ABSTRACT
While the wheel of history still certainly turns—historians in many fields still write history from the self-justifying point of view of the victors—Holocaust studies is one of the fields in which scholars have worked to do something different. Far from the stone under the wheel of history that Jarecka and her colleagues had imagined, the Holocaust and its victims had little effect on how scholars and their students understood the world from which it had emerged and the postwar histories which it shaped. As Holocaust scholars become insiders rather than outsiders, we must remain true to the vision of our field as casting “a stone under history’s wheel.” Perhaps the most powerful way that Holocaust studies can continue to serve as a stone under the wheel of history is to use our subject matter to encourage learning about and practice in the basic skills of humanities research.
