Something changed

For most of my academic life, apart from teaching general courses in political theory, I taught a specialist undergraduate course on Marxist thought as well as related courses - or modules as we subsequently came to call them - at MA level. Although Jewish, during all those years I wasn't especially attuned, through my work, to what you might call Jewish issues, and nor was I in my personal life. I've always identified myself as a Jew, but it has been a wholly secular identification and I've never been deeply integrated within a Jewish community or milieu. But in the early 1990s my research interests came to include the Holocaust, and from 1994 until I stopped teaching I began to run a course on this subject for which the student demand was so heavy that the course now occupied nearly all of my teaching time. Since this was the topic I was thinking and teaching about, I became rather more attuned to Jewish-related signals, so to say, in the environment within which I move and in the wider world.

All this is merely by way of introduction to the following passage of an article by John Crace in Education Guardian - about David Cesarani:

Five years ago, scarcely a week went by without a media appearance from David Cesarani. The history of the Nazis and the Holocaust were in vogue and the country's leading specialist in Jewish history was top of every editor's wish list of pundits. "It was a strange time," he recalls. "The resurgence in Nazi scholarship due to the opening of the archives after the collapse of the former eastern bloc coincided with events in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. The past telescoped into the present as the world sought to understand the nature of genocide and wipe the historical slate clean before the new millennium."

Then the phone went quiet. For one thing, a greater understanding of the Holocaust did not bring about an end to genocide, and for another the events of 9/11 changed the news agenda. The west had a new set of enemies and the single-mindedness, not to mention fickleness, of the media meant that a new set of commentators got to have their week in the sun.

Cesarani's experience is not my own. My media appearances have not been plenty, and even that is an exaggeration. But as to the broader 'atmosphere', I believe Cesarani is absolutely right. Something changed, and it happened after 9/11. Only, I think the reasons given in this piece as to why it changed don't exhaust the set. Certain alignments within would-be 'progressive' political culture - ones which I write about here often enough not to have to spell them out on this occasion - have played a crucial part. You now hear and read things in certain quarters which would have been nearly unthinkable even five years ago. Whether or not Crace and/or Cesarani would share this view I don't know.