Skip to main content

"I do not attach great significance to it": Taking note of "The Holocaust" in English Case Law

Herman, Didi (2008) "I do not attach great significance to it": Taking note of "The Holocaust" in English Case Law. Social and Legal Studies, 17 (4). pp. 427-452. ISSN 0964-6639. (doi:10.1177/0964663908097079) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:6324)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0964663908097079

Abstract

The first part of this article traces the history of the word 'holocaust' and the phrase 'the Holocaust' in English judicial discourse, both in cases where the mass killing of Jewish Europeans in the early 1940s was a relevant issue, and the many more cases where it was not. The second part of the article returns to a selection of the recent cases, arguing that when the Holocaust is referred to in contemporary judgments it tends to be spliced in as a form of stock footage, and suggest that this routinized manoeuvre succeeds in misremembering the past, rather than contributing to any substantive comprehension of the events the phrase is intended to describe. More than this, however, the uses of the Holocaust by the judges may also reinforce particularly English understandings of Jews and Jewishness. Far from acting as a mnemonic device to recall atrocity, the Holocaust can in fact act as an aid to remembering what it is 'the English' find distasteful and alien about 'the Jew'.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1177/0964663908097079
Uncontrolled keywords: Holocaust; Jewish; judges; memorialization; memory
Subjects: K Law
Divisions: Divisions > Division for the Study of Law, Society and Social Justice > Kent Law School
Depositing User: Eve Dyer
Date Deposited: 06 Jun 2008 09:21 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 09:44 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/6324 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

  • Depositors only (login required):

Total unique views for this document in KAR since July 2020. For more details click on the image.