Witnessing Positions : Jews, Memories, and Minorities in Contemporary Germany

Highly visible, majority-led public discussions over Holocaust memory, antisemitism, and migration in Germany are often about minorities, whose actual social presence, perspectives, and voices remain missing. Majority society often delineates the terms of minority inclusion, assigning these groups narrowly defined social roles without their input. Witnessing Positions addresses this omission, and examines these debates as sites in which belonging is negotiated and contested. In two parts, author Irit Dekel analyzes how Jews and other minoritized groups respond to such positioning by forging forms of social presence through acts of witnessing—both to one another and to the majority society in which they live. First, Dekel investigates Germany's memory culture and its tendency to separate Jews from other minority groups, revealing how majority society stages memory work as a self-reflective project centered on its Others. She then turns to minority-led interventions, examining spaces of appearance in which Jews, migrants and other otherss engage in memory work themselves, observing majority society and one another as equal co-witnesses. Witnessing Positions offers a new framework for analyzing minority voices, performance, and appearance, and in doing so, it contributes to renewed debates on witnessing after the Holocaust while advancing broader discussions of belonging, memory, and public agency.