National Policy, Global Memory

Since 1963, the state of Israel has awarded the title of “Righteous among the Nations” to individuals who risked their lives sheltering Jews during the Holocaust. This distinction remained solely an Israeli initiative until the late 1990s, when European governments began developing their own national categories, the most prominent of which was the “Righteous of France,” honoring those who protected Jews during the Vichy regime. In National Policy, Global Memory, Sarah Gensburger uses this dramatic episode to lend a new perspective to debates over memory and nationhood. In particular, she works to combine two often divergent disciplines—memory studies and political science—to study “memory politics” as a form of public policy.

Trained in the social sciences, Sarah Gensburger is a sociologist of memory and a historian of the Holocaust. She is currently a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS-ISP) and the author of Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews (Indiana University Press, 2015), co-author of Nazi Labor Camps in Paris (Berghahn Books, 2011) and co-editor of Resisting Genocides: The Multiple Forms of Rescue (Columbia University Press, 2011).

“Extensively and rigorously researched, Gensburger’s book persuasively argues for memory studies and political science to converge in the study of memory public policy, but it will also appeal to all scholars of memory studies and the Shoah in the French context.” • French Studies

“Gensburger's work which provides a wealth of detail about the individual actors, as well as the interest groups, lobbying for the recognition of non-Jews who came to the aid of Jewish victims of Nazi policies throughout World War II-era Europe.… [It] artfully demonstrates how memory studies benefits from political scientific analysis, and as such ties the social sciences together in the field of Holocaust Remembrance.” • International Social Science Review

“This is a rich book--thickly documented, creative in selecting its object of inquiry--and challenges instrumental concepts of the uses of memory implicit in the accusations leveled by those who denounce ‘victim competition’… Gensburger’s aim is to explain public policy, and that she does in an eye-opening fashion. The problems she raises are timely and interesting, and her empirical rejection of the “interest group” argument is convincing.” • H-France Review

“In this rich and personal book, Sarah Gensburger traces the genesis of a category, its issues, and the implementation of the ‘public policy of memory’ that accompanied it.” • Le Monde