Forum: Jelena Subotic’s Yellow Star, Red Star

Abstract

Jelena Subotic’s Yellow Star, Red Star examines how Holocaust memorializing changed over time in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania in ways that attended to national identity and EU membership. The book displays Professor Subotic’s painstaking historical work accrued from years of primary source research via archival, fieldwork, as well as a comprehensive secondary source review, and is written in an immensely tangible way. The dynamics of Holocaust memorializing, Subotic demonstrates, are as much about the present as they are about the past. The work is an achievement of historical, theoretical, political and ethical proportions. Thus, the book appeals to a broad number of audiences, disciplines, and critical reflections on the politics of historical memory. What follows is a forum that comes out of a book roundtable on Subotic’s study held at the 2019 International Studies Association-West meeting in Pasadena, California. The book had just been published by that September, and as a fresh study it proved to be a good forum to introduce the book to would-be readers and also provide some good ‘‘early’’ takes on the book in light of the research interests of the respondents and, also, how it might bear upon or be put into conversation with a variety of research fields.