No abstract

Gender differences in conversation topicsIn 1922, Henry T. Moore walked up and down Broadway in the evening for several weeks, gathering fragments of overheard conversations. His research was motivated by similarities in the psychological test scores of the sexes that he felt ran counter to both "common sense and universal experience" (1922, p. 210). Moore observed that when women conversed with women, the majority of the conversations were about persons of the opposite sex or about

No abstract

Holocaust and genocide researchers are engaged in a vigorous debate concerning the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the appropriateness of comparing this event to others. They concur, however, in criticizing comparisons to the Holocaust made by activists, characterizing these comparisons as carelessly reasoned and self-interested. We use a U.S. national survey to identify which comparisons to the Holocaust are most salient to the public. Further, we test hypotheses about possible motivations or predictors of various comparisons, including influences of education and gender on ways of knowing, effects of race and political orientation on ethnoracial comparisons, and generational differences in collective memory. We conclude that public comparisons to the Holocaust are in concordance with elements of the United Nations' definition of genocide. Comparisons to the Holocaust are best predicted by education, gender, race, and current events. These findings have important implications for Holocaust pedagogy and for our understanding of the public's role in the construction of historical accounts.One of the most vigorous disputes in Holocaust and genocide studies concerns the uniqueness of the Holocaust. To some scholars, comparisons between the Holocaust and other events are anathema, as such comparisons are said to obscure the Jewish particularity of the Holocaust, ironically perpetuating the anti-Semitism that scholarly attention to the Holocaust ought to dispel (e.g., Alexander 1994;Dawidowicz 1981;Eckhardt and Eckhardt 1980;Feingold 1981). To others, specific, theoretically motivated comparisons between the Holocaust and other genocides, ethnocides, politicides, and cases of state-organized terror are valid (Chalk and

No abstract