What we talk about when we talk about digital Holocaust memory: A systematic analysis of research published in academic journals, 2010–2022

ABSTRACT

In recent years, digital technologies have presented new opportunities for innovative Holocaust commemoration and education. Accordingly, scholars across disciplines have focused on “digital Holocaust memory” as a new frontier in both research and practice. But what exactly do they mean when they use this term? This article provides a systematic analysis of the literature regarding digital Holocaust memory as published in leading academic journals between 2010 and 2022. We position the digitalization of Holocaust memory within the context of the global evolution of memory culture and differentiate between the Holocaust’s “master narrative” and alternative, more peripheral Holocaust-related themes and perspectives. Scholars perceive the digitalization of Holocaust memory as enabling a new focus on marginal Holocaust-related narratives, but we demonstrate that they nevertheless tend to remain in the comfort zone of well-established Holocaust narratives while ignoring digital commemoration and education taking place at geographic and thematic margins. By focusing on the traditional master narrative of the Holocaust, we argue that the extant literature regarding digital Holocaust memory primarily serves to preserve the centrality of this narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital Holocaust memory
• digitalization
• Holocaust commemoration
• new media
• systematic literature review

Raymond Carver’s (1981) famous collection of short stories - What we talk about when we talk about love - contains a short story of the same title. Carver suggests that love and its essence is rarely the main topic of discussion when people sit together and talk about what they define as love. This study uses Carver’s famous turn of phrase to explore what we, as scholars, talk about when we discuss digital Holocaust memory? We will show that scholars view digital Holocaust memory as a turning point in the culture of Holocaust remembrance, creating what Walden (2019) defines as a culture of “virtual Holocaust memory.” In many cases, scholars perceive the digitalization of Holocaust memory as enabling a new focus on the peripheries of Holocaust-related narratives. These narratives are set in places not usually regarded as “centers” of the Holocaust (the global south and the USSR, for example), and themes that are not usually part of the discussion regarding the Holocaust and its aftermath (refugees, rescue efforts, resistance, non-Jewish victims and so on).

An example of such memory work that is taking place in the periphery can be found in the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC). The Center was officially opened in March 2019 and it explores the history of genocides in the 20th century with a focus on the case studies of the Holocaust and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda. With the temporary closure of the physical museum during the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, all the JHGC’s activities moved online. The center offered weekly webinars to the public, as well as online lessons to schools and universities, and virtual tours were developed and uploaded to the JHGC’s website. Interestingly, because many South Africans do not have access to the internet or to data, WhatsApp voice-notes were sent to more than 200 schools. Online commemorations were held to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Jewish Detainees from Mauritius and the 80th anniversary of their deportation to the island, an episode that is at the margins of Holocaust history yet is central to South Africa as it was the closest the Holocaust came to its region (Nates, 2021). Similar activities were also held at the Jewish Holocaust Center in Melbourne, Australia, where 54 schools had virtual programs in 2020, a virtual tour was designed and uploaded to the center’s website, and webinars were held focusing on stories of refugees and survivors who arrived in Australia during or after the Holocaust (Hampel, 2021). Yet, as we will show in our study, such initiatives are not part of the academic discussion regarding digital Holocaust memory. When engaging with digital Holocaust memory, scholars tend to remain in the comfort zone of well-established Holocaust narratives, using case studies from central facets of Holocaust imaginaries, while ignoring digital Holocaust commemoration and education taking place in the geographic and thematic margins.

Questions regarding the digitalization of Holocaust memory became even more crucial and prominent during the COVID-19 outbreak. The pandemic initiated a rapid process of “mediatization” (Hepp, 2020) and digitalization of nearly all aspects of life. In the process of social distancing, many came to realize what a digital-only world might look like. We worked solely online, we studied in online classes, and we socialized in virtual parties. In relation to the question at the heart of this study, during the pandemic, commemoration was limited to online-only environments. As such, the digitalization and mediatization of our life during the pandemic was also evident in the realm of memory and remembrance, and most notably in Holocaust commemoration and education.

