This panel gathers scholars who analyze and critique the rhetorical, affective, and institutional forms of “Never Again” discourse in Chile, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United States, tracing how the slogan is both a terrain of ethical struggle and a barometer of shifting political imaginaries. Giovanni Miglianti reinterprets the writings and speeches of Primo Levi and Lidia Beccaria Rolfi to argue that analogy was central to their testimonial ethics and that their insistence on connecting Auschwitz to other sites of suffering (from Vietnam to Argentina) models a comparative, solidaristic politics of remembrance urgently relevant today. Ana Figueiredo explores the renewed mobilization of “Never Again” during Chile’s 2023 commemoration of the coup’s 50th anniversary. Against the resurgence of right-wing revisionism and the persistence of Pinochet’s 1980 constitution, she argues that the slogan has re-emerged as a critical framework to defend the country’s fragile culture of remembrance against erasure and authoritarian nostalgia. Ben Ratskoff analyzes the Shoah Foundation and Holocaust Museum LA as a case study in post–October 7 “mission drift,” demonstrating how museums reframe “Never Again” from a call for universal genocide prevention to a tool of particularistic anti-antisemitism advocacy, revealing the institutional pressures reshaping contemporary Holocaust memory. Eliza Frenkel investigates how “Never Again” circulates as a moral and affective field in contemporary Poland. Through ethnographic research in Warsaw’s post-Holocaust sites—including Israeli youth tours, refugee encounters, and graffiti interventions—she shows how “Never Again” reproduces hierarchies of belonging while also enabling acts of multidirectional counter-memory linking Warsaw to Gaza. Irit Dekel analyzes the circulation of “Never Again” and its variants — “Never Again War” and “Never Again Is Now” — in German political culture between 2023 and 2025, arguing that popular uses of the phrase both expose and obscure plural democracy’s limits in confronting antisemitism, otherness, and the ethics of repetition.
Irit Dekel, Indiana University, Bloomington. "Ever Again: repetition and exchange in war and Holocaust memory"
In this presentation, I analyze the popular expressions of the phrase “Never Again” as sites for the articulation of Germany’s legacies of Holocaust memory, war and democracy. I ask what does a popular discourse that expresses fear from repeating war and genocide tell us about the political culture of Germany as a plural democracy? What does it hinder us from engaging with? With discourse analytical methods I examine use of the phrase “Never Again” in German popular culture as a floating signifier whose meaning shifts across political, cultural, and temporal contexts. Drawing on Laclau’s theory of signification, I address the refrain from repetition and explore how “Never Again” and its variants “Never Again War” and “Never Again is Now/ for everyone”—were used between October 2023 and October 2025 to shape responses to contemporary moral crises of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the war in and destruction of Gaza, the war in Ukraine and threats to democracy. Addressing the circulation of the phrase, I argue that “Never Again” use intensifies debates over Holocaust comparability and perception of otherness and antisemitism. The third part focuses on exchange and intermediality in Holocaust memory: I will compare the deployment of the phrase by politicians, scholars, memory activists Jewish-identified and non-Jewish identified institutions who make universalistic and particularistic claims in using the phrase with regard to Holocaust memory in the German media.
Keywords: Never Again, German Culture, universalism, memory activism, signification.
Giovanni Miglianti, Colby College "Again and Again: Analogy and the Holocaust"
Drawing upon close reading and affect theory, this paper investigates the role of analogy in Holocaust testimonies, with special reference to the writings and public speeches of Primo Levi and Lidia Beccaria Rolfi. Moving beyond the Holocaust uniqueness debate and problematizing the “never again” paradigm, these survivors grounded their testimony in the constant comparison between their extreme experiences within the concentration camps and the ordinary lives of their readers and listeners, while also establishing analogy between different historical events as a method to understand contemporary violence. The proposed contribution begins by presenting analogy, or rather imperfect analogy as the key rhetorical figure of Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved – describing the “paradoxical analogy between victim and perpetrator” and between life within and outside Auschwitz – and Beccaria Rolfi’s The Thin Thread of Memory – denouncing the continuities between fascism and post-fascism. The second part of the paper relies on original archival research to survey Beccaria Rolfi and Levi’s decades-long activity as public witnesses, with a special focus on their practices of and reflections on comparing the Holocaust to contemporary events taking place in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Argentina. At a time when references to the Holocaust are unscrupulously weaponized, these survivors’ lifelong commitment to analogy as a method shows us that comparison can be a powerful tool for testimony, resistance, and international solidarity.
