← Back to author list

Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn teaches European history at Columbia University and has written books on Emmanuel Levinas, Holocaust memory, and human rights.

Ordinary Memory

Samuel Moyn

“I wanted to write an integrated history,” Saul Friedländer told a magazine in 2007, in an interview marking the long-awaited concluding installment of his Holocaust study Nazi Germany and the Jews. By “integrated history,” Friedländer meant one in which the designs of genocidal perpetrators were fused with the personal testimony of the victims. “Business-as-usual history flattens the interpretation of mass…