Search & Research, Lectures and Papers 34: Holocaust Historiography between 1990 to 2021 in Context(s) – New Insights, Perceptions, Understandings, and Avenues—An Overview and Analysis

Holocaust research expanded enormously in recent decades and consists by now of a series of sub-domains. Nevertheless, the central domain was and remains the domain of “the core period”: the years of the Nazi regime (1933-1945) and of the regimes of Nazi Germany’s close allies and satellite countries. In this treatise Prof. Dan Michman, Head of the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research, surveys and examines major developments and changes in research on the core period of the Holocaust since 1990 until these days, and analyzes the various factors that paved the ways towards and triggered them: politics, memory policies and interests, social psychological needs, generational changes, value transformations, and new scholarly methodologies. These are accompanied by hundreds of references in many languages. The broad picture presented in this treatise leads to conclusions that erode several assumptions that got entrenched in earlier stages of research and which are still widely taught and found in popular discourse. Consequently, according to the author, there is a need to redefine the anti-Jewish campaign unleashed by Nazism (“the Holocaust”/”Shoah”) and fine-tune it; the treatise wraps up with such a redefinition. This publication is a “must” for all who are interested in the most updated picture of the state of historical research on the Holocaust.