Abstract: As soon as the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic became evident, concern began to be expressed in the Jewish community about how its effects might damage aspects of Jewish life. Our July 2020 survey of Jews across the UK was designed to investigate some of these effects and bring some data into policy discussion about the future of the community.
Part of that discussion involves community income, and specifically whether Jews will feel able to donate to charities in the ways they have previously, or if they will continue to pay membership fees to synagogues or make voluntary contributions to cover the Jewish studies programmes, security and other supplementary activities in Jewish schools.
This paper looks at these issues first by examining respondents’ giving behaviours in 2019, and comparing them to their actual or expected behaviours during the first few months of the pandemic. It finds that, as of July 2020, its effects were found to be rather limited – while charitable giving, synagogue membership fees and voluntary contributions to schools were all expected to take a hit, a strong majority indicated no change in their giving behaviour at this time. Moreover, there are some indications that a shift has taken place in people’s tendency towards giving to Jewish charities over general ones. Whether this is part of a longer-term trend or simply a response to the pandemic is unclear.
The study then investigates those who said they were planning to make a ‘negative switch’ in their giving behaviour, to explore the extent to which that change was due to economic factors caused by the pandemic, or two alternative possibilities: their economic situation prior to it, or the strength/weakness of their Jewish identity.
It finds that changes in behaviour are heavily influenced by the economic impact of the pandemic, particularly with respect to synagogue membership fees, but that Jewish identity also plays a part, most acutely in relation to making voluntary contributions to schools.
Abstract: From the Foreword:
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Education Research Project aims to provide an overview of empirical research on teaching and learning about the Holocaust (TLH) with a cross-cultural and multilingual perspective. The outcomes include transferring knowledge between various regions and countries, intensifying dialogue between scholars and educational decision makers and enhancing networking among researchers.
To fulfill these aims, in 2012 the IHRA established a Steering Committee and tasked a team of researchers with skills in a large range of languages. Early in the process, the decision was made to focus upon research which deals with deliberate efforts to educate about the Holocaust and to limit the search accordingly. This decision
meant there was a focus on both teaching and learning. The teaching focused on school settings – although there is also some explicit instruction at museums and sites of memory. Certainly, learning takes place in both school settings and museums/ sites of memory. This focus meant that some areas of scholarship are generally not
included in this collection. Firstly, non-empirical work, which is extensive and important, was beyond the scope of this research. Secondly, analyses of materials such as curricula, films, and textbooks were also beyond the scope.
The Education Research Project culminated in the publication of volume 3 of the IHRA book series Research in Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust: A Dialogue Beyond Borders, edited by Monique Eckmann, Doyle Stevick and Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs. The book is available in hard copy for purchase and as a free PDF download.
The second outcome is this set of eight bibliographies. These eight bibliographies comprise references to empirical research on teaching and learning about the Holocaust. They also include abstracts or summaries of most of publications. Each bibliography includes research from a single language or related group of languages
(both geographically related or linguistically related). The research team identified almost 400 studies resulting in roughly 640 publications in fifteen languages that are grouped in the following eight language sets:
German, Polish, French, the languages of the Nordic countries, Romance languages other than French (specifically Spanish, Portuguese and Italian), East-Slavic languages (Belarussian, Russian and Ukrainian), English and Hebrew.
The bibliographies presented here contain titles in the original language and translations in English, as well as abstracts in English that were either written by the original authors, written by the research team or its contributors (or translated into English by the team). This set of bibliographies provides a unique tool for researchers
and educators, allowing them to gain insight into educational research dealing with teaching and learning about the Holocaust, not only in their own language, but also in languages they are not familiar with. We hope that this publication and these abstracts will provide a tool that facilitates research across language borders and contributes to further exchange, discussion and cooperation between researchers and educators as well as the creation of international and cross-language networks.
