Is Assman's Mnemohistory Anti-Semitic?
A recent article in the Chronicle (via Anthony LeDonne ) has raised this question and answered very strongly in the affirmative. It is one thing to say a method or approach is ineffective or not useful, and quite another to say that it is actually dangerous. I remember hearing Jan Assman speak at Union Theological Seminary when I was a graduate student at Columbia. I honestly don't remember a word he said, but just remember him speaking in stereotypical professorial tweed. The article is quite long, but the beginning does point out some of the important breakthroughs of Mnemohistory developed by Aleida and Jan Assman in the past few decades. Such as... In his recent volume, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization : Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Assmann recapitulates a number of his most important findings. Building on the work of previous theorists of cultural memory as an approach to histor...