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‘Sites of memory’ of the Holocaust: shaping national memory in the education system in Israel
Author(s) -
Resnik Julia
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
nations and nationalism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.655
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1469-8129
pISSN - 1354-5078
DOI - 10.1111/1469-8219.00087
Subject(s) - the holocaust , subjectivity , politics , national identity , sociology , subject (documents) , representation (politics) , state (computer science) , politics of memory , law , political science , computer science , epistemology , philosophy , algorithm , library science
Abstract. 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.