The grand moral narratives of cruelty come upon us with profound political ramifications. The Western narrative is reminiscent of the crimes of totalitarianism such as the Holocaust and the Gulag. Beyond the Atlantic world, these memories hardly play a role. The focus here is on the atrocities of the West against the world outside the West. Not the Holocaust, but colonialism and imperialism are the semantic markers. These two moral narratives are not always easy to separate; they are often linked in both historiography and political analysis, and they overlap in the Middle East conflict. My research project will attempt not only to describe and analyze the two narratives, but also to allow them to enter into discourse with one another – with the aim of thinking Jewish studies and post-colonialism together.

Natan Sznaider is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Tel Aviv University of Applied Sciences. He specializes in sociological theory, globalization and the culture of memory. Born in Germany, he emigrated to Israel in 1974, where he began his academic studies in 1976. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York on The Sociology of Compassion. He held several guest professorships and fellowships in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He publishes regularly essays in newspapers und magazines. Natan Sznaider lives and works in Tel Aviv. He is currently working on a study on the relationship between Jewish Enlightenment and sociology and the resulting possibilities for a joint thinking on postcolonial and Jewish studies. His book Vanishing Points of Memory: About the Present of the Holocaust and Colonialism, which was published by Hanser Verlag in January 2022, marks the beginning of this research project.