Simon Perego, a recent PhD graduate from Sciences Po’s History Center devoted his thesis, supervised by Claire Andrieu, to commemorations of the Holocaust in the Jewish community in Paris between 1944 and 1967.
He demonstrates that the memory of the Holocaust has been sustained through many commemorations that started at the end of the war. As vessels of memory, these gatherings also formed an identity resource shared between France, Israel and the Jewish religious tradition, and a sociopolitical ritual producing both cohesion and conflict in a lively and ideologically divided Jewish community. Defended in 2016, his thesis received the prize for French-language Jewish studies awarded by the Association for Jewish Studies, the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and the French Commission on Jewish Archives.
Simon Perego is now a member of the Laboratory for Excellence on “Writing a new history of Europe”, where he leads the “wars and traces of war in Europe” section.