Confronting the past in a polarized present: holocaust representations motivate people for symbolic justice and against antisemitism

Abstract Awareness of past atrocities is widely seen as critical for restoring justice and building resilient democracies. Cultural representations are often deployed by cultural elites to keep the past alive. Yet, we know little about how ordinary citizens respond to them. Through a survey experiment (n = 2198), we measured the effect of three different prototypical cultural representations of the Holocaust on intentions to commemorate the Holocaust, intentions to counter antisemitism, and attitudes towards minoritized groups. We find that all three forms demonstrate overall effectiveness in motivating individuals in support of commemoration and against antisemitism and improving their attitudes towards minoritized groups. We find heterogeneous treatment effects by party affiliation. For far-right supporters, reading about the story of an individual victim is particularly effective. For others, representations that center the sheer extent of atrocities or focus on symbolic justice efforts show a greater effect on action intentions. We repeated the survey with the same respondents three months later (November 2023), following the start of the Israel–Gaza war, and found that means and treatment effects remained overall stable despite the change in context. The results demonstrate the power of cultural representations of historical injustice for motivating people to take action and reducing their prejudice today.