scholarly journals Holocaust Scholarship and Politics in the Public Sphere: Reexamining the Causes, Consequences, and Controversy of the Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen Debate

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew I. Port

Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the so-called Historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel), as well as the twentieth anniversary of the lively debate sparked by the publication in 1996 of Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. To mark the occasion, Central European History (CEH) has invited a group of seven specialists from Australia, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States to comment on the nature, stakes, and legacies of the two controversies, which attracted a great deal of both scholarly and popular attention at the time. To set the stage, the following introduction provides a brief overview of the two debates, followed by some personal reflections.

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (5) ◽  
pp. 1231-1246
Author(s):  
Michael Rothberg

The trial of Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, is generally considered a turning point in the history of Holocaust memory because it brought the Holocaust into the public sphere for the first time as a discrete event on an international scale. In the same year, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's film Chronicle of a Summer appeared in France. While absent from scholarship on memory of the Nazi genocide for over forty years, Chronicle of a Summer contains a scene of Holocaust testimony that suggests the need to look beyond the Eichmann trial for alternative articulations of public Holocaust remembrance. This essay considers the juxtaposition in Chronicle of a Summer of Holocaust memory and the history of decolonization in order to rethink the “unique” place that the Holocaust has come to hold in discourses on extreme violence. The essay argues that a discourse of truth and testimony arose in French resistance to the Algerian war that shaped and was shaped by memory of the Nazi genocide.


Author(s):  
Rachel Baarda ◽  
Rocci Luppicini

Ethical challenges that technology poses to the different spheres of society are a core focus within the field of technoethics. Over the last few years, scholars have begun to explore the ethical implications of new digital technologies and social media, particularly in the realms of society and politics. A qualitative case study was conducted on Barack Obama's campaign social networking site, my.barackobama.com, in order to investigate the ways in which the website uses or misuses digital technology to create a healthy participatory democracy. For an analysis of ethical and non-ethical ways to promote participatory democracy online, the study included theoretical perspectives such as the role of the public sphere in a participatory democracy and the effects of political marketing on the public sphere. The case study included a content analysis of the website and interviews with members of groups on the site. The study's results are explored in this chapter.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 2120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Jaques ◽  
Mine Islar ◽  
Gavin Lord

Contrary to what practice suggests, social media platforms may not be an appropriate forum for communicating with civil society about sustainability issues such as climate change. Misinformation campaigns are distorting the line between fact and falsity on social media platforms, and there has been a profound shift in the way that social media users consume and interact with information. These conditions have been popularly labeled as the post-truth era. Drawing from Neo-Marxian theory, we argue that post-truth can be explained as a new iteration of ideological struggle under capitalist hegemony. We substantiate this claim through a mixed methods investigation synthesizing corpus-assisted lexical analysis and critical discourse analysis to evaluate 900 user-generated comments taken from three articles on socioenvironmental topics published on Facebook by news organizations in the United States. The results showed that the nature of this struggle is tied explicitly to the role of science in society, where the legitimacy of science is caught in a tug-of-war of values between elitism on the one hand and a rejection of the establishment on the other. It follows that presenting truthful information in place of false information is an insufficient means of coping with post-truth. We conclude by problematizing the notion that Facebook is an adequate forum for public dialogue and advocate for a change in strategy from those wishing to communicate scientific information in the public sphere.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 205032451987228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob S Aday ◽  
Christopher C Davoli ◽  
Emily K Bloesch

While interest in the study of psychedelic drugs has increased over much of the last decade, in this article, we argue that 2018 marked the true turning point for the field. Substantive advances in the scientific, public, and regulatory communities in 2018 significantly elevated the status and long-term outlook of psychedelic science, particularly in the United States. Advances in the scientific community can be attributed to impactful research applications of psychedelics as well as acknowledgement in preeminent journals. In the public sphere, Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind was a commercial hit and spurred thought-provoking, positive media coverage on psychedelics. Unprecedented psychedelic ballot initiatives in the United States were representative of changes in public interest. Finally, regulatory bodies began to acknowledge psychedelic science in earnest in 2018, as evidenced by the designation of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy to “breakthrough therapy” status for treatment-resistant depression by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In short, 2018 was a seminal year for psychedelic science.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Scheper Hughes ◽  
James Kyung-Jin Lee ◽  
Amanda Lucia ◽  
S.Romi Mukherjee

California is experiencing a proliferation of public religious celebrations like never before. The authors focus on four public celebrations: the throwing of colors during Holi, an annual pilgrimage to Manzanar, the Peruvian celebration of El Señor de Los Milagros, and Noche de Altares. Even as these and many other similar festivals simultaneously represent the irruption and interruption of the sacred in the public sphere, these festivals reflect the multi-religious character of immigration. These public rituals say something about the pursuit of belonging in California and in the United States within an increasingly diverse and multicultural landscape. Those who participate together as intimate strangers are often seeking only a temporary affiliation, perhaps a place for a moment to engage one another beyond the context of the marketplace. In sharing in these religious and cross-cultural experiences, participants become enmeshed in the complicated and vibrant diversity of California, up close and personal, as physical as the bodies encountered there.


Author(s):  
Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann

This epilogue comments on the changes within the Polish American community and the Polish-language press during the most recent decades, including the impact of the Internet and social media on the practice of letter-writing. It also poses questions about the legacy and memory of Paryski in Toledo, Ohio, and in Polonia scholarship. Paryski's life and career were based on his intelligence, determination, and energy. He believed that Poles in the United States, as in Poland, must benefit from education, and that education was not necessarily the same as formal schooling. Anybody could embark on the path to self-improvement if they read and wrote. Long before the Internet changed the way we communicate, Paryski and other ethnic editors effectively adopted and practiced the concept of debate within the public sphere in the media. Ameryka-Echo's “Corner for Everybody” was an embodiment of this concept and allowed all to express themselves in their own language and to write what was on their minds.


1969 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Fruchtman

Question Bridge: Black Males is a 'trans-media' art project created by Hank Willis Thomas and Chris Johnson in collaboration with Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair. The artists travelled throughout the United States for four years to engage more than 150 Black men in an intercultural dialogue about identity and representation. These exchanges are part of socially engaged art practices that Grant H. Kester calls "dialogical aesthetics," in which artists adopt a collaborative, process-based approach to facilitate a dialogue within communities. As an artwork that is based on conversation, collaboration and community engagement, Question Bridge offers an opportunity to explore the potential for creative expression to engage social issues and stimulate change. This article uses Kester‘s dialogical aesthetics to examine the relationship between dialogue and identity formation. Drawing on postcolonial theorists Frantz Fanon and bell hooks, as well as Jürgen Habermas‘ conception of the public sphere, I argue that Question Bridge creates an opportunity for transformational dialogues that challenge and ultimately deconstruct dominant stereotypes and popular media narratives.


2007 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 568-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmet T. Kuru

Why do secular states pursue substantially different policies toward religion? The United States, France, and Turkey are secular states that lack any official religion and have legal systems free from religious control. The French and Turkish states have banned students' headscarves in public schools, whereas the U.S. has allowed students to wear religious symbols and attire. Using the method of process tracing, the author argues that state policies toward religion are the result of ideological struggles. In France and Turkey the dominant ideology is “assertive secularism,” which aims to exclude religion from the public sphere, while in the U.S., it is “passive secularism,” which tolerates public visibility of religion. Whether assertive or passive secularism became dominant in a particular case was the result of the particular historical conditions during the secular state-building period, especially the presence or absence of an ancien regime based on a marriage of monarchy and hegemonic religion.


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