration Camp, the Here: Spaces for Memory App at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial Site, the Sobibor AR exhibit, the project Auschwitz VR as well as the 360-degrees-walks at Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. Going further, some digital initiatives are using VR/AR/MR technologies to zoom in on historical documents, testimonies and artefacts, notable projects include the ARt AR App at the Dachau Memorial Site and Museum which revivifies historical and contemporary drawings and paintings in-situ at the present-day site, the Anne Frank House VR which invites visitors to navigate the annex through a series of digital objects, and The Last Goodbye VR experience which foregrounds survivor testimony within Majdanek, the similarly survivor-driven Walk with Me at The Melbourne Holocaust Museum and numerous films that shape the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center’s The Journey Back exhibition space.
While it is important to note that VR technology is not new and has existed for more than 30 years, it is only recently that the technology has become more widely accessible in the heritage and museum sectors (in part, due to the affordability of headsets and devices in the domestic market). The proliferation of VR and AR projects within the sector, then, raises critical questions regards the opportunities for digital Holocaust memory practice and education while also bringing to the fore issues of curation, contextualisation, visitor experience and accessibility.
This report serves as an important first step in this work. It was created as part of the research project ‘Participatory Workshops – Co-Designing Standards for Digital Interventions in Holocaust Memory and Education’, which is one thread of the larger Digital Holocaust Memory Project at the University of Sussex. The participatory workshops project have focused on six themes, each of which brought together a different range of expertise to discuss current challenges and consider possible recommendations for the future.
The themes were:
AI and machine learning
Digitising material evidence
Recording, recirculating and remixing testimony
Social media
Virtual memoryscapes
Computer games
Abstract: The social media landscape is ever-changing as is its relationship to Holocaust memory and education. In the earlier days of Facebook and Twitter’s dominance, there was a clear divide of opinions in the Holocaust sector. On one hand, some institutions were early adopters (notably the Auschwitz State Museum) and others experimented with the affordances of these platforms such as the team at Grodzka Gate, Lublin extending the analogue practice of school pupils sending letters to child Holocaust victim Henio Zytomirski onto Facebook and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s ‘tweet-up’ hybrid architecture tour. On the other hand, expressions of hesitance about these participatory spaces informed the need for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Education Working Group to establish guidelines for using social media in this context (2014).
As practice grew, it also became somewhat formalised with most organisations predominantly focusing on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for public engagement work, and most content presenting traditional curation of historical sources with additional narrative, promoting the organisation’s offline (or elsewhere online) work, or behind the scenes access to curator and educator experiences. Whilst, one of the
celebrated potentials about social media is their ability to help organisations to reach wider (global) audiences, little has changed online since Eva Pfanzelter’s (2014) claim that the Holocaust institutions that dominated previously offline, also dominate on social media platforms. Few others attract much engagement with their posts.
TikTok has brought both new opportunities and challenges for the Holocaust sector – organisations and individuals who have taken to creating content on the platform are seeing far greater engagement than they had on previous ones. Yet, TikTok is also one of the most data-invasive and opaque platforms regarding researcher access. Many also encounter far more Holocaust denial, distortion and trivialisation on this platform. However, the social media landscape is also far larger than the Holocaust sector has really acknowledged and much of the coded hate content that appears on mainstream platforms has been cultivated at scale on others, from 8Chan to Telegram, and gaming and VR social spaces. It is imperative therefore that we bring together a wide range of stakeholders and experts to discuss what the sector needs to move forward with its work on social media. If Holocaust memory and education is to remain visible in the ever-expanding digital world, then it must be visible across a variety of digital spaces.
This report serves as an important first step in this work. It was created as part of the research project ‘Participatory Workshops – Co-Designing Standards for Digital Interventions in Holocaust Memory and Education’, which is one thread of the larger Digital Holocaust Memory Project at the University of Sussex.
