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ABSTRACT
The six contributions to Volume 35, Number 2 of The Journal of Holocaust Research (2021), ‘Confronting Hatred: Neo-Nazism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust Studies Today,’ were first presented at events organized by Janet Ward (University of Oklahoma) and Gavriel Rosenfeld (Fairfield University), including a seminar at a conference of the German Studies Association (October 2019, in Portland, Oregon), and a roundtable at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting (January 2020, in New York City). By inviting a group of German and American scholars to collaborate and explore the complicated continuities between the fascist past and today, amid the rise of populism, racism, antisemitism, and white ethno-nationalism in the United States, Germany, and beyond, we deepened our collective understanding of the connections and challenges for our teaching, scholarship, and public outreach. Mindful of the need for a more effective scholar-activist approach, this JHR special issue offers the first grouping of research emanating from our discussions; and our other, equally urgent focus, ‘Fascism in America, Past and Present,’ is currently a work-in-progress (coedited by Gavriel Rosenfeld and Janet Ward).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Excellent examples of this new convergence scholarship include: Bradley W. Hart, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018); Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019); Dan Plesch, Human Rights After Hitler: The Lost History of Prosecuting Axis War Crimes (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017); James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Jonathan Wiesen, “American Lynching in the Nazi Imagination: Race and Extra-Legal Violence in 1930s Germany,” German History, vol. 36, no. 1 (2018): pp. 38–59; and Jonathan Wiesen, U.S. Racial Violence in the German Imaginary, 1918–1968 (forthcoming).
2 “New Survey by Claims Conference Finds Significant Lack of Holocaust Knowledge in the United States” (2018), http://www.claimscon.org/study; Maggie Astor, “Holocaust Is Fading From Memory, Survey Finds,” New York Times, 12 April 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/us/holocaust-education.html.
3 Valentina Pisanty, The Guardians of Memory and the Return of the Xenophobic Right, trans. Alistair McEwen (New York: CPL Editions, 2021).
4 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); and Levy and Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010).
5 Jayashri Srikantiah and Shirin Sinnar, “White Nationalism as Immigration Policy,” Stanford Law Review, vol. 71 (2018–2019): p. 199.
6 Ibid., p. 203.
7 Today, Emma Lazarus is branded by white ethnonationalists as the “‘Jewess who tried to ruin the U.S.’ There’s an alt-right tradition of aiming right at her poem.” Rebecca Onion, “The Complicated History of Emma Lazarus’ ‘The New Colossus,’” Slate, 15 August 2019, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/ken-cuccinelli-statue-of-liberty-poem-emma-lazarus-new-colossus-history.html.
8 Lisa Nakamura, “Watching White Supremacy on Digital Media Platforms: ‘Screw Your Optics, I’m Going In,’” Film Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 3 (2019): pp. 19–22.
9 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
10 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020), pp. 216–218.
11 Sergey Lagodinsky, a German member of the European Parliament and representative of the Greens-European Free Alliance, 11 February 2020, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/CRE-9-2020-02-11-ITM-013_EN.html.
12 David Lane, “White Genocide Manifesto,” Calling Our Nation, 73 (n.d.): pp. 26–28; and David Lane et al., Deceived, Damned, and Defiant: The Revolutionary Writings of David Lane (St. Maries, Idaho: Fourteen Word Press, 1999), pp. 1–6.
13 See Paul Jackson, “White Genocide: Postwar Fascism and the Ideological Value of Evoking Existential Conflicts,” in Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire, (eds.), The Routledge History of Genocide (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 211.
14 Jonathan Sarna, “A Scholar of American Anti-Semitism Explains the Hate Symbols Present During the US Capitol Riot,” The Conversation, 8 January 2021, https://theconversation.com/a-scholar-of-american-anti-semitism-explains-the-hate-symbols-present-during-the-us-capitol-riot-152883.
15 Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right, trans. David Broder (London: Verso, 2019), pp. 69, 73.
16 Jason Stanley, “Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda,” Just Security, 4 February 2021, https://www.justsecurity.org/74504/movie-at-the-ellipse-a-study-in-fascist-propaganda/.
17 Protests, such as those in Israel, the European Union, and at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, proved ineffective. “Belgian Carnival Parade of Anti-Semitic Tropes Goes Ahead Despite Criticism,” Deutsche Welle, 23 February, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/belgian-carnival-parade-of-anti-semitic-tropes-goes-ahead-despite-criticism/a-52490668.
18 Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).
19 Joanna Smith, “Monument to Jewish refugee ship MS St. Louis returns to Halifax,” Toronto Star, 7 May 2015, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/05/07/monument-to-jewish-refugee-ship-ms-st-louis-returns-to-halifax.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=star_web_ymbii.
20 “UNHCR’s Gillian Triggs Warns COVID-19 Severely Testing Refugee Protection,” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 7 October 2020, https://www.unrefugees.org/news/unhcr-s-gillian-triggs-warns-covid-19-severely-testing-refugee-protection/.
21 Joshua Shanes, “Donald Trump, Pittsburgh, and the Lessons of Kristallnacht,” Washington Post, 9 November 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/11/09/donald-trump-pittsburgh-lessons-kristallnacht/.
22 Anti-Defamation League, “Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2019,” https://www.adl.org/audit2019.
23 Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017), p. 32.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Janet Ward
Janet Ward, President of the German Studies Association (2021 and 2022), is Brammer Presidential Professor of History and Senior Associate Vice President for Research & Partnerships at the University of Oklahoma: https://www.ou.edu/cas/history/people/faculty/janet-ward.