Abstract: At the time of writing, two major landmarks have occurred in what might be called the history of the ‘afterlife of Holocaust memory’ in Britain.1 Most recently, the beginning of a new academic year in schools and colleges in England and Wales brought the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the National Curriculum — an event of immense significance in relation to Holocaust education in the United Kingdom. Whereas previously the presence of the Holocaust in educational curricula varied considerably, the incorporation of the genocide into the statutory content for the first National Curriculum for History in 1991 ensured that school history would become a core conduit in the expansion of knowledge and awareness among a new generation of young people. Beyond the chalkface, the other noteworthy anniversary of 2011 took place on 27 January when Britain held its tenth annual Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD). A day which ‘provides an opportunity for everyone to learn the lessons from the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and subsequent genocides and apply them to the present day to create a safer, better future’, HMD speaks to and of a process of heightened insti-tutionalisation which began in earnest at the turn of the millennium and has continued unabated since.2 HMD thus provides an illuminating window onto the preconceptions, priorities and politics which currently envelop and influence the shape of memorialisation in Britain, but it also does much more than this: as one of the first such days to be created in Western Europe following the Stockholm Declaration of 2000, Britain’s HMD also gestures to a gamut of issues related to memorialisation in general and Holocaust memory in the contemporary world in particular. Amongst others, these include the practices and procedures of collective remembrance, the forces behind a ‘turning’ to memory in the postmodern epoch, and the rationale for (and consequences of) the emergence of the Holocaust as a global phenomena in the past quarter of a century.
Abstract: Relatively little comment has been passed on the role of the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum (IWM). There is a critical discourse about the role of the exhibition in the museum of course, and Rebecca Jinks’s and Antoine Capet’s essays contribute admirably to that discourse, yet the specific question of the relationship between thinking about the Holocaust and thinking about Empire and imperial genocide has seldom been asked. Yet as Jinks’s essay makes clear, Britain has an imperial past and as such it is not possible for the Holocaust exhibition to just avoid that context. It would be very difficult anywhere in Britain, but in the IWM, the official repository of the nation’s war memories, it is impossible. What is more, the IWM specifically tasks itself, in its Crimes Against Humanity exhibition, to engage with genocide in a wider context and as such to place the Holocaust in that context. And the British Empire was a site of genocide. One might expect then to find that the IWM grapples with the problem of genocide in the British Empire (in Australia, in Ireland, in India for example). It does not. As such, I want to use this commentary to think more about the relationship between the galloping British memory of the Holocaust that Capet identifies, and Britain’s memory of genocide in its Empire that Jinks highlights, using the IWM as a case study.
Abstract: n the last decade or so, research has begun to address the ways in which global discourses of memory, within which the Holocaust is paradigmatic, often ‘borrow’ Holocaust iconography and tropes of memorial-isation to discuss or commemorate other tragedies.1 This utilisation of Holocaust memory is indicative of the position that the Holocaust now generally holds throughout the Western world, and yet it also raises questions about how we represent, and respond to, the other tragedies of the twentieth century. In this vein, this chapter explores the interactions between the memory of the Holocaust and other contemporary mass atrocities in Britain, using as case studies the Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) Holocaust exhibition, which opened in 2000, and its Crimes Against Humanity exhibition, which first opened in 2002 and then moved to a different part of the building in 2009. While on the face of it, the sheer difference in size and visitor numbers between the two exhibitions could easily function as a metaphor for the disparity between the status of Holocaust memory, and the memory of ‘other genocides’ in Britain and the West, my object is to explore the symbiotic and perhaps even dependent relationship between the two exhibitions, and by extension the wider categories of ‘Holocaust’ and ‘genocide’.
Abstract: It can be supposed that most people interested in twentieth-century history are familiar with the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and that most will have visited its permanent Holocaust exhibition since this was formally opened in June 2000. What Suzanne Bardgett, the curator who runs the exhibition, calls its ‘artifacts’ cover 1,200 square metres but before 2009 it showed only one piece of ‘art’ indirectly derived from the discovery and liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by the British Army in April 1945: Edgar Ainsworth’s drawing Wem Berger, Aged 13, after a Year in Ravensbriick (near Bélsen), April 1945 It is not always realised that the IWM has, in fact, many more drawings and paintings connected with what is now known as Holocaust Art. The museum now publishes a history of the ‘hangings’ from which each of these works has benefited and this indicates that, while there were many hangings immediately after the war, there was then a long period of ‘purgatory’ from which these works are only now re-emerging. In a revealing article of 2004, Bardgett suggested that it was the whole issue of representing the Holocaust in the Museum which was taboo until the 1980s.2 Inevitably, the paintings and drawings suffered from this reticence, which largely explains their neglect as an iconographie source for Holocaust studies in Britain.
