Call for Papers: Special Volume on Holocaust Memory in Canada (2026)

Special Editors: Adara Goldberg (Kean University), Yasmine Lucas (University of Toronto, Saint George), and Lucas Wilson (University of Toronto Mississauga)

In the aftermath of the Second World War, approximately 40,000 Holocaust survivors and their families arrived in Canada, profoundly shaping the social and cultural fabric of the country. As survivors and their descendants contributed to Canadian society as witnesses, community-builders, artists, educators, and activists, memory of the Shoah became part of Canada’s national narrative.

Over the decades, Holocaust memory in Canada has taken multiple forms: through museums, memorials, public education initiatives, literature, oral histories, and scholarly works. These cultural productions have not only documented atrocity but also mediated debates about justice, belonging, and the place of Jewish experience in Canadian public life.

In recent years, new museums, archives, and digital projects have expanded the reach of Holocaust education and commemoration. At the same time, Holocaust memory has been brought into fresh—and sometimes fraught—public conversations, particularly in the wake of October 7, 2023, and the debates it has sparked about genocide, antisemitism, and historical analogy.

For this special issue of Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, we invite essays that explore Holocaust memory in Canada, broadly construed. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • New Holocaust museums and exhibitions in Canada
  • Art that engages with the Holocaust
  • Psychiatric treatment of survivors and their descendants
  • Holocaust education, including digital humanities and virtual reality modules
  • Invocations of Holocaust memory in activist movements
  • Multidirectional memory (e.g. putting the Holocaust into conversation with Canadian colonialism)
  • Canada and the Holocaust in a transnational context
  • Holocaust survivor accounts, including The Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program and regional testimony collections
  • Second-, third-, and fourth-generation Holocaust literature and projects in Canada
  • Representations and invocations of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish literature

The journal welcomes contributions from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to anthropology, digital humanities, education, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, political science, practitioner research, religious studies, sociology, and visual arts.  

In addition to original academic articles that will undergo peer review, the journal also regularly solicits contributions for the following non-peer-reviewed subsections: 

  • The Archives Matter: short essays on holdings in Jewish and non-Jewish Canadian archives organized around this volume’s central theme. 
  • Roundtables: scholarly and often interdisciplinary discussions featuring several voices and organized around this volume’s central theme. 
  • Translations: translations of historical or contemporary sources (broadly defined) dealing with the Canadian Jewish experience of the Holocaust or post-Holocaust in languages other than English or French.  
  • Field Notes: non-standard academic writing on contemporary literary, cultural, intellectual, and communal events of interest relevant to the Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish experience. More information about this section can be found here.  
  • Reflections: personal essays by academics or practitioners about their careers devoted to understanding the Holocaust in a Canadian context. 

We welcome expressions of interest for all subsections that sit at the intersection of Holocaust memory, Holocaust studies, Jews, and Canada.    

In an effort to stimulate original, comparative, and intersectional research involving Canadian Jewish content and both non-Jewish Canadian content and non-Canadian Jewish content, the journal welcomes submissions from researcher-author pairs committed to producing collaborative scholarship. The journal offers co-author collaboration grants of $500 in support of this work. Please note in your submission if you and your co-author seek consideration for this grant. More information can be found here. 

The following serve as general guidelines for submissions:

  • For original articles to be submitted for peer review, please include a tentative title, a short abstract (250 words), and a brief biography. The journal also accepts completed manuscripts in the range of 6,000 to 10,000 words, including endnotes.  
  • For submissions to one of our subsections, please include a short abstract (200 words) clearly stating the subject of the proposed reflection, translation, field note, etc., how it relates to the special volume, and why you are best positioned to explore it. Please include a brief biography.

For more detailed submission instructions, please refer to the journal’s policies and submission preparation checklist available on our website. The manuscript should adhere to The Chicago Manual of Style (18th edition, CMOS) for all stylistic, grammatical, and citation matters. It is the full responsibility of contributors to ensure their work is in line with CMOS. 

For inquiries and submissions, please contact the special volume editors:

Adara Goldberg (adara.goldberg@kean.edu), for inquiries and submissions related to history, education, testimony, archives, religious studies, policy, and practitioner research. 

Yasmine Eve Lucas (yasmine.lucas@mail.utoronto.ca), for inquiries and submissions related to anthropology, sociology, psychiatry, museums, and the politics of Holocaust memory.

Lucas Wilson (lucasfw.wilson@utoronto.ca), for inquiries and submissions related to literature, oral history, gender and sexuality studies, and visual arts. 

The journal’s editor-in-chief David Koffman (koffman@yorku.ca) and managing editor Joshua Tapper (jtapper@yorku.ca) are also happy to provide more information.

Timeline:

Abstract/expression of interest deadline: January 1, 2026

Editorial feedback deadline: March 1, 2026

Submission deadline: October 1, 2026