The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age

Politics, History, and Social Change

by Daniel Levy, Natan Sznaider

In The 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Israel, Germany

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2005

Reviews

[Sylvia Saxton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Levy and Sznaider have accomplished a great feat in their coalescence of over fifty years of scholarship. They succeed in explaining the development of a cosmopolitan memory and how the Holocaust was in a unique temporal position to facilitate such a development of globalized memory. While Levy and Sznaider do not present new research in the work they do outline and explain their position from all sides using the various theories and claims of a wide array of prominent scholars. The largest drawback of this work by far its excessively wordy writing. The information presented is complex on its own, but the convoluted writing style made some parts of the work almost inaccessible. Many times, the author's odd word choices made even a simple idea complicated. Apart from the hindrance of the writing style though, Levy and Sznaider explained the difficult concepts in an understandable way. However, for someone who is not already familiar with social and memory theory the onslaught of new ideas and information would be easily overwhelming. They author left little if any time for the reader to sit with an idea and its explanation before moving onto a new and equally intricate idea often within the same section of the text. This would make it difficult for the average reader to take anything more then a vague surface understanding away from the work. The real value of Levy and Sznaider’s work comes from its easily accessible layout, index, and bibliography. The layout of the work, by parts, chapters, and subheadings makes it easy to find the pertinent section when using the book as secondary source material. The index and bibliography are useful in much the same way.