Abstract: Yiddish was the everyday language spoken by most Central and East European Jews during the last millennium. As a result of the extreme loss of speakers during the Holocaust, subsequent geographic dispersal, and lack of institutional support, Yiddish is now an endangered language. Yet it continues to be a native and daily language for Haredi (strictly Orthodox) Jews, who live in close-knit communities worldwide. We have conducted the first study of the linguistic characteristics of the Yiddish spoken in the community in London’s Stamford Hill. While Krogh (in: Aptroot, Aptroot et al. (eds.) Leket: Yiddish studies today, Düsseldorf University Press, Düsseldorf, pp 483–506, 2012), Assouline (in: Aptroot, Hansen (eds.) Yiddish language structures, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, pp 39–62, 2014), and Sadock and Masor (J Jew Lang 6(1):89–110, 2018), investigating other Hasidic Yiddish-speaking communities, observe what they describe as morphological syncretism, in this paper we defend the claim that present-day Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish lacks morphological case and gender completely. We demonstrate that loss of morphological case and gender is the result of substantial language change over the course of two generations: while the case and gender system of the spoken medium was already beginning to undergo morphological syncretism and show some variation prior to World War II, case and gender distinctions were clearly present in the mental grammar of both Hasidic and non-Hasidic speakers of the relevant Yiddish dialects at that stage. We conclude the paper by identifying some of the language-internal, sociolinguistic and historical factors that have contributed to such rapid and pervasive language change, and compare the developments in Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish to those of minority German dialects in North America.
Abstract: This report, which focuses on the past two academic years, uncovers a much higher number of antisemitic incidents
on UK campuses than had previously been reported. It shows that in some instances, university staff, academics
and student societies were themselves responsible for antisemitism on campus, and that university complaints processes are sometimes inadequate. In one case reported to CST, a Jewish student at the University of Warwick was even subjected to disciplinary investigation after he complained that a member of academic staff had made an antisemitic comment in a lecture. This was later dropped with no action taken against the student.
CST recorded a total of 58 university incidents in the 2018/2019 academic year and 65 university incidents in the
2019/2020 academic year, making a total of 123 antisemitic incidents during the two years covered by this report. The total for 2019/2020 is the highest total CST has ever recorded in a single academic year, despite the year being cut short as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, CST had recorded university incidents by calendar
year, and logged 25 such incidents in 2018; 22 in 2017; and 41 in 2016. The significant increase in university incident totals since 2018 reflects a sustained drive by CST’s campus team to encourage students to report antisemitic incidents. This increase in the number of university incidents therefore needs to be seen within the context of increased awareness among university students of the need and importance of reporting incidents to CST, as well as the rising levels of antisemitism in the UK more widely. It is likely that more incidents
remain unreported.
Abstract: This study, the first to assess mortality among Jews around the world during the COVID-19 crisis, draws on data from a wide variety of sources to understand the extent to which Jews were affected by coronavirus in different parts of the world during the first wave of the pandemic, March to May 2020.
The first section describes the methods of quantification of COVID-19 mortality, and explains why measuring it using the excess mortality method is the most effective way to understand how Jewish communities have been affected. The second section presents data on Jewish mortality during the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic, drawing particularly on data provided to JPR by Jewish burial societies in communities all over the world. It does so in a comparative perspective, setting the data on Jews alongside the data on non-Jews, to explore both the extent to which Jews have been affected by the COVID-19 epidemic, and how the Jewish experience with COVID-19 compares to the experience of non-Jewish populations.
The immediate impression is that there is not a single ‘Jewish pattern’ that is observable everywhere, and, with respect to the presence of excess mortality, Jewish communities, by and large, followed the populations surrounding them.
