ABSTRACT
Shimon Samuels's work includes the containment of resurgent antisemitism in the former Soviet Union; restitution claims of Holocaust victims against banks and insurance companies; and Vatican diplomacy. This chapter focuses on the relevance of the Holocaust as a preventive instrument against its recurrence, that is, a benchmark for minorities, a yardstick for contemporary atrocity, and an early-warning system for mass murder. In the immediate postwar, the images of the Holocaust acted as protective "teflon" against blatant expressions of antisemitism in the West. The transparent fine-tuning of the psychological underpinnings of national collective memory may be excuses for conflict resolution based directly upon the lessons of Holocaust denial. For the last twenty years, curricula development and research into the Holocaust have been accepted into mainstream academic programs in North America and Western Europe. The chapter then moves the emphasis to defining, drawing and applying its lessons to a practical global agenda focused upon, inter alia, language, memory, jurisprudence, restitution, and technology.