Even prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, Holocaust memory was increasingly delivered through digital rather than traditional media. The COVID-19 crisis, however, forced educators, practitioners, researchers, and individuals to adjust to a reality that was limited exclusively to online communication and content. Holocaust memory institutions used social media as the primary means of communication with the public, which itself became, to an increasing degree, global in scope – as people from all around the world could participate in almost every online commemoration events regardless of their physical location or national affiliation. Holocaust museums offered online tours, webinars, podcasts, and special online events, while scholars held international conferences, discussions, roundtables, workshops, seminars, and other virtual encounters online (Henig & Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020; Walden, 2022). In addition, Holocaust commemoration itself “went virtual” as well. The Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah), taking place in April 20–21, 2020, and in April 7–8, 2021, usually one of the most “sacred” days in the Israeli national calendar (Brog, 2003), was held exclusively online and both official and unofficial commemorative events – took place in a digital format with varying degrees of interactivity. As such, during the pandemic, we encountered what can be defined as an acceleration and intensification of digital Holocaust commemoration. Accordingly, the question posed in this study – namely what is discussed in the academic pursuit to study and analyze digital Holocaust memory – has become ever more acute.

In order to address this question, we provide a systematic analysis of the literature regarding digital Holocaust memory, which has appeared in leading journals over the past decade. We open our discussion with an explanation of the digitalization of Holocaust memory within the context of the global evolution of memory culture. We then differentiate between what can be characterized as the Holocaust’s “master narrative” and alternative, more peripheral, Holocaust-related themes and perspectives. This differentiation enables us to better understand the main focus of studies regarding Holocaust digital memory. After explaining how our analysis of the literature was conducted, we present our findings. To conclude our study, we reflect on these findings and claim that the academic literature about the digitalization of Holocaust memory does not necessarily reflect a widening of our perspective on the Holocaust, nor does it expand the discussion about the Holocaust in new directions or create a more nuanced understanding of it and the implications of its intersectionality. Instead, by focusing on the traditional master narrative of the Holocaust, the literature regarding digital Holocaust memory primarily serves to preserve the centrality of this narrative.

Digitalization of Holocaust memory and its globalization

The Holocaust is the “foundational past” of the Western world (Confino, 2011). The centrality of Holocaust remembrance creates a shared understanding of the past for many communities. According to Confino (2011), a shared understanding of the past can also create shared moral values, political affiliations and perceived communion between different nations and collectives comprising what can be defined as the West, or the global north. In this regard, in the late 20th century, many Holocaust scholars highlighted the increasingly widespread dissemination of Holocaust commemoration and education activities (Levy & Sznaider, 2006). Others noted that the transnationality of Holocaust remembrance and education symbolizes the global scope of such memory (Gavriely-Nuri & Lachover, 2012). This confirms, at least on the surface, Confino’s assumptions about the Holocaust as a “foundational past.” Scholars and practitioners alike hoped that a shared understanding of the past will prevent future atrocities, promote cooperation between nations and create policies of “moral remembrance” – a standardization of how we should remember and commemorate the past (David, 2020). However, some scholars criticized these assumptions, claiming that the so-called “global memory” of the Holocaust is more Western or American than global in nature (Goldberg & Hazan, 2015). Critics suggest that the globalization of Holocaust memory, which is not actually a global but rather Western project, does not necessarily engender the type of critical Holocaust remembrance that carries the potential to prevent future atrocities (Kansteiner, 2014). Moreover, global Holocaust memory tends to be employed in a manner that serves to generate rather than prevent or mitigate new inequalities (David, 2020).

The process of globalizing Holocaust memory is inherently connected to questions of media and mediation (Hoskins, 2011). According to Erll (2018), “whenever we approach memory in culture – that is, when we are interested in processes of remembering and forgetting that take place within sociocultural contexts – we are dealing with mediation” (p. 309). Practices involved in the construction of a society’s memory rely on discursive processes, which involve communication technologies (Pentzold, 2009). Indeed, we are constantly reminded of our individual and collective past through exposure to media content, and through the process of memory mediation, by which we externalize individual memories and internalize mediated “collective” memories (Erll, 2018; Neiger & Meyers, 2011). Through this process, a tangible record (or a version of) a society’s past is created in a manner that encourages interpersonal and emotional connections to and with this past (Edy, 1999). This is clearly the case with Holocaust memory. There is no way to imagine a shared understanding of the Holocaust without widely circulated images, stories and narratives that have become available through the media – books, movies, TV dramas and so on (Meyers et al, 2014).

