In Blessed Memory of a Dream: Mordechai Shenhavi and Initial Holocaust Commemoration Ideas in Palestine, 1942-1945 (original) (raw)
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Polity and Changing of Holocaust Memory
International Journal of Advances in Social Science and Humanities, 2019
The concept of Holocaust memory hails from a past process, which sought to define the existence of the Holocaust in the years succeeding the tragedy, in various forms of commemorative exercises. The Holocaust museums, commemorative sites, and annual commemorative events formed the hallmark of these exercises. This paper examines the nature of Holocaust Memory in the 21 st Century and its relevancy as to public sentiment under current geopolitical realities. To begin with, it is a presupposition by the author that Holocaust shaped memory has shifted within world Jewry from what was at one time linked to variations of survivor testimonies and second and third generational syndromes toward newly embedded cultural sentiments that are related to a designed public memory, without linkage to specific events, people or places. Along with the shifting of Holocaust Memory the Israeli State narrative has developed alternative mythologization that serves the nation-state by inserting the notion of military might. It is paramount that newly minted memory sets become identifiable and definable. A mixture of Jewish religiosity along with Israeli statehood ideology largely drives the morph sis of this memory. While seemingly disconnected from geographic boundaries, it is linked to political sentiments, which are surprisingly similar in Israel and the Diaspora, and are seen as trending along Right vs. Left ideologies. The objective of this work is to inform the public about a current configuration of Holocaust Memory that has evolved rather recently and is currently poorly defined in academic and social discourse.
Sites of memory' of the Holocaust: shaping national memory in the education system in Israel
Nations and Nationalism, 2003
This article attempts to understand the development of the national memory in Israel and the stress on the Holocaust as the constitutive representation of the national identity in the last decades. In the first three decades of the existence of the state, at a time Israeli society was embedded in an 'environment of memory' due to the presence of a big proportion of Holocaust survivors, the subject of the Holocaust was almost neglected in schools. On the other hand, since the 1980s, when the 'environment of memory' of the Holocaust started to fade naturally, 'sites of memories' of the Holocaust started to blossom in the education system. The national memory is meant to support political and social arrangements in the present; thus, in order to shape national subjects, the education system has to adapt the official memory accordingly. While in the past, the memory of the Holocaust was counterproductive to the formation of the 'new Jew', it became an appropriate response to the crisis of the national subjectivity unleashed after the Yom Kippur War.
Memory Studies
With the passing of the survivors of the Holocaust and the aging of the second generation, new agents and initiatives are transforming the commemorative landscape of Holocaust remembrance. This article examines the impact of this generational transition on the production of collective memory of the Holocaust with focus on a new remembrance project in Israel, known as Memory in the Living Room. While some attention has been paid to its innovative structure and anti-paradigmatic components, none has focused on its agents and their mnemonic agenda. This paper argues that an examination of this agenda and an exploration of the wider structural contexts within which it developed are crucial to a deeper understanding of its overall significance. Based on 20 in-depth interviews the article argues that the emergent commemorative agenda is a hybrid version of transnational memory informed by concepts and practices drawn from a global digitalized culture.
The politics of commemoration The Holocaust, memory and trauma
2006
Assuming that the consequences of devastating events for individuals and collectivities run different courses, why do we use the word " trauma " to explain a wide array of social and cultural phenomenon? Trauma has traveled far to become a key not only to explain, like originally conceived wounds to the body, but injuries to spirit, culture, society and politics. Trauma has proliferated into a metaphor deployed to explain almost everything unpleasant that happens to us as individuals and as members of political communities. How do we conceptualize the transition from the trauma of the individual to the traumatized community? What does trauma mean for a theoretical formulation of collective memory? What are the social, legal and political dimensions that inform representations of collective traumata? Wulf Kansteiner (2004) provides an insightful history of the metaphoric diffusion of trauma, criticizing its loose deployment as inadequate. He points out that it is misleading...
Holocaust Memory; Between Universal and Particular.doc
This essay looks at the way the Holocaust and ‘Holocaust memory’ comes to be subsumed within contemporary forms of antisemitism. The most recent and paradoxical illustration of this phenomenon concerns recent ‘debates’ around its now annual commemoration, Holocaust Memorial Day. At the core of these debates is the idea that Holocaust Memorial Day’s seemingly singular focus on nazi crimes against Jews which serves not only to ‘privilege’ its Jewish victims at the expense of others, but also, serves particularist Jewish interests, most notably, Jewish nationalism or ‘Zionism’. One of the articulations of these ‘debates’ is through the language of ‘universalism’ and ‘particularism’. From this perspective, nazi crimes against Jews are presented as ‘universal crimes against humanity’. As a consequence, any emphasis or, indeed, recognition of their specifically Jewish dimensions is read as the illegitimate usurpation of universalism by narrow and parochial particularism, It is as a violation of the seemingly progressive standards of an abstract ‘humanity’ and of ‘universal human rights’ that the alleged specificity of Holocaust Memorial Day stands accused. This essay examines the genealogy of these ‘debates’. The first section offers a critique of critical thought’s treatment of the Holocaust from the late 1980’s onward. In these works we see what I have termed the dissolution of the specifically or ‘particular’ Jewish aspects of nazism into a more generic and abstract ‘universalism’. In the second section, I discuss the consequences of this dissolution when re-articulated in the index of ‘morality’; that is, in the development of the Holocaust as moral symbol or ‘icon’. In the section that follows, I examine the ways in which the allegation of Jewish ‘particularism’ around the question of Holocaust memory and memorialization is said to stimulate the unravelling of the post-national and post-modern project of the ‘New Europe’. The final section looks at similar negative presentations of the Holocaust in the recent critical rejection of ‘ethics’ and a return to what is termed ‘the political’. I conclude by arguing that together, these attempts to understand the antisemitism run the risk of reproducing the very phenomenon it seeks to challenge.
The Strength of Remembrance: Commemorating the Holocaust During the First Decade of Israel
Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society, 2000
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