The recent global turn in Holocaust studies has revealed the genocide’s profound international ramifications, from refugee flows to commemorative practices to international law. It has encouraged the study of comparative genocide and placed the conventional European narrative of the Holocaust in conversation with other histories and disciplines.Mark Celinscak and Mehnaz Afridi’s new edited volume, which consists of seventeen essays by scholars from a range of fields and backgrounds, introduces some of the interpretive possibilities and intellectual benefits of viewing the Holocaust as a global event, rather than solely in the context of Jewish or European history.
As its subtitle suggests, the book is divided into three sections, each of which explores a different domain of Holocaust studies. The first tackles Holocaust memory in a variety of non-Western contexts. Roni Mikel-Arieli’s contribution on Holocaust memory in Mauritius best illustrates the analytical potential of a global approach — for instance, the 1,581 Jewish refugees who spent the war in Mauritian prison-turned-detention camps arrived there from Romania via Palestine. After the war, the Jewish community in South Africa maintained the cemetery associated with one of the camps, and, in time, Mauritian novelists used the memory of the wartime detentions to explore the legacies of colonialism and slavery. A global approach to studying the Holocaust allows these fascinating political, geographic, and cultural trajectories to unspool.
The second section concerns global histories of the Holocaust from the Antipode Islands to upstate New York. Much of what made the Holocaust a global event was the immigration of European Jews to distant shores before, during, or after the war. Many of the essays in this section, and in the volume more broadly, explore the histories and ramifications of those migrations. Aomar Boum’s fascinating contribution takes a unique approach, offering a “sonic narrative” of World War II in North Africa that draws on popular songs and poems produced by the region’s indigenous Jewish communities. Doing so reveals some of the wartime experiences of a non-European Jewish community who, had the war gone differently, would have been sentenced to death alongside their European brethren.
The book’s final section explores representations of the Holocaust from around the world; one common theme is the challenges of Holocaust education among Arab and Muslim populations. As Mohammed S. Dajani Dauodi and Zeina M. Barakat discuss in their contribution, the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine confounds and perhaps even precludes widespread, meaningful engagement with the Holocaust among these groups. As the entries in this volume demonstrate, Holocaust education has spread to all four corners of the globe; however, due to geopolitical complications, Holocaust education is less prevalent in the Arab and Muslim world.
Certain tensions cut across the book’s diverse essays. Exploring Holocaust memory, education, and representation in countries outside of Europe reveals as much or more about those countries than it does the Holocaust itself. There are perhaps drawbacks to a global approach to the Holocaust, as the editors acknowledge in the introduction — universalizing the lessons of the Holocaust can risk losing sight of the event’s historical particularities. None of the authors in this volume neglect the specificity of the Holocaust, and they all explore the intersection of the Holocaust and Holocaust memory with other phenomena — colonialism, apartheid, racism, modern-day antisemitism, testimony, and Israel/Palestine, among others — with care. A global approach to the Holocaust may not be risk-free, but it is a valuable and fruitful one.
Meghan Riley earned a PhD in Modern European History from Indiana University. She is a postdoctoral fellow at Northern Arizona University.
