Museums, including Holocaust museums, display artifacts and other aspects of material culture in order to convey historical events in a manner that allows the visitor to experience them at various levels. The combination of didactic and narrative exhibits generates a sense of identification and empathy with the victims and offers visitors an emotional and even spiritual experience. Thus, Holocaust museums are located in an intermediate zone between the academic establishment and the popular media. Holocaust museums form an integral institution for forming and conveying Holocaust memory. Unavoidably, they are also shaped by the political cultures of their home countries. This chapter examines how different Holocaust museums have been constructed in different times and places to serve both a didactic function for Holocaust education and a political function in shaping contemporary culture.

It is unsurprising that the legacy of the Holocaust was central to postwar Europe, but it is striking that the Holocaust became no less important in postwar America. It can be argued that the Holocaust has been “Americanized.” This phrase was initially deployed as a pejorative by critics who decried what they saw as the commercialization and trivialization of Holocaust memory. In some cases, they even argued that Holocaust memory was instrumentalized in the service of specific political agendas – support for Israel and the consolidation of a specifically Jewish identity in a multicultural America. At the same time, given the size and diversity of the Jewish diaspora in the USA, there was no way the Holocaust could not become central to American-Jewish self-understanding and, therefore, become a core part of American culture more broadly.