Los usos del Holocausto en Argentina. Apuntes sobre las apropiaciones y resignificaciones de la memoria del genocidio nazi

The identification of the Holocaust with other historical experiences has raised several debates within the public sphere throughout the last decades. While many condemn any kind of comparison of the Holocaust, arguing that this entails trivialization, others claim comparing as a legitimate means to understand contemporary conflicts. Regardless of such positions, the study of memories and of public and political uses of the Holocaust, permits to visualize how a large group of social agents link past and present in various contexts.  This paper undertakes a historical overview of Holocaust memory and its “uses” in Argentina, focusing on four key periods: the period contemporary to the extermination of the Jews in Europe; the sixties, when polemic uses of the Holocaust emerged in association with the problems of antisemitism and with the conflict in the Middle East; the dictatorship and the recovery of democracy, when the Holocaust became a global metaphor for the violation of human rights and a parameter dictatorial antisemitism and its repressive procedures would be compared to.