Delphine Bechtel

is professor for German, Yiddish, and Central European studies at the Université Paris IV Sorbonne.

Articles

Remembrance as balancing act

The public and academic treatment of eastern Europe's Jewish heritage

Knowledge about the life of the east European Jews and the Shoah has grown in past decades. But the appropriate transmission of east European Jewish history and culture poses great challenges. On the one hand, there is a danger of remembrance of the Holocaust sliding into commercialism and kitsch; on the other hand, treating Jewish life as a museum artefact runs the risk of forgetting its renaissance. Here, academics, educators and curators explain the conclusions they have drawn from attempting this balancing act.

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