This chapter proposes a reading of Argentine-Jewish literature that stresses key moments of production. It begins with a focus on Alberto Gerchunoff´s The Jewish Gauchos as the foundational text (and of modern Jewish literature in Spanish) and the moment of massive immigration. Gerchunoff is read alongside Borges, who is treated as a contrapunctual figure, a canonical writer who engages with transnational Jewish literatures and draws strategies from Jewish reading and writing to devise his own literary models.  The second part examines the impact of the Shoah on Argentine Jewish literature of the 1950s and 1960s focusing on playwright Germán Rozenmacher and in the world of Yiddish and Ladino publishing. Tamara Kamenszain is subsequently described as an author that espouses “reluctant belonging,” someone who has engaged with different subjects and different styles but never ventures very far away from Jewishness. The third part treats the use of the Holocaust metaphorically to discuss state terrorism in the works of Reina Roffé and Sergio Chejfec. It concludes with a reflection on contemporary writing and the variety of literary genres.

This interview with Julia Pascal reveals the philosophy behind the concept and creation of her 2007 production of The Merchant of Venice/The Shylock Play at the Arcola Theatre, London. The Ghetto-on-Ghetto framing device is explored as a central motif. Vital to this re-vision of the text is the living presence of Polish Ghetto escapee, the actor Ruth Posner. Posner challenges the representation of the malevolent, male Jewish figure of Shylock that has historically dominated the image of Jews in the European imagination. The staging of the script, through Posner’s gaze, is explained as a provocative act to spotlight neglected female Shoah experience and to interrogate the view of the creation of Shylock as an example of Shakespeare’s humanism and philosemitism. Pascal discusses her reasons for heightening the experience of Black and Jewish characters to hint at a critical reading of the role of the Outsider figure at the birth of the British Empire. The interview reveals the decision to confront a text from rehearsal to critical reception. Included are questions surrounding the context of daring to add to and investigate the play within a climate of growing antisemitism in Britain.

Chapter six grew out of my curiosity about a term that appears in the preamble of the ICC Statute: unimaginable atrocities. If the court is indeed called to fight "unimaginable atrocities," how is it possible that considerable parts of the same statute are devoted to spell out and, in great detail, how these crimes should be defined? The chapter combines my curiosity about the ICC Statute with my questions about the use of film in legal education. Following Shoshana Felman, I argue that the ICC Statute should be read as pointing to the limits of what can be articulated in legal language. The unimaginable or unspeakable cannot, by definition, be captured in legal categories. However, it is possible to suggest what it means for something to be unimaginable. This is where art, including film, can play a role. The biggest part of the chapter is devoted to films that use reenactments to show what it means not to be able to fully articulate and understand historical trauma. The films, I argue, function as a reminder of the importance of the term used in the ICC preamble: the unimaginable atrocities that point to the limits of what law can articulate and achieve.

Chapter 2’s analysis of fifteen textbooks published since 1993 for Israeli middle and high-school students demonstrates that an exclusive presentation of the Holocaust in the curriculum has relied on the explicit portrayal of the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish tragedy with universal relevance to the entire Jewish nation and, therefore, pertinent to every Israeli-Jewish youth. Simultaneously, the overt minimization of other groups’ suffering as a result of Nazi genocidal policies is deemphasized through the conveyance of anachronistic historical information and the usage of numerical aggregation practices. The chapter’s identified Zionist metanarrative lays the foundations for further exclusionary manifestations, namely the minimization of Palestinians’ fate in the 1948 War. Textbooks that illustrate a teleological movement from the center(s) of Jewish destruction, “there” in the galut (Hebrew: exile), to revival “here” in Israel, advocate a post-Holocaust justification for the Zionist enterprise and, consequently, necessitate an untainted recovery from the preceding crisis. By differentiating between Zionist, Zionist-critical, and revisionist narratives of the war, the chapter’s secondary analysis illustrates that while new historiographical writings on the 1948 War have emerged, the beneficial and practical effects of the mass Palestinian exodus are stressed in textbooks. In line with this narrative, a systematic policy of expulsion is firmly cast aside and, instead, overt reminders of traditional Zionist historiography formulating a miraculous rebirth remain.

Claude Lanzmann began work on Shoah in 1973 and didn’t complete it until twelve years later. The film was shaped in part by events that happened as it was being shot: a spate of trials that placed in the dock perpetrators of the Final Solution in France, the emergence of a movement of Holocaust-deniers or negationists, and the airing on French TV in 1979 of the American “docudrama” Holocaust. Lanzmann shaped a movie that in form and substance defined itself in reaction to these developments, crystallizing in the process a particular, French understanding of the Final Solution as a unique and unprecedented event, not about survival and reconstruction, but about death in the gas chambers of the Aktion Reinhard Vernicthungslagers. Lanzmann wanted to create a film that denied viewers catharsis or consolation, and in the process, he gave the genocide a new name, Shoah, which has since gained currency in France and elsewhere.

The war to end all wars destroyed the European order and its peculiar system of international law in which the theory of ‘humanitarian intervention’ had found its natural habitat. By the end of the nineteenth century, the expansion of the European empires had subjected the entire globe to one European system of international law, but by the end of World War I the European claim to moral superiority and ‘civilisation’ had been severely weakened by the horrors of war. The answer was, in the word of one of its architects, ‘a great experiment’: the League of Nations.1 The following decade has been variously considered as the hopeful beginning of an attempt to create an ‘improved stage in the history of humanity’;2 a political innovation aimed at the creation of peaceful existence under the rule of international law;3 and the ‘pathological inflation of the law’.4 The League of Nations represented an attempt to institute a new type of international order based on the international rule of law. Yet, rather than abandon the distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ nations, as some apparently feared,5 this ‘Move to Institutions’6 legitimised the European powers’ leading role as ‘civilisers’ through the Mandate System.7 Moreover, its founding treaty created the state of tension in which the League would have to operate – the commitment to both the principle of self-determination and the leading role of the ‘civilised’ states for the advancement of the law. In this spirit, the Covenant of the League of Nations and the treaties concluded in its context introduced a number of provisions for a number of states and regions that related to matters traditionally left to the ‘domaine reservé’ of ‘civilised’ states, and thus introduced local regimes of minority protection under the auspices of the League. Attempts to institutionalise a full system for the protection of minorities in all member states of the League failed, however, not least because France and the United Kingdom resisted. These powers were ‘determined to maintain control of over a minority-protection regime of which they were the principal authors’ and they were also ‘committed to making this determination known’.8