That being said, one can safely surmise that the Holocaust has never before occupied such a central place in academic, memorial, and political discourse as it does in the present day. Concerning research on the Holocaust, Professor Wendy Lower of Claremont McKenna College, who is Acting Director of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, remarked in her keynote speech that “the field has exploded” in recent years.
Lower pointed by way of example to the almost incomprehensibly vast collection of testimonies recorded at USC Shoah Foundation, which currently hosts a total over 165,000 hours of footage, but which still only amounts to the testimony of a fraction of the survivors of the Holocaust. The opening of archives following the end of the Cold War in 1989/90 and the adoption of the Holocaust by the now greatly expanded European Union