Britain, the United States and the Holocaust: In Search of a Historiography

Kushner, Tony

doi:10.1057/9780230524507_12

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…26 Beckman, The 43 Group. in defeating postwar fascism, with the communists' role restated by Renton and Copsey, in separate works, both of whom engaged directly with Beckman's memoir in addressing the issue. 27 Nevertheless, Copsey has played a vital part in widening the picture of British antifascism. He transcended not just left-wing antifascism but 'the politics of hostile activism' altogether to take in intellectual, media, middle-class, feminist and liberal antifascism.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…32 Tom Buchanan contested the attempt to construct a new antifascist paradigm, seizing on the very question of conceptual stretching Copsey raised. He could 27 Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain,p.85;Renton,Fascism, Nigel Copsey, 'Preface: Towards a New Anti-Fascist Minimum' in Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds), Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.xiv. 29 See Roger Griffin's concept of the definitional minimum of fascism in Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), p.13.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dachau (these last three in striped prison uniforms), Lidice and Rotterdam'. 27 Harry Pollitt, the party's General Secretary, first urged the public to remember the Blitz in resisting a newly armed-Luftwaffe, and then 'Belsen and the mass murder camps!' to oppose the release of Nazi war criminals to rebuild the German army.…”

Section: Labour In Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

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British Antifascism and the Holocaust, 1945–79

Cohen¹

2022

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British Antifascism and the Holocaust, 1945-67 Joshua Cohen This thesis explores the extent to which the Holocaust shaped British antifascism in the period 1945-1967. It makes an original contribution in setting out the first dedicated analysis of the relationship between consciousness of the Nazi genocide and motivations for confronting fascism in Britain. The study has interrogated institutional archival records to assess the presence of the Holocaust in the private discourses, propaganda and campaign strategies of a wide variety of antifascist organisations. Personal motivations for antifascist activism have been engaged with through analysis of memoirs, autobiographies and oral histories. The thesis will demonstrate that the Holocaust was often absent from antifascist rhetoric, and so should be decentred from understandings that assume constant affinity between Holocaust remembrance and British antifascism. Instead, antifascism in this period was often conceptualised in a patriotic framework, as coda to the Second World War, or viewed through left-wing analyses of class struggle which obscured fascism's 'racial' victims. However, the central importance of this study lies in its revealing that a Holocaust-inspired resistance to fascism was emerging in this period and beginning to co-exist with patriotic and other forms of antifascism. The 'lessons' of the Holocaust for antifascists were the subject of agonised internal disputes and became a point of open conflict between militant and establishment Anglo-Jewish organisations. The genocide was also politicised in a number of antifascist campaigns, including on the Left and in the name of civil liberties. The thesis therefore argues for 1945-67 as a vital transitional period when use of the Holocaust as a weapon against fascism was developing, albeit sometimes on the fringes of antifascist discourse. In this way, the period presaged the more confident later invocations of the genocide, including in activism against the National Front in the 1970s.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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British Antifascism and the Holocaust, 1945–79

Cohen¹

2022

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“…Britain was slow in developing what Pearce (2014) refers to as Holocaust consciousness (see also Kushner 2004Kushner , 2013Pearce 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A primary objective of this article is to examine the way that ‘memory makers’ are themselves ‘made’, using the British Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) as a case example. Britain was slow in developing what Pearce (2014) refers to as Holocaust consciousness (see also Kushner, 2004, 2013; Pearce, 2013). As late as the 1970s, ‘British scholarship on Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust was still virtually non-existent […having] been subsumed for much of the post-war period beneath a carefully nurtured narrative of Second World War heroism and moral superiority’ (Pearce, 2008: 73).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making memory makers: Interpellation, norm circles and Holocaust Memorial Day Trust workshops

Richardson

2017

Memory Studies

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This article examines the rationale for ordinary people’s involvement with commemoration. Adopting a critical ethnographic approach, and taking myself and my own interpellation as a symptomatic example, I ask what it is about Holocaust Memorial Day that calls to people, motivating them to become involved in localised commemorative activities. Since 2005, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust has been responsible for organising and promoting Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration and, as part of this, they organise free workshops across the United Kingdom for people interested in organising an activity to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. The data I analyse in this article are drawn from two sites: participant observation of three workshops organised by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (October–November 2015) and interviews with both the organisers and participants of these three same workshops. My analysis demonstrates that the workshop is orientated to answering two modal questions, which participants (implicitly) ask of themselves: should I commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, entailing a deontic modality, and can I commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, entailing an epistemic modality. I argue that Holocaust Memorial Day should be regarded as a norm circle which, through its members, possesses a causal power to produce a tendency in others to also commit to endorsing commemoration as a social norm.

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In Advance of the Broken Image: Gerhard Richter and Gustav Metzger’s Confrontations with Nazi Criminality

Allwork

2019

The Holocaust and Its Contexts

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Britain, the United States and the Holocaust: In Search of a Historiography

Cited by 5 publications

References 4 publications

British Antifascism and the Holocaust, 1945–79

British Antifascism and the Holocaust, 1945–79

Making memory makers: Interpellation, norm circles and Holocaust Memorial Day Trust workshops

In Advance of the Broken Image: Gerhard Richter and Gustav Metzger’s Confrontations with Nazi Criminality

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