This is a comprehensive study of Holocaust memory in the digital age of social media and an important examination of how social technology affects the way history is made and circulated online. Social media has become a place where memories of the Holocaust take shape through user-driven content shared in elaborately interconnected communication networks. Curated exhibits, documentaries and scholarly research, smartphone photos, short videos and online texts act as windows into the popular consciousness. They document how everyday people make sense of the crime of genocide, presenting unique challenges to historians. Does participatory media create a different understanding of genocide than more traditional forms of writing? How does expertise manifest in the digital public sphere? Do YouTube tourist videos and concentration camp selfies undermine the seriousness of the Holocaust and Holocaust studies by extension? Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape provides valuable answers to these questions and much more. The book comes with a range of helpful images and it also analyzes the way vernacular memory around the Holocaust and postwar reckoning and reconciliation is mobilized as well as contested in the digital sphere. It is an important volume for all scholars and students of the Holocaust, its history and memory.

The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age challenges a number of key themes in Holocaust studies with new research. Essays in the section “Tropes Reconsidered” reevaluate foundational concepts such as Primo Levi’s gray zone and idea of the muselmann. The chapters in “Survival Strategies and Obstructions” use digital methodologies to examine mobility and space and their relationship to hiding, resistance, and emigration. Contributors to the final section, “Digital Methods, Digital Memory,” offer critical reflections on the utility of digital methods in scholarly, pedagogic, and public engagement with the Holocaust.Although the chapters differ markedly in their embrace or eschewal of digital methods, they share several themes: a preoccupation with the experiences of persecution, escape, and resistance at different scales (individual, group, and systemic); methodological innovation through the adoption and tracking of micro- and mezzohistories of movement and displacement; varied approaches to the practice of Saul FriedlÄnder’s “integrated history”; the mainstreaming of oral history; and the robust application of micro- and macrolevel approaches to the geographies of the Holocaust. Taken together, these chapters incorporate gender analysis, spatial thinking, and victim agency into Holocaust studies. In so doing, they move beyond existing notions of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders to portray the Holocaust as a complex and multilayered event.