The Leo Baeck Institute London is pleased to announce the publication of Witnessing Positions: Jews, Memories, and Minorities in Contemporary Germany by Irit Dekel, the latest title in the LBI’s German Jewish Cultures series.
The book examines how public debates in Germany about Holocaust memory, antisemitism and migration often position minorities at the centre of discussion while leaving their own voices and perspectives at the margins.
Dekel asks what happens when minorities respond to, reshape and challenge these assigned roles through acts of witnessing. She develops a broader understanding of the witness: not only someone who testifies to past events, but also an individual or group who speaks to present social realities.
Drawing on legislation, public media, commemorative events, museums, memorial sites and memory activism over the past two decades, Witnessing Positions explores how minorities create social presence and claim space in contemporary Germany. It shows how public debates about memory can become arenas in which belonging is negotiated, contested and reimagined.
The book makes an important contribution to the study of contemporary German memory cultures and to wider discussions of minority agency in changing democratic societies.
Irit Dekel is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, where she is also director of the Olamot Center. She is the author of Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
Read more about Witnessing Positions and the German Jewish Cultures series.
