Since the late 1990s, scholars of Holocaust memory have been exploring the international, transnational, supranational, and global dimensions of the on-going engagement with the annihilation of European Jews in Nazi Germany. They often point to the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000, which was the first large-scale international summit meeting of the new millennium, or to the 2005 UN General Assembly's Resolution on Holocaust Remembrance. These events demonstrate that Holocaust memory has indeed gone global—or has it? This and a number of related questions are at the core of this volume edited by cultural historian Amos Goldberg and social anthropologist Haim Hazan. They ask how “global”—i.e., not only European or American—Holocaust memory has actually become, what it contains and implies, how it functions in different contexts, what its vocabulary is, whether it is about Jews and Jewish history or about other genocides, and what its political, moral, and cultural implications are.

This volume is not the first to tackle the subject matter; rather, it is linked to a larger historiographical development. Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider have argued that the Holocaust has come to symbolize the epitome of evil in the context of a “cosmopolitanization” of Holocaust memory (Erinnern im globalen Zeitalter. Der Holocaust [2001]). Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel have provided a number of mostly European empirical case studies of this development (Universalisierung des Holocaust? [2008]), while Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad have taken the “global career” of the Holocaust as a starting point to explore more broadly the connections between globalization and memory debates (Memory in a Global Age [2010], 8). Marking Evil studies this subject from a new angle through seventeen chapters that focus mostly on the discursive dimensions of Holocaust memory in the global age. This should not come as a surprise, given that most of the volume's contributors are scholars of literature, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy.

The volume, emerging from the work of an Israeli research group, is divided into five sections. The first contains two introductions by the editors that outline the core questions of the book. Goldberg also offers an intriguing assessment of the tension between the significance of Holocaust memory as a universal, global ethical standard, and its central relevance for European/Western identity formation. Here he detects an imbalance: while Holocaust memory is “cosmopolitan in its ethics” and fundamental to a global human rights regime, it grants its victims, at the same time, “a privileged status divorced from this ethics” (21), thus setting them apart from the victims of other genocides. Hazan's introduction focuses on the inherent contradiction between the supposed uniqueness of the Holocaust and its simultaneous ubiquity, as illustrated by commemoration days, historical research, political and philosophical discourse, and the teaching of its alleged moral lessons. More specifically, he argues that the “globalized Holocaust” has “hardly any similarity” with the “authentic Holocaust” (31), stressing the inconsistency between “the imputed centripetal authority of the existentially essential category, ‘Holocaust,’ as against the centrifugal diffusing forces associated with the process of globalization” (32).

The volume's additional fifteen chapters cover a great deal of ground. The second section probes the existence and the meaning of a global Holocaust memory. In a posthumous piece, Peter Novick considers the “idea of a consequential ‘global memory of the Holocaust’… chimerical” (47), while Alon Confino calls it “inaccurate” and “misleading” because it has “no real resonance” (56) outside of Europe, Israel, and the United States. The volume's third section examines the vocabulary of global Holocaust memory, including trauma, testimony, human rights, and collective memory. The contribution of Michael Rothberg stands out, drawing on the main argument of his influential book Multidirectional Memory (2009), in which he argues that one should not see the memory of the Holocaust and other events, such as slavery and colonialism, as competitive and mutually exclusive; rather, one should consider “the public sphere as a field of contestation where memories interact productively and in unexpected ways” (213). The fourth section then shifts the focus to an examination of “The Poetics of the Global Event”: its four chapters look at how poets, writers, and artists who did not personally suffer from Nazi persecution have struggled with the question of how to represent the Holocaust in their works. The final section, titled “Closure,” contains two personal accounts. In the first, social anthropologist Emanuel Marx gives his recollections of Kristallnacht; the second is a short “personal postscript” by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi on her career as a literary scholar of the Holocaust.

Besides the language, which is at times ridden with jargon, a couple of lacunae should be pointed out. First, as mentioned with respect to Confino's piece, the volume questions the existence of a truly “global” Holocaust memory, pointing to its largely European, Israeli, and North American dimensions. In this context, it would have been worthwhile to take a closer look at Holocaust discourse in China or South Africa, for example. The editors mention both cases in the preface, but they are not discussed elsewhere in the book. Some chapters, like Michal Givoni's analysis of Doctors Without Borders as witnesses to humanitarian catastrophes, or Tamar Katriel's contribution on the legacies of Mohatma Gandhi, touch on these non-Western dimensions, but their protagonists and their respective arenas are mostly European or North American. With the exception of Carol A. Kidron's chapter, whose comparative analysis of “The Global Semiotics of Trauma and Testimony” includes survivors of the Cambodian genocide, none of the contributors actually takes non-Western regions or actors under explicit and extensive scrutiny.

Second, one could make the opposite case and argue that the book pays too little attention to Germany—after all, the largest successor state of the Third Reich. Indeed, developments abroad have had a significant impact on Germany's coping with the Nazi past. In the context of European integration, Germany has also left its mark on the memory culture of its neighbors. The editors’ focus is not primarily on what one could call the political, or even practical, level of the implementation and functioning of memorial cultures. Nevertheless, the omission of the role of Germany and Germans in this context—Jakob Hessing's chapter on “The Reading of W.G. Sebald's Prose” notwithstanding—does not seem entirely plausible.

All in all, the volume's greatest strength, namely, its wide range of themes and topics, is, at the same time, its weakness. While each individual chapter can be read with great benefit, the volume as a whole does not seem to provide a coherent answer to the questions outlined earlier. Then again, it may be that Holocaust memory has taken on so many different forms and meanings that only eclectic—and necessarily fragmentary—accounts can do justice to the topic.