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Paying for the Past: Reparations after the Holocaust in Global Context | Israel Institute for Advanced Studies

Paying for the Past: Reparations after the Holocaust in Global Context

Paying for the Past: Reparations after the Holocaust in Global Context

September 1, 2023 - June 30, 2024

Organizers:

Iris Nachum (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Gideon Reuveni (University of Sussex)
Daniel Siemens (Newcastle University)

 

How to address past injustices is one of the key questions of the day. Victims of historical harm and their descendants frequently ask for material and symbolical compensation as well as for a say in how today’s societies narrate and frame these past events. Research on redress for victims of historical wrongs, as a form of social justice, has become increasingly important both on the political and on the historical agenda, often representing conflicting assessments on the significance of reparation.

Some authors point to the power of reparations to settle deep-rooted social conflicts and ethnic frictions. Others argue that the politics of reparation fosters a culture of victimhood and perpetuates old antagonisms; and in so doing, nurtures the very logic from which many political and ethnic conflicts emerge. For both sides of the argument, the Holocaust represents the most extreme case of past injustice that not only helped to raise awareness of genocidal violence and other acts of human rights violations in history, but has become a central metaphor that has channelled these historical injustices into the trajectory of reparation and compensation. Our Research Group studies cases, types and models of rectifying past wrongs in a global perspective. Our motivation is thus to propose a historical topic of strong contemporary relevance. In bringing together scholars from different disciplines, our Research Group will stimulate discussion and contribute to a new framework for a long-term perspective of compensation and reconciliation in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries.

Members

men

Dr. Ron Dudai

Visiting Scholar
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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