2023 Impact Profile: Estelle Tarica, Professor and Chair of Spanish and Portuguese, Professor of Jewish Studies

Estelle Tarica’s 2022 book Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America proposes the existence of a recognizably distinct Holocaust consciousness in Latin America since the 1970s. Community leaders, intellectuals, writers, and political activists facing state repression have seen themselves reflected in Holocaust histories and have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries. This unique, controversial approach to the memory of the Holocaust is little known outside the region. By drawing together two areas that have rarely been brought into contact — Holocaust studies and Latin American studies —Tarica deepens our understanding of Holocaust awareness in a global context.