Indeed, the digitalization of contemporary media is a central aspect in the globalization of Holocaust memory (Reading, 2011; Walden, 2019). The media is changing, and “new media” alter the way we experience the past and the way we perceive the meaning of memory, remembering, and forgetting. The memory of the Holocaust could not have transcended familial, geographical, or national boundaries without being mediated by the established postwar media. Claude Lanzmann’s 9-hour Shoah documentary, released in 1985, for example, was a “media event” (Dayan & Katz, 1994) in its own right, which connected diverse audiences from all over the world. The movie’s influence reached far beyond its country of production (France) and created global communities of audience and shared visual imagination of the Holocaust. In recent years, the media involved in disseminating Holocaust-related content have become increasingly digital and part and parcel of the new media ecology, which is essentially global in nature and scope (Frosh, 2018; Kansteiner, 2014; Walden, 2019).

However, there is still a lack of a systematic exploration of the possible effects of the digitalization on Holocaust memory and how it differs from other forms of mediation. Indeed, how exactly the digital turn influences the way we remember the Holocaust and the social, political, historical, and even personal implications of such memory is still an open question. One possible answer is suggested by Hoskins (2018) in his description of the “memory of the multitude.” According to Hoskins, the introduction of new technological features changes society’s memory in a fundamental manner. Memory, he claims, is “lived through a media ecology wherein abundance, pervasiveness and accessibility of communication networks, nodes, and digital media content, scale pasts anew” (Hoskins, 2011, p. 29). This, he contends, means that we can no longer speak of a “collective memory” – a shared understanding of a formal version of the past that shapes individual and social identities and sensibilities. Consequently, there is no way to think about the past as enabling moral remembrance. Rather, according to Hoskins (2018), we should speak about the multitude as the “defining digital organizational form of memory beyond but also incorporating the self” (Hoskins, 2018, p. 85). The memory of the multitude enables fragmentation of multiple memories in a process that defies the narrativization of the past and rejects the crystallization of a shared collective identity in light of a shared understanding of the past. Using this perspective when addressing new digital forms of Holocaust memory, we may wonder if these new forms of remembrance defy the narrativity of Holocaust memory. If we commemorate the Holocaust without offering a coherent narrative, which also implies a moral evaluation of the here and now, the digital turn in Holocaust remembrance cannot be seen as a proponent of a new ethical turn in memory (Tirosh, 2020.

An alternative approach is that the digitalization of global Holocaust memory is inextricably connected to ethical concerns as discussed above. According to Erll (2018), those interested in questions regarding the global dimension of Holocaust memory are also interested in questions regarding the connection between media and the opportunity to create a vision of justice and solidarity between various groups. As such, the digitalization of Holocaust memory is perceived as a new and advanced way to commemorate and to remember the past while enhancing the moral imperative arising from this commemorated past – to prevent atrocities wherever and whenever they take place and to promote human rights worldwide. The digitalization of Holocaust remembrance, scholars claim, enables users “to inscribe themselves in [a] mediated Holocaust memory” (Henig & Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020, p. 2). This, according to Walden (2019), renders the audience “critical participants in the production of Holocaust memory” (p.5). The total immersion of users in the content disseminated over these new forms of remembrance is perceived as dictating a moral evaluation of the stories shared with the audience (Walden, 2019). While these new immersive practices do not “dictate a specific narrative of the past to visitors, viewers or users,” they do encourage “participants to take responsibility for remembering the Holocaust” (Walden, 2019, p. 12).

In many cases, these responsibilities are realized in a process of memory democratization, meaning that new actors are now responsible for telling marginalized stories and narratives of the past (Hansen, Hemer, and Tufte, 2015). Memory processes occurring in various digital media can create counter-public spheres, in which users are actively engaged in the negotiation of cultural memory (Birkner & Donk, 2020). With crowd participation and interactivity as defining elements of these digital tools, one can expect the democratization of the formation and transformation of collective memory, its messaging and modes of observance (Smit, Heinrich, & Broersma, 2017). In relation to Holocaust-related narratives, a potential democratization is related to exploring issues that are peripheral to traditional Holocaust studies discourse and addressing questions that stand outside the Holocaust’s “master narrative,” which we will now define and describe.

