A Pedagogy of Horror – the Holocaust in Israeli schoolbooks

Abstract

The paper summarizes a study of twenty-six Israeli schoolbooks of History and Holocaust studies, used in mainstream secular schools. It focuses on the representation of Holocaust victims in these schoolbooks. The study adopts a social semiotic approach to text analysis and attempts to reveal the interest of the rhetors and designers of schoolbooks through the analysis of representations, conceived of as motivated signs. The paper’s argument is that regarding the Holocaust, Israeli schoolbooks often adopt the Nazi-German narrative and perspective, which is not responsive to victims’ suffering, and represent them in a de-personalized way as icons, symbols, and specimens of categories. The paper ends with the schoolbooks’ portrayal of Palestinians as Nazis.

Key words: Holocaust representation, atrocity photographs, multimodal analysis, motivated signs, Nazification of Palestinians.