The report cautions against speculation about why Jews were disproportionately affected in some places, but rule out two candidate explanations: that Jewish populations with particularly elderly age profiles were hardest hit, or that Jews have been badly affected due to any underlying health issue common among them. They consider the possibility that Jewish lifestyle effects (e.g. above average size families, convening in large groups for Jewish rituals and holidays), may have been an important factor in certain instances, noting that these are unambiguous risk factors in the context of communicable diseases. Whilst they suggest that the spread of the virus among Jews “may have been enhanced by intense social contact,” they argue that without accurate quantification, this explanation for elevated mortality in certain places remains unproven.
The report also includes a strongly worded preface from Hebrew University Professor Sergio DellaPergola, the Chair of the JPR European Jewish Demography Unit, and the world’s leading expert in Jewish demography. In it, he stresses the importance of systematically testing representative samples of the population at the national and local levels, and, in Jewish community contexts, of routinely gathering Jewish population vital statistics. He states: “If there is one lesson for Jewish community research that emerges out of this crisis it is that the routine gathering of vital statistics – the monitoring of deaths, as well as births, marriages, divorces, conversions, immigrants and emigrants – is one of the fundamental responsibilities community bodies must take.”
Abstract: Rozsáhlá monografie odborníků z pražské právnické fakulty pod vedením Jana Kuklíka a Reného Petráše se věnuje problému majetkových ztrát židovského obyvatelstva za druhé světové války a různým metodám odškodnění. Publikace má široký historický a komparativní záběr, obsahuje podrobnou analýzu právních aspektů a zabývá se i dodnes nedořešenými otázkami. Nejpodrobněji je v knize zastoupeno území bývalého Československa, ale pozornost je věnována i vývoji v dalších státech: Německu, Rakousku, Polsku, ale také v zemích s velmi odlišnou situací, jako jsou Velká Británie, Bulharsko či Švýcarsko. Výklad u jednotlivých států obvykle zahrnuje nástin vývoje postavení Židů v daném regionu v posledních desetiletích před holocaustem, jsou však naznačeny i starší, středověké tradice. Jádrem práce je zachycení často až pozoruhodně různorodých metod záborů židovského majetku zejména v době druhé světové války a jeho restitucí nebo různých odškodňovacích akcí, které probíhají až do současnosti.
Abstract: This detailed and thorough report is rapidly becoming the ‘must-read’ study on European Jews, taking the reader on an extraordinary journey through one thousand years of European Jewish history before arriving at the most comprehensive analysis of European Jewish demography today.
Written by leading Jewish demographers Professor Sergio DellaPergola and Dr Daniel Staetsky, the Chair and Director of JPR’s European Jewish Demography Unit respectively, it explores how the European Jewish population has ebbed and flowed over time. It begins as far back as the twelfth century, travelling through many years of population stability, until the tremendous growth of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed by the dramatic decline prompted by a combination of mass migration and the horrors of the Shoah. Extraordinarily, after all this time, the proportion of world Jewry living in Europe today is almost identical to the proportion living in Europe 900 years ago.
Using multiple definitions of Jewishness and a vast array of sources to determine the size of the contemporary population, the study proceeds to measure it in multiple ways, looking at the major blocs of the European Union and the European countries of the Former Soviet Union, as well as providing country-by-country analyses, ranging from major centres such as France, the UK, Germany and Hungary, to tiny territories such as Gibraltar, Monaco and even the Holy See.
The report also contains the most up-to-date analysis we have on the key mechanisms of demographic change in Europe, touching variously on patterns of migration in and out of Europe, fertility, intermarriage, conversion and age compositions. While the report itself is a fascinating and important read, the underlying data are essential tools for the JPR team to utilise as it supports Jewish organisations across the continent to plan for the future.
