189: Tanya Gold: "Shameless: Exploiting the Holocaust". How the brutality of the Shoah is being whitewashed

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Tanya Gold’s provocative article, Shameless: Exploiting the Holocaust is in the Autumn 2025 edition of the Jewish Quarterly, the magazine of stories, ideas, and debates shaping Jewish culture and history.

Tanya takes aim at the state of Holocaust fiction — think Schindler’s List, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Tattooist of Auschwitz. 

She passionately argues these stories push Jewish victims to the margins all too often, centering on non-Jewish heroes or romanticized narratives that soften the Shoah’s brutal reality. 

Why do these polished, mainstream tales dominate the raw, firsthand accounts of survivors like Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, or Zalmen Gradowski? 

And with antisemitism surging and Holocaust education under revisionist pressure from social media, what does it mean when these works are staples in UK classrooms? 

Let’s explore the ethics of Holocaust storytelling, and ask: are we remembering the past—or rewriting it?

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