Central and marginal Holocaust narratives

On its official website, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem defines the Holocaust as an “unprecedented genocide, total and systematic, perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, with the aim of annihilating the Jewish people” (Yad Vashem, n.d.). From this definition we learn what is the official narrative of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem underscores the Nazi’s rise to power and the beginning of their persecution of Jews, the ghettoization process (focusing on the ghettos of Lodz, Warsaw and Theresienstadt), the inception of the Final Solution and its implementation with the establishment of death camps to complement already existent concentration and slave labor camps; combat and resistance; and rescue, which culminates, inter alia, in the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel. As an ultimate source for Holocaust education, documentation, and research, Yad Veshem represents the hegemonic perception of the Holocaust, its timeline, themes, geography and boundaries.

In recent years, critics have tried to broaden this hegemonic perception. As part of this process, historians of the Holocaust have engaged with notions of “marginality” and “peripherality” in relation to specific episodes or phases of the Holocaust. For example, Jan T. Gross and Irena Grudzińska Gross have conceptualized the “third phase” of the Holocaust in Polish lands from mid-1942 to the end of 1944 as occurring “at the periphery” of the main machinery of killing and destruction in ghettos and death camps (Gross & Grudzińska-Gross, 2012). Kobi Kabalek (2015) also engages with the concept of margins in his writings on the history and memory of the “Final Stage” of the Holocaust. Drawing on Edward Shils’ classic analysis of center-margin relationships within societies when engaging with the structure of historical narratives, Kabalek argues that “Precisely because of their relative invisibility, edges or margins determine the scene and center of things and stories; they surround and hence locate and bound them and are themselves located and defined in relation to these centers.” (Kabalek, 2015, p. 248). He argues that the final stage of the Holocaust serves as an edge that helps define the boundaries of its master narrative. He conceives of the “Final Stage” as

an internal edge, which provides unfamiliar perspectives on the Holocaust itself by looking backward from the endpoints of the Holocaust according to the different narrations and phenomena that divert from the common story and its focus on the destruction process

(p. 248–249).

In May 2020, Yehuda Bauer argued against the focus on peripheral stories of the Holocaust since, according to him, it emphasizes only a tiny minority of cases and therefore, distorts perceptions regarding the Holocaust. When asked about Jewish refugees during the Holocaust he stated, “It is not really a story about the Holocaust. It is a story of people who escaped from the Holocaust. It is on the margins; it is one of the background stories […]” (Bauer, 2020). Indeed, when studying the Holocaust as the paradigmatic case of “memory in the global age,” using Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider’s terminology (2016), the stories of Jews who escaped Nazi-controlled Europe appear at first glance as rather peripheral. Most of the Jews who were able to leave Europe and seek asylum in different continents and regimes, did so prior to the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. Therefore, the refugee experiences and their places of refuge are usually not part of the core canon of places and events commonly associated with the Holocaust. However, by defining which issues are “on the margins” and which stories are “not really a story about the Holocaust,” Bauer, among the most important figures in Holocaust research and commemoration, set imaginary boundaries to the field.

In addition to issues and themes deemed “marginal,” an important aspect of the tension between central and marginal Holocaust narratives relates to geographic location. During the war, the persecution and murder of Jews had largely taken place in Eastern Europe, however, between 1945 and 1989, when Eastern Europe was under Soviet rule, the Holocaust was absent from public memory in these countries and its study was somewhat limited. Instead, the more general “Nazi aggression during the War” and the role of the Red Army in vanquishing it was emphasized. It is important to note that in the postwar international arena, the perception of Stalingrad and the resistance to Nazism in Western Europe and the USSR were intertwined (Kotek, 1996, pp. 62–63). Thomas C. Fox (2004) argues that during the early postwar period, the communist narrative of the Holocaust was part of the master narrative of Marxism and Soviet heroism. Within this framework, antisemitism, or any form of ethnically or racially based oppression were construed as the product of the ruling classes in their efforts to “divert the attention of the oppressed from their oppressors’’ (Fox, 2004, p. 420). Fox demonstrates how the Soviet definition of fascism, which saw fascism as an extreme form of capitalism, excluded the specificity of Jewish victimization. Even when it did mention the Nazi murder of Jews, this was usually viewed as part of the catastrophe of the “great patriotic war” that ensued to combat fascist racism (p. 421). Within this narrative, communists were classified as “fighters against fascism” whereas Jews were classified as “victims of fascism.” The fate of Soviet Jewry was universalized into the general account of the sufferings and martyrdom of all Soviet people. As a result, there were no scholarly works published in the Soviet Union that specifically dealt with the Holocaust or with Jewish suffering, either in Russian or in any of the languages of the Soviet national republics.