Abstract: What have those living with dementia lost? If they have lost aspects of their mind and self, who are they now? Are they 'normal'? Prevailing medical, therapeutic and sociopsychoanalytic interventions and studies on dementia, largely influenced by Tom Kitwood's person-centred approach, have focused mainly on revealing and evaluating the remaining intact bodily abilities and functions beyond loss. In contrast to this predominant understanding of dementia, my decade-long involvement in a Jewish Care Home as a volunteer and researcher has raised ontological, epistemological and practical critiques, acknowledging that we are never beyond loss but always alongside it, and that we simply do not know how to dwell well with it. Although the expressive and performative words, gestures and behaviours of those with dementia are often regarded as inarticulate, repetitive and nonsensical, these are the lived worlds of dementia that those affected feel, experience and live through, whilst continuously making relations and familiarising themselves with people, things, and their surroundings. This demands a paradigm shift in the ontological, epistemological and practical horizon within the study of dementia. Critically developing Canguilhem's notion of the normal and the abnormal, Ingold's dwelling perspective and Deleuze's concept of becoming, I redefine dementia not as a fixed mode of being but as a continuous process of becoming-dementia through an attentive engagement with one's immediate surroundings. In more detail, this study explores the ways in which people challenge the taken-for-granted concepts of loss and abnormality in five different dementia contexts: ethics, repetition, time, agency and emplacement. By rejecting medical preconceptions or categorisations, this study focuses on uncovering what loss does in everyday life rather than asking what loss means or what people lose. In particular, this study emphasises bodily movement, sensory perception and affect, not because of the language deterioration during dementia trajectories but because of a new way of understanding and new reality that those affected practise in daily life. Consequently, this study illustrates the immanent potential of the anthropological view for thinking and dwelling with those living with dementia alongside their limits and implications. This study is thus an autobiographical ethnographic testimony of my past decade living, learning, volunteering, studying and most importantly co-dwelling with those living with dementia. This is a collaborative co-production created with those involved, as without the participation of those affected and the co-presence of significant others, my work could not be done. Accordingly, there is neither a beginning nor end to this study, but a moving forward and generating dementia becoming as the lives of those affected and those who care for them unfold.
Abstract: JPR’s COVID-19 survey looks at how Jews have been impacted by the pandemic in terms of their health, jobs, finances, relationships and Jewish lives. The findings are being shared in a series of short reports looking at key policy issues, and this one focuses on the issue of how comfortable Jews feel about attending Jewish activities and events in person.
Drawing on survey responses from July 2020, it finds that whilst Jews situate themselves across the full length of the ‘comfort scale’ (running from very comfortable to very uncomfortable), there is a clear leaning towards the uncomfortable end.
Unsurprisingly, those who are uncomfortable are likely to be in older age bands and/or suffering from health conditions that make them particularly vulnerable to the virus. Similarly, those who have had the virus and continue to suffer from secondary symptoms (i.e. ‘Long COVID’) also tend to be uncomfortable about attending events in person.
However, there are some interesting exceptions. The most elderly appear to feel more comfortable than average, and the youngest age bands (those aged 16-24) feel more uncomfortable than average. Those who have had COVID-19 and recovered feel more comfortable than those who have not. And those who have experienced job losses, or have been furloughed, are rather less comfortable than those whose working loves have remained reasonably stable.
It is also very striking to see that, denominationally, the Strictly Orthodox feel most comfortable about attending in-person events, whereas non-synagogue members feel most uncomfortable. Members of other ‘mainstream’ denominations cluster together in between. However, people’s level of religiosity is actually a slightly better predictor than denomination of how comfortable they feel about attending community activities or events in person – those with strong religiosity are most likely to feel comfortable, and those with weak religiosity most likely to feel uncomfortable.
Perhaps most interestingly, there is an important relationship between how comfortable people feel about attending community activities and events in person, and their general state of mental health. Those showing signs of psychological distress feel notably less comfortable than others.
Brief details about the methodology used in the survey are contained in the report. A more detailed methodological is being prepared and will be available shortly.
Abstract: Through secondary analysis of survey data collected by YouGov for Campaign Against Antisemitism, this research note provides a longitudinal account of changes in Judeophobic antisemitism (that is, antisemitism articulated in relation to Jews identified as Jews) in mainland Britain from 2016-2020. Because survey responses are aggregated by most recent general election vote, the dataset facilitates comparison between those who voted for each of Britain’s three main parties in the 2015, 2017, and 2019 UK general elections. (Those who voted for other parties, as well as those who did not vote and those for whom voting data are missing, are aggregated as a fourth category.) Amongst those who voted for the centrist Liberal Democrat party, levels of Judeophobic antisemitism declined throughout the period. Amongst those who voted for the left-wing Labour Party, levels of Judeophobic antisemitism began at a low level, rose to a peak in 2018, and then declined, returning to something close to their 2016 level by 2020. Changes amongst other voter groups were less clear-cut, although all voter groups saw a decline in Judeophobic antisemitism from 2019 to 2020. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to analyze trends in antizionist antisemitism (that is, antisemitism articulated in relation to Israel and its supporters), comparative figures for that form of antisemitism are provided for the years 2019–2020.
