Recent French Discourses on Stalinism, Nazism and "Exorbitant" Jewish Memory

This article analyzes how the perceived problem of a "surfeit" of Jewish memory of the Holocaust in France has emerged in the context of a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism among French historians, journalists and intellectuals in the 1990s. It explores the way in which many French scholars across a wide range of ideological positions agree that Jewish memory of genocide has obscured the recognition of other crimes against humanity, and in particular the recognition of Stalin's crimes. The article asks how and why the memory of crimes against Jews and Stalin's victims has been constructed rhetorically as a zero-sum game in which Jews have unjustifiably claimed to have suffered the most of all.