In the West, on the other hand, starting in the 1960s and focusing on Jewish persecution, the memory and study of the Holocaust became an ever more important subject in Israel, the USA, West Germany, and other West European countries. This focus did not reach Eastern Europe until the nations of the region began liberating themselves from Soviet rule and opening themselves to the world (Kucia, 2016, p. 98). The opportunity to reexamine the official history of the war, as well as a chance to include previously neglected chapters in the overall historical narrative came with the collapse of the iron curtain and the unsealing of Soviet archives (Ibid).

Another geographic location relevant to our discussion on marginal narratives of the history and memory of the Holocaust is that of the so-called “Global South.” The “Global South” refers broadly to the regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. The use of this phrase marks a shift from the previous focus on development or cultural differences toward an emphasis on geopolitical power relations (Dados & Connell, 2012). As mentioned above, before and during World War II, countries in the Global South became places of refuge for some fleeing Nazi-controlled Europe, while for others, they served as places of detention (Eppelsheimer, 2019; Gilbert, 2016; Grossmann, Edele, & Fitzpatrick, 2017). During these years, African countries were controlled by various occupying powers. Consequently, experiences in North Africa, where Jews and non-Jews lived under French, Italian or German occupation differed from those in French West Africa, Italian East Africa or in the British colonies and Commonwealth in the southern parts of the continent (Boum & Stein, 2019; Kissi, 2020). Nevertheless, within the Eurocentric focus in Holocaust studies, African histories have long been regarded as “marginal,” consigned to the periphery. After the War, anti-colonial, and nationalist movements in the Global South, particularly Africa, flourished. Thus, during the War, and even more so, in the postwar period, colonial histories were interwoven with the histories of the Jewish genocide, contributing to the shaping of decolonization processes (Mikel-Arieli 2019, 2020, 2022 ; Gilbert & Alba, 2019; Gilbert, 2016; Rothberg, 2009). Such processes are relevant to the entangled histories and memories that connect the Holocaust to events of genocide and mass violence in Africa, South America, and other Global South areas.

While the Global South is perceived as a peripheral location for Holocaust-related issues, Holocaust memory is very present in this area. For example, the Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO) that was established in 1985 as an international network for the advancement of Holocaust education, remembrance and research, includes more than 370 organizations from around the world, among them institutes located in China, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, and other countries that were not directly involved in the Holocaust (AHO, n.d.).

As such, exploring the memory of the Holocaust from the margins, i.e from the periphery of locale issues, and themes, which are not currently regarded as part of the master narrative, is to martialize the democratic potential of global Holocaust memory. Digital memory practices are perceived as capable of highlighting hidden aspects of established narratives, forgotten stories and marginalized themes. As such, it is interesting to examine whether these “marginal,” peripheral, non-hegemonic, alternative Holocaust narratives are being addressed in the academic literature covering digital Holocaust memory.

Methodology

In order to understand what scholars dealing with digital Holocaust memory are actually writing about, we conducted a systematic analysis of the literature (Harris, Quatman, Manring, Siston, & Flanigan, 2014) on digital Holocaust memory. Systemic analysis of literature about various topics is increasingly prominent in the social sciences (Fenkl, 2012; Fredriksen-Goldsen & Muraco, 2010) and in media and communication studies in particular (Boeynaems, Burgers, Konijn, & Steen, 2017; Chakravartty, Kuo, Grubbs, & McIlwain, 2018; Matthes, 2009). In most cases, literature reviews serve as building blocks of empirical research. Yet, systematic analyses of literature are usually stand-alone pieces that “attempt to make sense of a body of existing literature through the aggregation, interpretation, explanation or integration of existing research” (Xiao & Watson, 2017, p. 94). We assume that such an analysis will help us identify whether scholarly writing about digital holocaust memory highlights more marginal and peripheral issues within the central Holocaust narrative or whether these academic constructions of knowledge only reproduce the main narrative. We focus on peer-reviewed scholarly interventions as we think that academic writing, and academia in general, is not merely a sphere in which knowledge is reported and disseminated to a broader audience. Instead, this is a prominent cultural sphere in which knowledge is constructed, and hidden processes of marking what is normative and what is legitimate are woven into the knowledge-making process. Indeed, this is the intellectual work of scholars that often creates symbols and cultural norms (Sand, 2000).

