Eyal Zandberg

Memory and digital media : six dynamics of the globital memory field

Neda Agha Soltan, a young Iranian woman, was shot dead on June 22, 2009 on the streets of Tehran during protests following the Iranian June elections. Her death was digitally witnessed by a friend nearby using a camera phone: the data then went viral. He emailed the data to another friend in the Netherlands. The camera phone video was uploaded to a number of websites; within hours still images from the video were captured, printed out, and used in protests at her killing and at the results of the Iranian elections in cities around the world, including Los Angeles, New York, and Vienna. The next day, Neda’s dying images were broadcast by major television companies and made worldwide headlines including newspapers in Britain, the US, and Australia. The image of Neda’s face, covered in blood, was recolored, reconfigured, and reassembled across multiple media forms. The witness video prompted the creation of a number of memorial websites, a Twitter icon, a number of Facebook groups, two Wiki pages, memorial art works, and songs commemorating Neda’s life and death.

Critical laughter: humor, popular culture and Israeli Holocaust commemoration

This article explores current trends in the representation of the Holocaust in Israeli popular culture through the analysis of the successful satirical television program: The Chamber Quintet. The article argues that the shows subversive and challenging interpretations of traditional Holocaust commemorations, indicates a major change in the collective memory of the Holocaust. The article explores the cultural role of the shows sketches relating to Holocaust memory by using three perspectives of analysis. The first is a historical–sociological perspective that deals with the development of Holocaust commemoration in Israel. The second perspective deals with the conflict between popular cultural practices and the conventions of Holocaust remembrance. The third perspective deals with the problematic relationship between the content (Holocaust memory) and the form (the genre of humor). Combining these perspectives reveals a dialectical discourse that connects prior voices with new modes of Holocaust representation in popular culture. The article suggests that the use of the popular medium and the genre of humor undermine the programs content. This process indicates a situation of deadlock in collective memory in which new voices criticize the traditional commemoration but can offer no alternative and subvert their own criticism.

The sound-track of memory: Ashes and Dust and the commemoration of the Holocaust in Israeli popular culture

The article investigates the 1988 music album Efer Veavak (in English: Ashes and Dust) that was created by Yehuda Poliker and Ya’akov Gilad, two Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivor parents. The article’s findings suggest that the Holocaust story as told through Ashes and Dust emphasizes individual aspects rather than collective lessons and that there is a growing sensitivity to the issue of memory preservation. Moreover, Ashes and Dust highlights the notion that the survivors’ children are now the bearers of Holocaust memory, and that it is through them that the Holocaust becomes an Israeli story about the present, rather than only a diaspora story about the past. These tendencies are amplified by the fact that Ashes and Dust is a popular cultural product. The public use of the songs through radio broadcasting has in many cases caused them to be assimilated into the mainstream and has blurred their initial identification as markers of a singular event, the Holocaust.

Tuned to the nation's mood: Popular music as a mnemonic cultural object

This article explores the concept of sonic memory via the investigation of popular music that constitutes a radio playlist. Our case study focuses on the songs aired on Israel’s Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism during the state’s first decade of local-commercial radio broadcasting (1993–2002). The critical analysis sought to understand what makes certain songs so identifiable with the national mourning ritual and the ways in which such songs gain the authority to symbolize and shape social memories. The article deconstructs the songs’ commemorative authority through three primary questions: (1) What is one permitted to sing about when addressing the Holocaust in popular music? (2) Who is permitted to sing or write about it? (3) How are those individual artists permitted to sing about the Holocaust within the context of popular music? The findings suggest that the authority of the songs as ‘cultural objects’ is derived from a complex combination of their quiet tone and slow tempo, the biographies of their creators and performers, and their lyrics, written by poets who embrace a philosophical-existential point of view. Beyond this analysis, the article seeks to understand the power and efficacy of popular music as a cultural object.

Past Continuous: Newsworthiness and the Shaping of Collective Memory

This study explores the multi-layered interrelations between the production of news and collective remembering. We investigate this phenomenon by analyzing television newscasts aired on Israels Memorial Day for the Holocaust and Heroism (MDHH), 1994–2007. These newscasts provide a rich research corpus because they stand at the intersection between two types of rituals: the everyday ritual of newsmaking, and the national commemorative ritual, for which the media serves as a main site of articulation. The article implements a “zoom in” perspective: first, we examine the broadcasting schedules, exploring the role of newscasts in the process of leading the audiences in and out of the commemorative ritual. Next, we suggest a typology distinguishing between (a) items dealing with current events, (b) commemorative items focusing on Holocaust remembrance, and (c) dog whistle items that are “attuned” to the specific cultural ear and thus enable mundane news items to be interpreted as related to Holocaust commemoration. We argue that the dual aim of the items featured in MDHH newscasts–to provide both news values and commemorative values–leads to the construction of “reversed memory,” a narrative that commemorates past events (the “there and then”) by narrating present events (the “here and now”). Reversed memory commemorates the difficult past through the achievements of the present, and thus not only eases the collective confrontation with painful traumas, but rather avoids this encounter altogether.