Abstract: This article analyses the British left’s response to allegations of antisemitism within the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. It uses as its foil a collection of essays on the topic written over the course of the Corbyn era for leading online outlets of the contemporary Anglo-American left, and given away as a free e-book by Verso, the world’s biggest leftist publisher, during the 2019 British election campaign. On the basis of this collection, the article suggests that the Labour antisemitism crisis was the culmination of a long process of political and theoretical degeneration within the left. It argues that the tendency to reduce of the question of antisemitism to that of class “interests,” with antisemitism understood primarily as an “instrument” used by the powerful to divide the “oppressed,” leaves many leftists unable to comprehend the possibility of exterminatory antisemitism as an end-in-itself. The appeal of this approach lies in the apparent alibi against antisemitism it provides for those on the left, like Corbyn, whose interests supposedly coincide with those of “the oppressed,” and means that accusations of antisemitism within the left can be similarly denounced as cover for the underlying ‘interests’ of those making the accusation. The article argues that the insistence that the State of Israel is “a racist endeavour,” a claim which lay at the heart of the Labour antisemitism dispute, rests upon an arbitrary and ahistorical rejection of the notion of Jewish peoplehood. This critique itself draws upon a long history of right-nationalist and liberal-republican antisemitism in which Jews were viewed as an illegitimate “anti-nation,” and in its partiality is radically distinct from a critique of the nation-state as such. The article suggests that this same partiality and ahistoricity reappears in the inability of a class instrumentalist perspective to apprehend the intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, relationship between Israel and antisemitism, and the genocidal antisemitism of the Holocaust in particular.
Abstract: In late 2019, the Henry Jackson Society commissioned polling organisation Savanta ComRes to undertake a survey involving a weighted sample of 750 British Muslims. Respondents were asked about their perspectives on a number of topics. These included: other faith groups; prominent geopolitical players; and the perceived level of Jewish global control. This represents one of the most systematic and comprehensive surveys into the socio-political attitudes –
both domestic and international – of British Muslims. According to the study:
- When compared with their perception of other faith groups, British Muslims have the least favourable attitude towards Jewish people.
- The only people viewed less favourably by British Muslims than Jewish people are those belonging to no religious group (atheists/non-believers).
- British Muslims who are more socially integrated through their friendship groups, have a more favourable view of both Jews and the State of Israel.
These are a number of observations of significance:
-A December 2019 ICM Unlimited poll found that 18% of the general population felt Jews have disproportionate influence over business and finance. In this survey of British Muslims, 34% were of the view that Jews have too much control over the global banking system.
- The same ICM poll found that 15% of the general population felt Jews have disproportionate influence in politics. In this Savanta ComRes poll, 33% of the British Muslim respondents were of the view that Jews have too much control over the global political leadership.
- On the matter of ‘dual loyalty’, the ICM survey found that 24% of the general population believed British Jews were more loyal to Israel than to the UK. The corresponding figure for British Muslims, in this survey by Savanta ComRes, is 44%.
- When compared to British Muslims who are not university-educated, British Muslims who are university-educated are more likely to agree with the view that British Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the UK, along with holding the broader belief that Jews have too much global control.
- The majority of British Muslims who report that they attend a mosque at least 3-4 times a week, believe British Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the UK – 55%. The corresponding figure for British Muslims who very occasionally or never attend a mosque is 34%
Abstract: Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings brings together a group of international experts to investigate the relationship between Holocaust remembrance and different types of educational activity through consideration of how education has become charged with preserving and perpetuating Holocaust memory and an examination of the challenges and opportunities this presents.
