In my second major monograph, on Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum, I coined the concept of ‘memorial ethics’ and explored how it operates within that museal space. Modelled on a lesser-known aspect of Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘first philosophy’, ‘memorial ethics’ refers to the obligation to conceive of memory as bearing witness, a testimonial act bringing the invisible to the level of the visible that is made necessary after the Shoah, once art had to be infused with a different ethics of representation. I analyzed Libeskind’s architectural project starting from Levinas’s equation between ethics and optics, which I framed within the broader context of a joint post-Holocaust poetics and cultural politics of memory. The book ends with a creative attempt to live up to Libeskind’s conception of his experiential space by linking it with my own ‘literary extension’, which fills in the museum’s structures with Holocaust(-related) literature: Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’, commanding a reflection on ‘election’ and the Law, Paul Celan’s and Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s poems, Blanchot’s famous passage on the Holocaust as an all-burning consuming history from The Writing of the Disaster, relevant texts by Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, two prominent thinkers/writers of Jewish origin, and victims of exclusion and discrimination in their French-occupied native Algeria during WW2.

I return to this concept in an essay, forthcoming in Memory Studies (19.4, 2026), focusing on the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, one of whose sections is ‘The Journey of Hope’. Entitled ‘Towards a Memorial Ethics of Hope: The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum’, the essay extends my previous reflection by taking as a point of departure the curators’ strategy to bring into the visible an ethics of hope which invokes a community and is future-oriented.

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