The Holocaust And Memory In The Global Age

InThe Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider examine the distinctive forms that collective memory take in the age of globalisation.Levy and Sznaider examine the way the Holocaust has been remembered in Germany, Israel, and the US during the last fifty years, and show how this singular event has been detached from its precise context and instead used as a way of focusing abstract questions of good and evil, and how this use has given the Holocaust a resonance across the global stage, as responses to other injustices like ethnic cleansing in Bosnia have depended on a collective understanding of the Holocaust to justify such actions. In so doing, memories of this singularly tragic event as articulated in our global age open up new possibilities for imagining global political and cultural norms for the effective spread of human rights and for corrected injustices around the globe.

Daniel Levy is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.