What happens when two persecuted groups—both targeted for annihilation—tell their stories side by side? That’s the question at the heart of Ari Joskowicz’s powerful exploration in Rain of Ash. Speaking on Holocaust Remembrance Day as part of UC San Diego’s Holocaust Living History Workshop, Joskowicz, professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, reflects on the rare but revealing moments when Jewish and Romani histories converge in public memory.
The Nazis sought the total extermination of both Jews and Romani people, yet the ways their stories have been remembered—and forgotten—differ significantly. Joskowicz highlights how, even today, commemorative events often focus almost exclusively on Jewish suffering. The murder of Romani people is less widely known or discussed, even though they, too, were racialized and systematically targeted. This imbalance has long-lasting consequences for how we understand the Holocaust and whose stories are heard.
Joskowicz doesn’t frame this as a competition over victimhood, but as an invitation to think relationally. When survivors from both groups speak after each other—or even in the same space—what tensions arise? What opportunities for solidarity or misrecognition emerge? These encounters, he suggests, reveal the challenges and the promise of building more inclusive historical memory—one that honors shared pain without erasing difference.