As part of our study, we compiled a list of all ranked journals listed in the Clarivate’s 2019 official communication journals ranking,¹ which included 92 journals and sampled all of them. In addition, we added four leading journals relevant to our analysis that are not in the discipline of communications to our dataset: Memory Studies, Holocaust Studies, The Journal of Holocaust Research and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. These are the leading journals in the fields of Holocaust and memory studies. We limited our timeframe for articles published between 2010 and 2022 because during this decade, the digitalization of Holocaust memory intensified. We used the journals’ search engines to identify articles using the following search terms: “digital,” “virtual,” “online,” and “social media” for the Holocaust journals, and “Holocaust” for Memory Studies and all other ranked communication journals. In Memory Studies alone we found more than two hundred articles about the Holocaust, however, the vast majority of them were not connected to digital media. In the communication journals, we found more than 125 articles dealing with the Holocaust; however, as was the case in the memory- related journals, most of them did not discuss digital issues. Ultimately, we found 37 articles relevant to our analysis (N = 37).

Each manuscript included in our sample was read and thematically analyzed. Both authors conducted the analysis separately and then convened to discuss their findings. In our analysis, we wondered whether academic writing on the digitalization of Holocaust memory reflects a widening perspective about the Holocaust and its commemoration in the digital age by focusing on digital tools and marginal Holocaust narratives. Indeed, marginality became an important issue in communication studies journals (Pearce, Gonzales, & Foucault Welles, 2020), as it focuses on “issues related to minorization, representation, equity and inequality” (p.1). By connecting the interest in marginality with issues related to digital Holocaust memory, we looked for case-studies which highlight marginal Holocaust narratives. As described earlier, such narratives mainly address events that occurred at the periphery of the “main story,” namely the machinery of killing and destruction in ghettos and death camps in Nazi-occupied Europe. We also focused on the geographic location of the case studies at hand and particularly whether they emanate from places in the Global South, USSR, Asia, etc., that are considered marginal to Holocaust studies (Bauer, 2020; Gross & Grudzińska-Gross, 2012; Kabalek, 2015). We present our findings in the pages below.

Findings

Of the 37 studies that make up this research corpus, only seven (Bernstein, 2016; Ewalt, 2011; Hatef, 2022; Kaprans, 2016; Makhortykh, 2019; Moffat & Shapiro, 2015; Pearce, 2019) focus on marginal case studies. Most of the articles in our corpus deal with the Holocaust “master narrative,” to use Bauer’s phrase (Bauer, 2020), and with popular and known digital communication devices of the last decade such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Wikipedia, websites and so on. For example, several articles explore the ways in which prominent memorial sites employ digital tools. Miles (2001) explores the online Holocaust exhibitions of the Imperial War Museum and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM); Oliva et al. (2015) focus on a 3-D reconstruction of the delousing building of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp and deploy it in an interactive mixed reality space; Trezise (2012) explores the USHMM exhibition on “Kristallnacht” in the “Second Life” virtual world, a massively popular multiplayer online role-playing game in which users interact using avatars in imagined worlds; Roseau (2019) examines the digitalization of Hélène Berr’s diary covering her life in Nazi-occupied Paris in the form of a digitized manuscript and as part of a digital tour at the Shoah Memorial in Paris; Brown and Waterhouse-Watson (2014) explore the use of audio-visual materials at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre; Walden (2019) focuses on the use of digital tools at the USHMM, the Jewish Museum Vienna, and the Memorial Center of Bergen-Belsen; Verschure and Wierenga (2022) explore the “Future Memory” project which focuses on the ways in which virtual reality can enable visitors to explore concentration camp sites in depth, while designing their route independently; Rich and Dack (2022) focus on a project at Rowan University in New Jersey, entitled the Warsaw Project, which seeks to balance the usage of digital practices, student engagement, and historical fidelity; and Milani and Richardson (2022) explore online (alongside on-site) guided tours at the memorial of Holocaust victims in Milan through analyzing their contextualization.

