Samuel Merrill - Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media: Mobilising Mediated Remembrance

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ISBN 978-3-030-32826-9 e-ISBN 978-3-030-32827-6

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

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Preface

As we were putting the final touches on this volume before submission our social media channels started to be punctuated with reports, videos and images of a protest on 30 June 2019 by hundreds of young Jewish people outside a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre in New Jersey. Sparked into action by recent revelations of the inhumane conditions of ICE detention centres, the protestors echoed the claims made by New York Congresswoman and activist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who on 17 June drew direct comparisons between the detention centres and concentration camps during a live stream on her Instagram channel. AOC, speaking to those people that were in her words concerned enough with humanity that Never Again means something, faced criticism on Twitter from Republican politicians, including Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney, for invoking and trivialising the memory of the Holocaust through her references to concentration camps and the use of a slogan commonly associated with its remembrance. Despite a Twitter response that clarified her comparison by offering a definition of concentration camps and distinguishing them from death camps, AOCs words were also denounced by the countrys Holocaust Memorial Museum, which released a statement on 24 June reading: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.Connecting to a long lineage of debates regarding the exceptionality and the non-representability of the Holocaust, this statement itself was met with an open letter published in the New York Review of Books on 1 July signed by over 200 academicsmany of whom study the Holocaust and are prominent in the field of memory studieswhich, partly out of concern for the ubiquity of the museums declaration, called for its retraction. The letter stated:

The Museums decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical. It has the potential to inflict severe damage on the Museums ability to continue its role as a credible, leading global institution dedicated to Holocaust memory, Holocaust education, and research in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies. The very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering; pointing to similarities across time and space is essential for this task.

AOCs comments not only triggered academic debate regarding the role of comparison in Holocaust research, they also found resonance with a group of young Jewish people who quickly formed the Never Again Action Group and partnered with the immigrant rights group Movimiento Cosecha. By late June, before its first demonstration, the group had already established a considerable internet and social media presence. Reclaiming the Never Again slogan and hashtag from its most recent high-profile appropriators in the American protest landscapethe March for Our Lives youth movement that has sought gun reform since the Parkland school shooting of February 2018 and other more recent shootingsmembers of the Never Again Action Group explicitly drew on their intergenerationally received memories of the Holocaust to declare openly that Never Again is Now. The groups website stated:

As Jews, we were taught to never let anything like the Holocaust happen again. We refuse to wait and seewe know from our own history what happens next. Many of our ancestors narrowly escaped from conditions like what we are seeing today in concentration camps at the border and detention centers around the country. Never again is now. If youve ever wondered what you would have done if you had been alive in the 1940s, this is the moment of truth. This is time to put our bodies on the line because when we say never again, we mean never again for anyone.