Keywords: Affect Theory, Analogy, Comparison, Grey Zone, Holocaust Testimony, International Solidarity, Italy, Lidia Beccaria Rolfi, Primo Levi
Eliza Frenkel, Indiana University, Bloomington "In the Place and Space of “Never Again”: Translation and the Politics of Memory in Poland" After the Holocaust, the phrase “Never Again” once promised a universal moral horizon and a shared framework for remembering. Yet today, its legacies appear fractured and unevenly lived. How does “Never Again” circulate in contemporary Poland, and what forms of belonging, exclusion, and recognition does it produce? This paper approaches “Never Again” as both a framework for remembering and, in practice, a moral field in which that framework is continually contested. Through ethnographic fieldwork across multiple sites, I juxtapose Holocaust tours of Israeli youth in Warsaw, graffiti on the Warsaw Ghetto walls, and encounters with Belarusian and Ukrainian refugee women in Warsaw to show how “Never Again” circulates in a polysemic environment shaped by layered histories and contemporary migrations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2015, 2016, 2023, and 2025 across post Holocaust memory sites, I trace how multiple habitus of memory are formed and expressed. Guided tours in the Warsaw Ghetto perform “Never Again” as a Jewish only inheritance, equating Holocaust victimhood with national survival and legitimizing violence against Palestinians. Graffiti and political inscriptions across the former ghetto and in nearby Jewish cemeteries intervene in the scripted hierarchies of remembrance challenging whose suffering is recognized and who remains outside the frame of “Never Again.” By linking Warsaw to Gaza, these interventions enact multidirectional counter memory that persists under the risk of being stigmatized as antisemitic. A third register emerges in interviews with Belarusian and Ukrainian refugees who spoke of “Never Again” as a symbol of civilization and ethical order, often without awareness that the towns they left behind were themselves sites of Holocaust extermination. Keywords: Memory Habitus, Post Holocaust, Migration, Commemoration, Warsaw Ghetto, Refugees, Post Socialist Memory.
Ben Ratskoff, Occidental College
“Never Again” and Mission Drift: Holocaust Memorialization between Genocide Prevention and Anti-Antisemitism Advocacy
In September 2025, the Holocaust Museum LA published an Instagram post with the phrase, “Never Again. For Anyone.” Hundreds of social media users, including prominent pro-Israel influencers and advocacy organizations, immediately protested what they perceived as an offensive universalization of a Judeo-centric slogan; the museum deleted the post and issued an apology within two days. This controversy exemplifies a broader set of crises that have unfolded in institutional Holocaust memory politics since the October 7 attacks, as Holocaust memorial institutions have been pressured to pivot from human rights-oriented commitments to genocide prevention and racism prevention–the bedrock of an “Americanized” and cosmopolitan Holocaust memory–toward increasingly particularistic anti-antisemitism advocacy. This paper examines a Holocaust memorial institution in Los Angeles — the Holocaust Museum LA — and its evolving deployment of the slogan “Never Again” over the past two years as a case study for analyzing these post-October 7 shifts in memorial museums. The paper situates these shifts within a broader contest over Holocaust memory and its function in international politics as well as the institutional imperatives of memorial museums and archives, such as fundraising, donor management, and audience expansion. I argue that such institutions demonstrate the “mission drift” reorienting hegemonic Holocaust memory away from mandates to universalize its lessons and toward narratives of timeless Jewish suffering. In doing so, they not only distort the historical complexity of the Holocaust and delimit the ethical horizon of the “Never Again” slogan but also raise urgent questions about the public role of memorial museums and archives amid widespread, identitarian reaction.
Keywords: Never again, genocide, antisemitism, universalism, particularism, memorial museums, archives
Ana Figueiredo, Universidad de O’Higgins, "Present day challenges to the demand of “Never Again” in relation to Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile" On September 11th, 1973, General Pinochet led a military coup that paved the way for a 17 yearlong dictatorship, characterized by human rights violations and political repression in Chile. After the transition to democracy in 1990, victims of the dictatorship and family members of the disappeared, took significant efforts aimed at the recognition and memorialization of the atrocities committed during this period. These efforts led to the development of two truth commissions and the establishment of institutions and memorial sites to commemorate victims and educate the public. While these initiatives continue to play a crucial role in maintaining a culture of remembrance about the dictatorial past, Chile still faces significant challenges regarding the enduring legacies of the dictatorship. Within this context, on September 11th, 2023, during the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup, one of the main events that took place was a silent night vigil in which more than 12000 women gathered around the Presidential Palace to demand “Never Again”, highlighting the ongoing struggles for truth and reparation demands regarding the past. Importantly, the “Never Again” demand came at a time in which the emergence of extreme-right wing factions in Chile have begun to publicly endorse and defend Pinochet’s dictatorship and its legacy through different means, including the denial of human rights violations, the promotion of “memory laws”, and educational materials that downplay the dictatorship’s atrocities, among others. This presentation aims to theoretically address how the “Never Again” framework has recently gained traction as a discursive resistance strategy against the threat of erasure of Chile’s culture of remembrance of the dictatorship within the current political landscape.
20260729T140020260729T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires2.7. “Never Again” and the Politics of MemorySV201MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
