Dr Ben Ratskoff

Ben is pursuing two projects on antisemitism, racialization, and the politics of Holocaust memory, both of which explore how existing frameworks for understanding antisemitism and the Holocaust are transformed when they encounter new comparative methods and perspectives and new histories of atrocity. The first is a book project examining Black intellectual representations of Nazi antisemitism as it unfolded between 1933 and 1945. Drawing on writings by figures including W. E. B. Du Bois, Suzanne Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, and Richard Wright, the project examines how Black writers interpreted Nazi antisemitism through—and sometimes against—comparisons with colonialism and white supremacy. It argues that these encounters complicate prevailing approaches to comparison in the study of racialization while opening new ways of understanding Nazi antisemitism. The second project examines the USC Shoah Foundation’s October 7 testimony collection, asking how the structures and forms of Holocaust testimony are adapted to represent the October 7 attacks, and how such adaptations in turn reshape the frameworks, categories, and political agendas of Holocaust memorial institutions.

Book Chapters

• “Du Bois’s Cold War Revisions: The Color Line and the Jewish Problem, From Galicia to Dougherty County” in From Popular Front to Cold War, ed. Elissa Sampson and Robert Zecker. Cornell University Press, 2026.

Journal Articles

• “Prosthetic Trauma at the Nova Exhibition: Holocaust Memory, Reenactment, and the Affective Reproduction of Genocidal Nightmares”. Journal of Genocide Research, Forum: Atrocity Crimes and the Crisis of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, September 2, 2025.
• “James Baldwin’s Black Critique of Jewish Whiteness”. Jewish Studies Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2020), pp. 240-260.
• “Improbable Spectacles: White Supremacy, Christian Hegemony, and the Dark Side of the Judenfrage”. Studies in American Jewish Literature 39, no. 1, Special Issue: Trump and the “Jewish Question,” eds. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (2020), pp. 17-43.
• “Splattering the Object: Césaire, Nazi Racism, and the Colonial”. Caribbean-Jewish Crossings: Atlantic Literature and Theory, eds. Sarah Phillips Casteel and Heidi Kaufman, University of Virginia Press (Charlottesville, VA: 2019), pp. 177-197.

• “Schlock and Awe,” The Diasporist, October 2025.
• “When did ‘Never again’ become a controversial statement?,” Los Angeles Times, September 2025.
• Podcast: “After the DC Shooting,” On the Nose, Jewish Currents, May 2025.
• “Difference Without Power: Conversation with Sonali Thakkar,” Jewish Currents, December 2024.
• “Reading Baldwin After Kanye,” Jewish Currents, Autumn 2023 (with nyle fort, Marc Lamont Hill, Daniel May, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein).
• “Rethinking Jewish Diaspora: On Analogy, Translation, and Abjection,” The Funambulist, September-October 2022.
• “En Allemagne, la lutte contre l’antisémitisme tourne à la chasse aux sorcières [In Germany, the Fight Against Antisemitism Turns into a Witch Hunt]”, OrientXXI, August 2022.
• “Can the Palestinian Belong to a Universal History? Conversation with Yazan Khalili,” Jewish Currents, July 2022.
• “Against Analogy,” Jewish Currents, June 2020.