Jeffrey Olick
University of Virginia
Talk: “Enough Already! The Recent (and Not So Recent) Vicissitudes of Holocaust Memory”
September 23, 2026, 6:00 pm
Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library
Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library
Since at least 1945, two visions for memory have competed: one concerned that, as Nietzsche put it, too much attention to the past could be “the gravedigger of the present”; and one, following Santayana’s dictum, claiming that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. There have been both reasonable and unreasonable uses of these competing inclinations. Against a longer historical backdrop, this talk will address the precipitous fall in status of Holocaust remembrance since its apotheosis in the Stockholm Declaration of 2000. In particular, it will attempt to draw a line between justified identification of problems with Holocaust memory and the unjustified implication that Holocaust memory is itself the problem.
Jeffrey Olick is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia. He is Past President of the Memory Studies Association and an elected member of the Sociological Research Association. Olick is a cultural and historical sociologist whose work has focused on collective memory and commemoration, critical theory, transitional justice, postwar Germany, and sociological theory more generally. Current work focuses on the historical origins of the boundaries between psychology and sociology, the life and work of Maurice Halbwachs, and change in political culture through conflict over collective memory.
