ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the recent efforts of the United Nations to initiate a global pedagogic programme of intergenerational learning from the Holocaust. In particular, it will assess how the cosmopolitan moment in shared ‘vocabularies of remembrance’ of the Holocaust,1 identified by theorists such as Levy and Sznaider2 or Dubiel,3 has been extended further by efforts to embed this memory project within overlapping communities of collective moral learning and global communication. Central to these developments has been the way past and present encounters with genocide have come to be explored collectively as an object of protracted public communication, as much as legal and political enquiry. Indeed, the understanding is that memories of both Holocaust and post-Holocaust atrocities can never be made sufficiently clear, especially in their capacity to stimulate moments of self-confrontation and debate. Of course, the operative assumption in this instance is that of the non-translatability of certain aspects of genocide, where the language of violence is simply beyond translation. Yet the need to translate remains strong and, in light of newer shocking encounters with human atrocity, the desire to explore ‘the psychological, cultural, political and societal roots of human cruelty, mass violence and genocide’ remains equally urgent.4