Another central aspect that was explored in multiple studies is that of the mediation of the visitor’s experiences at memorial sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau (Dalziel, 2016; Commane & Potton, 2019; Łysak, 2022, González-Aguilar & Makhortykh, 2022; Feldman & Musih, 2022); or the Pearl Harbor memorial site (Douglas, 2020), through social media such as Facebook or Instagram. A somewhat different engagement of visitors’ experiences was investigated by White (2022) in his work on a project that is dedicated to commemorating the death marches, titled Honoring Esther, which combines “real-time experience on foot and online, leaving networked digital traces” (p. 305). The audience’s active role was also explored by a study in New Media & Society (Henig & Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020) that deals with the popular Instagram project: Eva Stories, which attracted both public and academic attention. Another recent publication (González-Aguilar & Makhortykh, 2022) explores user-generated content as a tool for memory mediatization by focusing on a selection of internet memes dealing with Anne Frank.

Several articles also focused on the digitization processes of established archives in the field of Holocaust studies, such as the International Tracing Service (ITS) (Stone, 2017) or The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) portal (Bryant, 2017; de Leauw, Bryant, Frankl, Nikolova, & Alexiev, 2018). Similarly, Lerner (2022) explores Holocaust-related digital archives such as the Arolsen Archives, USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, and Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names and how scholars using computer science based quantitative methods can analyze them. Furthermore, as Holocaust survivor holograms are by now a famous example of the digitalization of Holocaust memory as they represent both a unique and very sophisticated technology, this issue was prominent in several articles in our corpus (Brown & Waterhouse-Watson, 2014; Frosh, 2018; Marcus et al., 2022; Walden, 2019).

Interestingly, we found that four out of the seven articles focusing on marginal narratives are of case studies related to geographical marginality. Three studies focus on cases geographically located in Eastern Europe and particularly in the USSR. Bernstein’s (2016) article explores a website with user-sourced listings of war monuments to demonstrate how popular memory of the war reiterates and updates Soviet historical narratives. Kaprans’s (2016) article addresses memory debates regarding the history of the War and the Holocaust in Russia and the Baltic states. It focuses on how a memory initiative triggered by the provocative Latvian documentary, “The Soviet Story,” got started on social networking sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia. Makhortykh’s (2019) article also focuses on YouTube and explores how the Lviv pogrom of 1941 is represented online. It explores “how digital technology and Holocaust memory interact on YouTube” and examines “how globalization of the Holocaust remembrance is affected by the replacement of analogue mass media by digital media” (p. 442).

Ewalt’s article entitled “Mapping Injustice: The World is Witness, Place-Framing, and the Politics of Viewing on Google Earth,” (2011) on the other hand, focuses on a case study related to the Global South (Africa). While it explores a project produced by the USHMM, one of the most prominent Holocaust-related institutions in the world, it focuses on the use of Google Maps to shine light on atrocities in Africa. The project’s goal is to provide “narratives and photographs tied to various geographic spaces that provide information on African genocide, particularly that of Rwanda” (p. 340). In so doing, the project connects the Holocaust with current incidences of genocide and mass violence in Africa while pointing to possible intersections between African studies and Holocaust and Genocide studies. However, the article criticizes the fact that in the project in question, African atrocities, are viewed through the Western eyes of the USHMM. There is no local use of the new technologies in the marginalized societies, therefore, the peripherality of the African continent is preserved by the Western institute.

We found only two articles that engage with marginal themes related to the Holocaust, namely, focusing on non-Jewish victims of Nazism in the digital sphere. Hatef (2022) explores social media as a site for memory construction among Roma in the Czech Republic. Pearce (2019) focuses on physical and online initiatives to commemorate the victims of euthanasia in Germany and Austria. Moffat and Shapiro’s (2015) article is the only article in our corpus that focuses on marginal narratives that reflect both geographic marginality and marginal themes related to the Holocaust. The article explores how digital “serious games” that are “intended to teach or train the players, to give them new knowledge or change their beliefs and attitudes about something” (p.709) can be used to enhance the knowledge of future generations about the Holocaust. It focuses on digital games that are based on a story of a refugee escaping Nazi persecution across Europe. On the one hand, the games include internment in concentration camps, a subject falling squarely within the boundaries of the central Holocaust narrative. However, it features train journeys in freight cars across Siberia, a location that is situated at the margins of Holocaust geography, and focus on the process of seeking refuge, a topic which is still positioned at the margins of the Holocaust master narrative.

