Communicating Awe: Media Memory and Israeli Holocaust Commemoration

How can a society communicate a collective trauma? This talk offers a cross-media exploration of the operation of Israeli media, throughout six decades on Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of Israel`s most sacred national rituals. The book investigates the way in which variables such as medium, structure of ownership, genre and targeted audiences shape the collective recollection of traumatic memories. Following our previous conceptual work on media memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) we argue that a combination of the abovementioned factors, anchored in the political arena as well as in the realm of media practices and conventions lead Israeli media to operate on Holocaust Remembrance Day in a manner that “acts out” the collective trauma. Thus, the underlying narrative that is performed by the media on Holocaust Remembrance Day accounts for the Holocaust as a current, ongoing Israeli event, rather than an event that took place in Europe and ended decades ago.