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Prof. David Feldman (Birkbeck, University of London/The University of Melbourne), The Holocaust and Public Memory from the 1940s to the Present DayHistory Brown Bag Seminar
Today the Holocaust has become an inescapable part of public memory in many countries and Auschwitz takes a central place when we remember the mass murder of Jews in Europe under the Third Reich. It was not always so. From the 1940s to the mid-1960s it was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising which provided the focus for memorialization and it was only at the end of the twentieth century that Holocaust memorialization, across nations, became a state sponsored project. One constant over these decades, however, is that memorialization has been infused with political meanings. With a focus on the United Kingdom but drawing on a transnational history, this paper examines the changing and contested meanings of the mass murder of Europe’s Jews in public memory from the Second World War to the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s war on Gaza.
David Feldman is Professor of History in Antisemitism, University of Melbourne and also Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London where he is Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. His most recent book, coedited with Marc Volovici, is Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition (Palgrave, 2023). He is co-author of Facing Antisemitism: the struggle for safety and solidarity, a report on antisemitism in Britain today (Runnymede Trust, January 2025). His writing has appeared in The Guardian, the Financial Times, Haaretz, the New Statesman, The Independent and the Political Quarterly.
Image: Former United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron with Holocaust Survivors at Downing Street. Flickr, Number 10, Creative Commons.
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Digital Lab 213, Arts West, University of Melbourne, Library-University of Melbourne, Medical Rd, Parkville VIC 3052, Australia, Melbourne
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