Purpose: In this reflective essay, the authors explore how thinking with the notions of implication and complicity may encourage or hinder efforts to engage teachers in problematizing victim-perpetrator binaries in conflict-affected societies. Design/methodology/approach: This reflective essay draws on lessons learned from the authors' long-time…

In this paper, we analyse the Second World War (WW2) and the Holocaust as genocide during WW2 as sensitive topics in history teaching as perceived by 719 teachers from Austria, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Serbia and the Netherlands. Using the thematic content analysis of open answers to an online questionnaire we…

"After the death of the last witnesses the memory of the Holocaust must not be left to historians alone, now is the time for works of art" Aharon Appelfeld. This study focuses on the role and contribution of monuments to educating about Holocaust commemoration in Israel. Holocaust monuments are located throughout Israel, from north to…

Oslo Accords have stringently underscored that both rivalries, the Palestinians and the Israelis, must abstain from incitement to terror and violence. Their educational systems, consequently, have to refrain from convulsive, fundamentalist, and heinous skirmishes leading to stalled reconciliation. History school textbooks are deemed, from both…

This article reviews research on history education that addresses recent or ongoing conflict since 1990. History education is recognized as a key site for constructing identity, transmitting collective memory, and shaping "imagined communities," which makes its revision or reform a complex and important part of education in emergencies…

In Israel, changes in history teaching and the publication of new history textbooks in recent years triggered a stormy public controversy that went far beyond the content of the books themselves. The disputes over how history should be taught revealed the state of transition that had characterized Israeli society since the beginning of the 1990s.…

The purpose of this article is to explore the meanings and implications of dangerous memories in two different sites of past traumatic memories: one in Israel and the other in Cyprus. Dangerous memories are defined as those memories that are disruptive to the status quo, that is, the hegemonic culture of strengthening and perpetuating existing…

A group of Israeli high school students (h = 11) from two socially distinct schools read aloud a textbook account of a 1920 bloody encounter between Jews and Arabs. The study aimed at examining the relation between the textbook account and the students' formation of historical perceptions. Prior to reading the textbook excerpts, students wrote…