Conclusions

In this study we map and analyze recent studies concerning digital Holocaust memory to address the question: what are we talking about when we talk about digital Holocaust memory? We sought to explore whether the discussions on the digitalization of Holocaust memory widen perspectives about the Holocaust and its commemoration. We wondered if the literature concerning digital Holocaust memory focuses on peripheral Holocaust narratives or does it merely perpetuate traditional components of the Holocaust’s “master narrative,” faster and more pervasively. It is important to note that while our survey focused on peer-reviewed articles from 94 communication studies journals, four Holocaust-related journals, and one memory studies journal, we were not able to cover all published articles on the subject in question. Moreover, our analysis did not include books and book chapters. As such, future research may want to adopt our assumptions as a starting point for a broader analysis. However, since we focus on current peer-reviewed content on digital Holocaust memory, our analysis contributes an important voice to the discussion.

Our study reveals that while there is some attention to issues and themes that are not widely considered as part of the Holocaust “master narrative,” in most cases the academic discussion about digital Holocaust memory is confined to the central themes, issues and locations that comprises the well-established Holocaust narrative. Initiatives of Holocaust commemoration and education that are considered marginal are not yet critically addressed by scholars dealing with Holocaust digital memory.

As such, the digital innovation in Holocaust memory that is being addressed and analyzed in the literature, does not necessarily engender a more democratic understanding of the Holocaust. In order to create a real global perspective of the Holocaust and its remembrance, scholars should focus on the periphery of Holocaust-related themes. The digital turn in Holocaust memory is perceived as creating the opportunity for such peripheralization of the discussion, given the intrinsically global reach of digital media and the opportunities for crowd-sourcing and other modes of interactivity. This, to our disappointment, did not find expression in recent research in the fields of Holocaust, memory and communication studies.

Our major conclusion from this study is that marginal narratives of the Holocaust are closely related to geographical marginality and not to the fact that the narratives were presented using digital tools. In other words, the marginality discussed in such articles is most likely to be expressed through addressing killing sites or other related Holocaust sites in locations that can be considered as geographically peripheral to the Holocaust’s “center,” for example, case studies geographically located in the USSR, Eastern Europe, or the Global South. However, in our sample, even when marginal Holocaust narratives were expressed through a peripheral geographic lens, it was mediated by a western institute. Therefore, when exploring atrocities in Africa through the lens of a USHMM digital project, for example, a Eurocentric or Americanized approach is enforced, preserving the marginalization of the African continent.

It is also important to note that all three articles focusing on Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe were published in Holocaust/memory- related journals and not in journals focusing on communications and media. This is not at all surprising considering the recent growing interest in the field of Holocaust studies in the official history of World War II in countries of the former USSR, following the opening of the Soviet archives to the public (Kucia, 2016). Ewalt’s article, however, which serves as the most important case study since it combines digital, geographic and narrative marginality, was published in the journal, Communication, Culture & Critique (2011), and Moffat and Shapiro’s (2015) article was published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.

These findings reflect a somewhat critical perception of how academia perceives and research the digitalization of Holocaust memory. Scholarly interest in digitalization processes does not necessarily contribute to promoting marginal discourse in research. While new digital tools can carry the potential of opening the discourse to neglected and peripheral histories and memories, when we tend to research them, we preserve the central narrative of the Holocaust by focusing on digital initiatives that duplicate this centrality. In other words, when we scholars talk about digital Holocaust memory, we are speaking about the Holocaust master narrative and its mediation through digital media.

We do not wish to claim that writing, teaching, and commemorating the Holocaust is not important. Nor do we claim that new scholarship about the Holocaust’s master narratives is not needed and important. Yet, we do hold that scholarly discussions about the possible prospects of digital Holocaust memory initiatives should be more nuanced. Taking in consideration our study’s findings, it seems that while the digitalization of Holocaust memory is here to stay, and even accelerate as was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic, we should remember that although the interactivity of digital media and its global reach opens opportunities for greater diversity in engagement, digitalization alone does not necessarily give voice to unheard, marginal and peripheral viewpoints. In order to broaden our perspectives and understandings of the Holocaust, scholars and practitioners alike, should look to and promote peripheral Holocaust geographies and marginal issues. Digitalization of Holocaust memory will not do the work for us.

Ethic approval number

M-102-27122020

The ethics committee

Departmental Ethics Committee (Department of Sociology and Anthropology), the Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the Robert Bergida Donation - Holocaust, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The list is available in the following link: https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/dlm_uploads/2019/08/JCR_Full_Journal_list140619.pdf [last retrieved: September 22, 2022].