A brand new powerful international touring exhibition, marking Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 – co-created between University of Nottingham historians and the UK's National Holocaust Museum – will open in Soho, London later this month.
Featuring five storytelling giant video structures and an explosive 'single moment of destruction' The Vicious Circle invites critical thinking by tackling Holocaust education from a powerful new angle and challenges misconceptions that fuel anti-Jewish racism.
With funding from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the exhibition launches in Soho on Tuesday 21 January 2025 and runs until Tuesday 28 January 2025, before then going on international tour in Tallinn, Berlin and the European Parliament in Brussels.
The Vicious Circle explores the obsessive, recurring delusion that violence against Jews leads to individual and collective liberation – across millennia and continents – and acts as a timely reminder on Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January) that the Holocaust did not come out of nowhere and that it was not the end of the story of anti-Jewish racism.
By inviting the visitor to step inside the giant circle installation – which features five video mosaics all showing the richness and diversity of five communities – the exhibition reveals the same specific technique of public violence used repeatedly across time and place, through different continents and decades, but always against the Jews – the pogrom.
Then in one simultaneous and explosive moment, a fiery explosion consumes all five mosaics, and each screen dissolves to an image of the local pogrom concerned, with the results powerfully illustrated with diminishing population figures.
This exhibition is not about comparing the Holocaust to other genocides. It is about critical thinking. It is an invitation to confront dangerous ideological delusions that are still at work today. Why, after the Holocaust ended, were Jewish survivors massacred in Poland in 1946? And why did the perpetrators cite the same 'blood libel' myth that was used to justify medieval pogroms? Why do Hamas claim, as Goebbels did before them, that the Jews secretly run the world? Why did a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, claim, as Hitler did before him, that slaughtering Jews would create a free world?
"History never repeats itself exactly – but it rhymes. Only when we study ideological delusions across time and space can we break their spell. The Vicious Circle does not preach about how to save the world: it is an invitation to think again."
Five stunning original artefacts which tell the story of cross-cultural encounters and creativity between Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities across Europe and the Middle East will also be on display.
Images (all courtesy of the National Holocaust Museum) below show: Chanukah Lamp ('Menorah'), Iraq; Butterfly Glasses by Shlomo Mansour, Israel; Tzedakah Box, Germany; Klezmer Clarinet, Poland; Silver Wedding Bracelet, Aden, Yemen.
The exhibition invites reflective reasoning and judgement and asks how we can break this vicious circle. In keeping with the pedagogy of the National Holocaust Museum, it urges visitors to go beyond the usual call for empathy by considering the Jewish victims – but to examine the perpetrators, their false prophecies, and the doom-loop they create for their own societies.
80 years after the single worst anti-Jewish atrocity the world has ever seen, the conspiracy theories which caused it are still prevalent in society today and shared widely across social media platforms.
Marc Cave, Director of the National Holocaust Museum, said: "The UK's theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 is 'For a Better Future.' Let's look at the promise of a better future on offer from some. They promise a world without Jews, and certainly without a Jewish state, is a better world. They have expressed exhilaration at the latest pogrom. In the cultural arts space, there is a real need to educate and encourage dialogue about that."
