How do collective memories of histories of violence and trauma in war and genocide come to be created? Janet Jacobs offers new understandings of this crucial issue in her examination of the representation of gender in the memorial culture of Holocaust monuments and museums, from synagogue memorials and other historical places of Jewish life, to the geographies of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Ravensbruck.

Jacobs travelled to Holocaust sites across Europe to explore representations of women. She reveals how these memorial cultures construct masculinity and femininity, as well as the...