Abstract This article discusses the Fortunoff Video Archive's ongoing efforts to build testimony-centered online digital learning materials for secondary schools. Because of its witness-centered interview methodology and its origins as a project created by the New Haven survivor community, the archive is particularly well positioned to help students explore the nature and mediated character of Holocaust testimony. The archive's digital learning initiatives therefore ask students to explore testimony as both a complex historical source and a representation of memory, and to apply this understanding to the act of listening to victims of mass violence. Situating the archive's approach to teaching with digital testimony in the broader landscape of Holocaust education, this article explores examples of how Fortunoff learning materials engage students in empathetic listening and historical analysis, and prompt them to explore the role of archives in collecting, co-constructing, and disseminating Holocaust testimonies.
Abstract This article details the scholarly goals and conceptual and methodological challenges the authors encountered when developing an encyclopedic database to document the largest subset of Nazi-era camps—specifically the more than thirty-eight thousand labor camps for foreign civilian forced laborers estimated to have operated in Nazi Germany. Designed as a digital research tool, the database will serve as a companion to the forthcoming The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, vol. 7, Camps for Foreign Forced Laborers. Previous volumes in the series synthesize foundational information about persecutory sites and inmate experiences into historical narratives for reference purposes. The database builds on this approach while presenting relevant information as carefully defined quantitative, qualitative, and temporal data extracted directly from primary and secondary sources for large-scale computational analysis. This article illustrates strategies for integrating the database with a traditional reference series while using digital methods to collect and standardize large-scale historical data. Challenges include extracting reliable data from primary and secondary sources that are frequently incomplete, ambiguous, or contradictory. To combat these issues, the project team follows a three-step process, guided by elaborate data-entry conventions, that includes (1) building a database that documents quantitative, temporal, geographic, and name information; (2) interpreting qualitative information while documenting, rather than resolving, conflicts between sources; and (3) sorting the data into the database schema of a relational PostgreSQL database. The authors demonstrate the database's potential to generate innovative scholarship by featuring a distinct subset of regional data. Thus, this article reveals how digital analysis can yield meaningful statistical and spatial analyses of the Nazi forced labor camps beyond individual case studies, which have long figured as the most promising access points in the historiography.
Abstract This article explores the experiences of Polish Jewish men during the German occupation of Warsaw, focusing on the period prior to the mass deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto in summer 1942. It demonstrates that local male gender identities balanced between continuity and deconstruction in the face of increasing persecution. The policies of the occupation authorities—to an unprecedented degree—restricted Jewish men's agency and constrained their ability to perform what they saw as normative gender roles, such as breadwinning and protecting the family, which were essential to maintaining their sense of respectability as men. Initially, the gender dynamics that shaped prewar masculine or feminine roles remained in effect following the outbreak of the Second World War; however, as the anti-Jewish measures of the Nazi administration intensified and targeted men specifically, some Jewish men collapsed under the new burdens and could barely function, and some engaged in compensatory practices (including alternative employment or the use of violence) that partially restored their sense of masculine normativity. Hunger, roundups, and forced labor compelled men and women to rethink masculine gender identity. Exploring Holocaust memoirs and diaries, in addition to documents from the Oneg Shabbat archive, this article highlights the gendered experiences of the majority of Jewish men who did not participate in the resistance and expands our understanding of gender-sensitive Holocaust scholarship by including male voices.
Abstract Media about the Holocaust are often referred to in terms of Holocaust representation, as if this is the only way to explore the relationship between media and this past. As the Holocaust transitions from a living to a mediated memory, this article offers an alternative perspective. Whereas some historical critiques still focus on representational appropriateness and trivialization, current research is less concerned with who or what is made visible in media about the Holocaust and more interested in what users/visitors can do with sources and narratives about the past with and through media. Yet, conceptually, scholars continue to understand interactivity in limited ways, either in terms of user agency (in media and memory studies) or the relationship between human designers and computational systems (in digital humanities). The author argues that the dominance of representation in Holocaust studies should be understood as an interruption in the conceptualization of the relationship between media and the Holocaust rather than the norm. Taking a philosophical archaeological approach reveals that two other paradigms—the record and interactivity—are far more concerned with materiality. Moving through the three paradigms of representation, the record, and interactivity, this article foregrounds the overlooked significance of materiality in understanding the relationship between media and the Holocaust, and offers a model of seven spectra to support further practice and critique of media works that adopt interactive intentions.
Abstract This article examines the transformation and expanding scope of the concept of the Righteous through the interplay of local, national, and transnational memory politics. Beginning with the category of the “Righteous Among the Nations,” established by Yad Vashem in the early 1960s, it traces how this historically specific designation has, in recent decades, undergone a process of reinterpretation and universalization. Focusing on a memory network connecting Italy, Brussels, and Poland, the author analyzes how diverse local and transnational, governmental and nongovernmental actors—including Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide (Gariwo), the European Parliament, the History Meeting House in Warsaw, and the Memorial Museum to the Inhabitants of the Oświęcim Region—have contributed to redefining the term “Righteous,” so that the label now goes beyond the Holocaust context and increasingly applies to individuals, often civilians, recognized for moral courage, civic responsibility, and self-sacrifice in a variety of historical and contemporary settings.