The participatory workshops project have focused on six themes, each of which brought together a different range of expertise to discuss current challenges and consider possible recommendations for the future. The themes were:
AI and machine learning
Digitising material evidence
Recording, recirculating and remixing testimony
Social media
Virtual memoryscapes
Computer games
Abstract: Since 7th October 2023, when Hamas perpetrated the worst single massacre against Jews since the Holocaust, there has been a surge in antisemitism in UK universities. Some of this has tipped over into outright anti-Jewish discrimination and harassment. Jewish students and staff have reported feeling unable to fully participate in university life, for fear of being abused, harassed, or attacked. This report offers a summary of research by the IntraCommunal Professorial Group (ICPG) aimed at understanding free speech on university campuses especially with regard to the approaches to speech concerning Jews, Israel, Zionism, and the Middle East conflict.
This report sets out the key issues, and a series of recommendations based on the research and grouped together under the subheadings of our three key findings. Those key findings are as follows:
1. UK universities have (a) a general legal duty, to protect freedom of expression on campus; (b) a duty to prevent discrimination and harassment based on protected characteristics; (c) a university-specific institutional duty to protect the academic freedoms of research and study. Currently UK universities are meeting neither (b) nor (c) in their response to the menace to Jewish students and academic staff posed by antisemitism, particularly antiIsrael antisemitism. That is, they are neither preventing discrimination and harassment, nor protecting freedom of research or freedom to study.
2. Anti-Israel protests and encampments on campuses, including in online spaces, have exacerbated what was already considered a hostile environment by many Jewish students and staff. Some university departments, trade unions, and student political milieus – inperson and online – have directly and indirectly discriminated against, abused, harassed and/or excluded Jewish students.
3. Traditional antisemitic concepts and tropes are being used by pro-Palestinian and/or antiIsrael staff and students. Israel and Zionism are regularly demonised and delegitimised, often using blood libels or other anti-Jewish hatred, and students or academics labelled as Zionists are routinely viewed as legitimate targets for discrimination, harassment, abuse, and/or attack.
Abstract: This report finds that the decision to ban away supporters from the fixture was reached through a flawed risk assessment process.
We argue that the prohibition was not justified by the risks as assessed, and it represented an unnecessary departure from ordinary policing practice, which we believe would likely have been sufficient to secure the match.
The Parliamentary Select Committee similarly concludes that the decision-making process was flawed. However, it maintains that the prohibition was proportionate to the level of risk, even if that risk had been more rigorously assessed.
Our analysis considers a further, key point. A central weakness in the decision-making process was the failure clearly to specify the nature and source of the risk.
If the primary risk came from away supporters themselves, then exclusion may have been justified. But if the principal risk derived from anti-Israel protestors, boycott activists, and antizionist actors seeking to disrupt or attack the match, then banning the away supporters risked punishing those who were being threatened and who did not themselves constitute a significant threat.
In such circumstances, the appropriate response would have required consideration beyond technical policing calculations. If there was a significant antisemitic threat, a policy priority might have been to mobilise sufficient police resources to defend the match, the visiting team, and their supporters rather than excluding them.
The decision-making process appears to have overestimated the risk posed by Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters, in part through a misreading of the Amsterdam precedent and perhaps through reliance on politically committed sources of advice. It may have given insufficient weight to risks arising from boycott activism and to the risk of antisemitic violence of the kind that occurred in Amsterdam.
The process did not engage in a serious way with institutions or individuals from the Jewish community either locally or nationally, or with HM Independent Advisor on Antisemitism. Doing so would have given it a better chance of avoiding the mistakes that it made in understanding the precedent, possible alternatives and the predictable impact of the away fans ban on Jewish communities.
If there was a significant antisemitic dimension to the threat environment, the risk assessment process did not identify or articulate it clearly.
Abstract: This article explores the ways in which oral testimonies of Jewish survivors allow a critical reflection on the understanding of gratitude as a social emotion in the context of hiding under German occupation in Poland. Examined alongside oral interviews with non-Jewish rescuers and helpers, these testimonies unveil the social hierarchy between the non-Jewish majority and the Jewish minority. Consequently, the article scrutinizes the topoi of ‘an ungrateful Jew’ within the context of the Polish public sphere which excludes Jewish narratives, experiences, and memories. Based on oral history interviews and in-depth individual interviews with Jewish survivors, rescuers, and helpers, their descendants, as well as residents of two Polish towns in the Lublin area, Biłgoraj and Izbica, the article presents two case studies of rescue and survival. The analysis investigates the narratives, cultural norms involved, and the underlying power dynamics between rescuers or helpers and Jewish individuals.