The book is divided into two key parts. The first part considers the issues of and approaches to the remembrance of the Holocaust within an educational setting, with essays covering topics such as historical culture, genocide education, familial narratives, the survivor generation, and memory spaces in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. In the second part, contributors explore a wide range of case studies within which education and Holocaust remembrance interact, including young people’s understanding of the Holocaust in Germany, Polish identity narratives, Shoah remembrance and education in Israel, the Holocaust and Genocide Centre of Education and Memory in South Africa, and teaching at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.
Table of Contents
Series editors’ foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Education, remembrance, and the Holocaust: towards pedagogic memory-work
Andy Pearce
Part I: Issues, approaches, spaces
1. Lessons at the limits: on learning Holocaust history in historical culture
Klas-Göran Karlsson
2. The anatomy of a relationship: the Holocaust, genocide, and education in Britain
Andy Pearce
3. Väterliteratur: remembering, writing, and reconciling the familial past
Carson Phillips
4. Memories of survivors in Holocaust education
Wolf Kaiser
5. Figures of memory at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Michael Bernard-Donals
6. Imperial War Museums: reflecting and shaping Holocaust memory
Rachel Donnelly
7. Beyond learning facts: teaching commemoration as an educational task in German memorials sites for the victims of National Socialist crimes
Martin Schellenberg
Part II: National perspectives, contexts, and case studies
8. Hitler as a figure of ignorance in young people's incidental accounts of the Holocaust in Germany
Peter Carrier
9. Who was the victim and who was the saviour? The Holocaust in Polish identity narratives
Mikołaj Winiewski, Marta Beneda, Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, and Marta Witkowska
10. Conveying the message of Holocaust survivors: Shoah remembrance and education in Israel
Richelle Budd Caplan and Shulamit Imber
11. Holocaust education in the US: a pre-history, 1939–1960
Thomas D. Fallace
12. The Presence of the past: creating a new Holocaust and Genocide Centre of Education and Memory in post-Apartheid South Africa
Tali Nates
13. Educational bridges to the intangible: an Australian perspective to teaching and learning about the Holocaust
Tony Joel, Donna-Lee Frieze, and Mathew Turner
14. Myths, misconceptions, and mis-memory: Holocaust education in England
Stuart Foster
Abstract: This thesis uses critical discursive psychology to analyse anti-Semitic and Islamophobic discourse on the Facebook pages of two far-right organisations: Britain First and the English Defence League. Using the Charlie Hebdo attack as a time frame, I examine how the far-right manage their identity and maintain rationality online, as well as how users on Facebook respond to the far-right. This thesis demonstrates how Britain First and the English Defence League present themselves as reasonable in their anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic stance following the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Ultimately, I bring together the study of fascist discourse and political discourse on social media using critical discursive psychology, in a novel synthesis. The Charlie Hebdo shooting and the shooting at the kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015 (as well as other attacks by members of the Islamic State) have led to Muslims being seen as a threat to Britain, and thus Muslims have been exposed to Islamophobic attacks and racial abuse. The current climate is a challenging situation for the far-right, as they are presented with the dilemma of appearing as rational and even mainstream, whilst nevertheless adopting an anti-Islamic stance. The analysis focuses on how Britain First and the English Defence League used the shooting at the Kosher supermarket to align with Jews in order to construct them as under threat from Islam, and promote its anti-Islamic stance. I also analyse visual communication used by Britain First to provide evidence that Britain First supported Jewish communities. Discourse from Facebook users transitioned from supportive towards Jews, to questioning the benefits that Jews brought to Britain, and expressing Holocaust denial. Furthermore, I discuss how other far-right politicians in Europe such as Geert Wilders from the Dutch Party for Freedom, portrayed himself as a reasonable politician in the anti-Islamic stance he has taken in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack. Findings are discussed in light of how the far-right communicate about the Charlie Hebdo shooting whilst maintaining a reasonable stance when projecting anti-Semitic and Islamophobic ideology, and how such discourse can encompass hate speech. I demonstrate how critical discursive psychology can be used to show how various conflicting social identities are constructed and interact with each other online. This thesis shows how the far-right use aligning with Jews as means to present Muslims as problematic, and how such alignment has resulted in the marginalisation of both Jews and Muslims.