Structuring the Sacred: Media Professionalism and the Production of Mediated Holocaust Memory

In this study, the authors explore the considerations that guide media organizations when they narrate the past. To operationalize this research interest, the authors interviewed 10 senior Israeli electronic media professionals about the production processes that shape the broadcasts of electronic media on Israels Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism. The analysis of the interviews illuminates the constructed and negotiated (rather than natural and inherent) nature of media professionalism.

Days of awe: The praxis of news coverage during national crisis

Abstract The case study aims to reveal the praxis that serves the media during ethnic-violence conflicts. The article closely reads reports of the Israeli media covering the clashes between Israeli Arabs and the police, in the first days of the second Intifada (September 28–October 9, 2000). We analyze how mainstream Hebrew media (television news stations and newspapers) covered the unfolding events, and also refer to reports in Arab-language newspapers. Two prominent trends shaped the frame through which events were reported: Inclusion and exclusion. Israels Hebrew-language media excluded the Arab citizens from the general Israeli public, while, at the same time, equating them with the residents of the Palestinian Authority. That is, the media framed the Arab Israeli citizens as Palestinians, blurring the line between the riots within Israel and the armed violence in the West Bank and Gaza. This coverage changed after the first and most intense days of riots; Israeli journalists then switched to a more civil framing after establishing an inner as well as an outer discourse (mainly in concurrence with the politicians).

Reversed Memory: Commemorating the Past through Coverage of the Present

On the eve of Israel’s Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism (also known in Israel as ‘Holocaust Remembrance Day’ or ‘Holocaust Day’) 2012, the Israeli elite newspaper Haaretz published a provocative op-ed, written by Yoram Kaniuk, one of the country’s prominent novelists, bearing the title ‘Celebrate Holocaust Day.’ Referenced both on the newspaper’s front page and on its internet homepage the piece claimed that ‘Holocaust Day should be a day of joy. Tens of thousands of people survived, returned to life, raised children and grandchildren… In Auschwitz, people became the greatest heroes in history… Holocaust Day should be a national holiday of joy, celebrating the rescue [and] the heroism of the survivors’ (Kaniuk, 2012). A few days earlier, the popular daily Yedioth Ahronoth had published a feature story bearing the title ‘We Took-Off Like the Phoenix’ (Duek, 2012) that narrated the story of Holocaust survivors who became combat pilots in the Israeli air force (see Figure 7.1).

Localizing Collective Memory: Radio Broadcasts and the Construction of Regional Memory

This study, which focuses on the interrelations between media, memory, and collectives, examines the significant role played by the media in forming the two dimensions of collective mediated recollections: shaping the memory and defining the boundaries of the collective. One of the central arguments raised in recent years in the field of social science maintains that more attention should be shifted to the ‘cosmopolitan turn’ (Beck, 2003; Beck and Sznaider, 2006), the process that involves more openness to the transnational arena and the sensitivity to ‘universal values’ that become part of national societies. Within this context, we argue that although most of the research devoted to collective memory centers on the construction of national memory — in the era of globalization, collective memory and commemoration that exist in a cosmopolitan context (Levy and Sznaider, 2006) — it does not necessarily promote national values. We will contend that, parallel to the ‘cosmopolitan turn’, a reverse process might be identified whereby small communities — the relations among whose members rely on geographical or ideological vicinity, or yet on common areas of interest — succeed in creating regional-communal-local versions of the collective national memory.1

To Sell Holocaust Day to the Children

The establishment of Holocaust Remembrance Day as a day of collective ritualistic mourning has created a unique situation in which the memory of the Holocaust is addressed by the vast majority of the Israeli media, on the same day every year (Zandberg, 2010).1 In turn, this assists the tracking of the diachronic development of Israeli Holocaust media memory across time. Thus, the exceptional circumstances that shape the operation of Israeli media on Holocaust Remembrance Day — especially the ways in which they stress the tension between the conventions of Holocaust representation and the routines of media work — help elucidate the constructed and negotiated nature of ‘media professionalism’.