Abstract: We provide a comparative analysis of how European radical left parties (RLPs) politicise the Israel – Palestine and Russia – Ukraine conflicts. Examining the positions of 25 RLPs, we test four hypotheses examining variation in Israel-hostility, Russia-related stances, cross-conflict coherence, and the dynamics of war fatigue. Patterns of politicisation are complex and there is no unified party family response. We show that while no RLP is Israel-friendly, levels of Israel-hostility vary substantially and tend to intensify as the Gaza war persists. By contrast, positions on Russia – Ukraine remain deeply divided, with no linear shift towards Russia-friendliness. Ideological subtype shapes, but does not determine, party responses, while broader contextual factors, most notably the ‘Trump effect’, repoliticise questions of European security. However, further politicisation is limited by the weakness of cross-conflict coherence. Several parties express consistent anti-imperialist logic in their response, but most disaggregate their critiques. RLP foreign policy emerges as ideologically-driven but contextually responsive.
Abstract: This article examines how normative logic embedded in reparations law continues to shape contemporary German criminal law, taking the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952 between the Federal Republic of Germany, the State of Israel and the Jewish Conference on Material Claims against Germany (JCC) as its very conceptual point of departure. Against the backdrop of rising antisemitic criminal offenses in Germany, the article focuses on the amendment of Section 46 (2) of the German Criminal Code (StGB; Strafgesetzbuch), which explicitly includes antisemitic motives among the circumstances relevant for sentencing. While this amendment has been criticized as merely declaratory or even ‘symbolic’, this article argues that such criticism overlooks the deeper legal genealogy of state responsibility that ultimately originates in the Luxembourg Agreement. Antisemitic motives intensify culpability and wrongfulness because they engage the foundational commitments of the post-war legal order that emerged in response to antisemitic state-driven violence. Explicitly naming such motives in sentencing law therefore constitutes a crucial institutional function by shaping investigative practices, judicial reasoning, and normative expectations within the criminal justice system. From a criminal legal perspective, the article develops an account of motives as normative indicators that affect both culpability and wrongfulness. Antisemitic motives, it argues, intensify the Unrechtsgehalt of an offense because they negate the equal moral status of the victim and symbolically attack the legal order that emerged in response to antisemitic state violence. The article concludes that the explicit inclusion of antisemitic motives in Section 46 (2) StGB reflects a coherent and legally grounded response to historically specific injustice and underscores the role of criminal law in stabilizing responsibility within the German legal order.
Abstract: For this report, the Union of Jewish Students has collated dozens of testimonies from students who have
experienced antisemitism on campus.
The UJS also commissioned polling of 1,000 students, across all faiths and none, to assess the
impact of campus protests and the rise of antisemitism. The findings reveal alarming levels of campus
antisemitism, significant disruption caused by protests, and perceptions of Jewish students marred by
hostility and intolerance.
Key Findings:
1.Antisemitism has become normalised on our campuses.
- One in four students (23%) have seen behaviour that targets Jewish students for their religion/ethnicity.
- One in five (20%) students would be reluctant to, or would never, houseshare with a Jewish student.
- Jewish students have told us they have faced physical and verbal abuse, social ostracisation and
widespread antisemitic attitudes.
2.Glorification of terrorism is prevalent and unpunished.
- Our research has found that student groups have explicitly called for violence against Jews, even justifying the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach in December 2025.
- 49% of students have heard slogans or chants glorifying Hamas, Hezbollah or other proscribed groups on campus.
- 47% have witnessed justification of the October 7th attacks, rising to 77% among those who encounter Israel-Palestine protests regularly.
3. Protests disrupt all students, and universities have a clear mandate from students to take firmer action.
-Protests have disrupted learning for 65% of students, and 40% have altered their journey on campus to avoid disruption.
- Universities where protests are more frequent have seen higher levels of antisemitism, and four in ten (39%) of students who witness regular Israel-Palestine protests have seen Jewish students harassed often.
- 69% of students disapprove of protests blocking access to learning, and 82% deem calls to 'globalise the intifada' to be antisemitic.