Abstract: Since the earliest days of the coronavirus outbreak in the UK, concerns have been expressed that Jews have been disproportionately affected, with mortality levels among them abnormally high. Initial hypotheses arguing that this could largely be explained by geographical and age factors were both proven and challenged by a June 2020 paper published by the Office for National Statistics. It showed that Jews were more likely to be affected because of their above average age profile and where they tend to live (London and other urban centres), but that even after accounting for these and other socio-demographic variables, they were still found to be disproportionately vulnerable.
This short paper draws on existing evidence to investigate why this might be the case. In particular, it explores whether the long-established above average health profile of Jews in the UK has shifted in such a way as to result in elevated levels of mortality from COVID-19, and whether behavioural factors – particularly in the most Orthodox parts of the community – affect the numbers in any significant way. In brief, it finds that there has been no such change in the fundamental health status of British Jews, and that regardless of any specific issues within haredi communities, the vast majority of COVID-19 related deaths among Jews have occurred in the mainstream, non-haredi sector.
Its key conclusions are as follows:
1) Even though Jewish mortality from COVID-19 is high as it is for other Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups, Jews are a completely different case and should be analysed and understood as such;
2) The high mortality levels found among Jews is not caused in any significant way by any particular developments occurring in the strictly Orthodox (haredi) population;
3) Elevated mortality among Jews may in part be due to the interconnected and contact-rich social and religious lives that Jews have, but further analysis is required to confirm this.
Abstract: British state-supported Holocaust remembrance has dramatically grown in prominence since the 1990s. This monograph provides the first substantial discussion of the interface between public Holocaust memory in contemporary Britain and the nation’s changing religious-secular landscape.
In the first half of the book attention is given to the relationships between remembrance activities and Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and post-Christian communities. Such relationships are far from monolithic, being entangled in diverse histories, identities, power-structures, and notions of ‘British values’. In the book’s second half, the focus turns to ways in which public initiatives concerned with Holocaust commemoration and education are intertwined with evocations and perceptions of the sacred. Three state-supported endeavours are addressed in detail: Holocaust Memorial Day, plans for a major new memorial site in London, and school visits to Auschwitz. Considering these phenomena through concepts of ritual, sacred space, and pilgrimage, it is proposed that response to the Holocaust has become a key feature of Britain’s 21st century religious-secular landscape. Critical consideration of these topics, it is argued, is necessary for both a better understanding of religious-secular change in modern Britain and a sustainable culture of remembrance and national self-examination.
Abstract: Cet ouvrage dirigé par Jacques et Ygal Fijalkow découle du colloque qui s'est tenu en 2011 à Lacaune sur le thème des voyages de mémoire de la Shoah (colloque soutenu par la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah). Enseignants, personnels des musées mémoriaux, témoins de la Shoah, acteurs institutionnels, experts et universitaires y livrent leurs regards et leurs analyses sur les voyages d'étude sur la Shoah.
Enseigner la Shoah n’est pas chose facile. Tous les enseignants le savent. Dans le souci de développer des formes nouvelles d’enseignement, certains ont trouvé une solution : sortir de la classe et aller avec leurs élèves sur des lieux de mémoire. Cette façon de faire, dans un contexte de développement des voyages en général, est en plein développement.Du côté des pouvoirs publics, la formule a plu et les soutiens arrivent de sorte que le nombre de voyages augmente d’année en année. Le succès aidant, un débat est né : qu’apportent véritablement ces voyages de mémoire aux élèves qui y participent ?
C’est sur cette toile de fond que cet ouvrage a été rédigé. On y trouvera des éclairages sur ce qu’apportent les institutions spécialisées dans ce domaine. On pourra y voir également comment les choses se passent, aussi bien lors de la préparation que sur les lieux de mémoire eux-mêmes. Et ceci en France mais aussi chez nos voisins anglais, belges, espagnols, italiens, suisses, ainsi qu’en Israël. Le cas d’Auschwitz est privilégié, mais d’autres lieux sont également examinés.
