Set in Israel in the first decade of the twenty-first century and based on long-term fieldwork, this ethnographic study offers an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It explores practices of "memory activism" by three groups of Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian citizens -- Zochrot, Autobiography of a City, and Baladna -- showing how they appropriated the global model of truth and reconciliation while utilizing local cultural practices such as tours and testimonies
Changing temporalities and the internationalization of memory cultures / Daniel Levy -- Misremembering the Holocaust : universal symbol, nationalist icon or moral kitsch? / Ross Poole -- Memory and history from past to future : a dialogue with Dori Laub on trauma and testimony / Dori Laub and Federico Finchelstein -- Remembering yesterday to protect tomorrow : the internationalization of a new commemorative paradigm / Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro -- The role of conversations in shaping individual and collective memory, attitudes and behavior / Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst -- Re-presenting victim and perpetrator : the role of photographs in US service members' testimony against war / Kimberly Spring -- How shall we remember Srebrenica? Will the language of law structure our memory? / Selma Leydesdorff -- Refugees from utopia : remembering, forgetting and the making of The feminist memoir project / Ann Snitow -- Happy memories under the mushroom cloud : utopia and memory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee / Lindsey A. Freeman -- Authorizing death : memory politics and states of exception in contemporary El Salvador / Gema Santamaria-Balmaceda -- Memories of war and enacting the future at Yasukuni Shrine, Japan / David P. Janes
AbstractThe role of violent histories and their legacies in reconciliation processes has been a central question in debates on reconciliation and nation building after conflict: whether, how, and when painful events should be remembered in post-conflict and post-transition societies. A dominant approach to this question since the 1980s has been the "reconciliation paradigm," which views addressing violent histories as condition for reconciliation. A comparative study of the implementation in practice of this global paradigm by civil society–based memory activists in Poland and Israel–Palestine raises questions about its applicability. The findings point to two weaknesses: first, mistreatment of asymmetrical violence and power relations between the conflict sides and, second, the lack of systematic consideration of how reconciliation is perceived by local actors in practice. In light of these weaknesses, local memory activists developed alternative strategies to those of the reconciliation paradigm, while governments infused reconciliation with different meanings that impede reconciliation instead of advancing it. Cultivating a sociological approach to reconciliation theory, this article proposes new theoretical modifications that would expand the paradigm's applicability: reciprocity or mutual respect instead of mutual acknowledgments, a normative basis that transcends the liberal boundaries of reconciliation, and an agonistic memory instead of consensus about the past.
The role of violent histories and their legacies in reconciliation processes has been a central question in debates on reconciliation and nation building after conflict: whether, how, and when painful events should be remembered in post-conflict and post-transition societies. A dominant approach to this question since the 1980s has been the "reconciliation paradigm," which views addressing violent histories as condition for reconciliation. A comparative study of the implementation in practice of this global paradigm by civil society–based memory activists in Poland and Israel–Palestine raises questions about its applicability. The findings point to two weaknesses: first, mistreatment of asymmetrical violence and power relations between the conflict sides and, second, the lack of systematic consideration of how reconciliation is perceived by local actors in practice. In light of these weaknesses, local memory activists developed alternative strategies to those of the reconciliation paradigm, while governments infused reconciliation with different meanings that impede reconciliation instead of advancing it. Cultivating a sociological approach to reconciliation theory, this article proposes new theoretical modifications that would expand the paradigm's applicability: reciprocity or mutual respect instead of mutual acknowledgments, a normative basis that transcends the liberal boundaries of reconciliation, and an agonistic memory instead of consensus about the past.
This study joins the ongoing, yet marginalized, scholarly attempt to connect between law, memory and the media. We focus on a unique memory law: the 'Law Commemorating the Exile of Jews from Arab Countries and Iran' enacted in the Israeli parliament in 2014. The law aims to make official a long-silenced memory of the dispossession and suffering inflicted on Jewish residents of major Arab states and of Iran by local authorities as a reaction to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. By a systematic analysis of the law, the mediated discourse that followed its enactment and of the media fare on these commemoration days, this study uncovers the complex interrelations between law, media and society's memory. This study highlights an interesting process. At the 'negotiation stage', which precedes the actual enactment of the law, different memory actors promote varied narratives and create a public atmosphere that might support the political processes that lead to the enactment of a new memory law. When the law is enacted and by dictating special commemoration events and designated memorial days, the law creates signified temporal structures that the media, in turn, identify as important and highlight as sacred monuments in time. This indicates that while laws outline what society should remember, it is mediated techniques of news media production that legitimize historic narratives and makes them an integral part of society's memory.
"This handbook is the first systematic effort to map the fast-growing phenomenon of memory activism and to delineate a new field of research that lies at the intersection of memory and social movement studies. From Charlottesville to Capetown, from Santiago to Sydney, we have recently witnessed protesters demanding that symbols of racist or colonial pasts be dismantled and that we talk about histories that have long been silenced. But such events are only the most visible instances of grassroots efforts to influence the meaning of the past in the present. Made up of more than 80 chapters that encapsulate the rich diversity of scholarship and practice of memory activism by assembling different disciplinary traditions, methodological approaches, and empirical evidence from across the globe, this handbook establishes important questions and their theoretical implications arising from the social, political, and economic reality of memory activism. Memory Activism is multi-faceted, takes place in a variety of settings, and has diverse outcomes - but it is always crucial to understanding the constitution and transformation of our societies, past and present. This volume will serve as a guide and establish new analytic frameworks for scholars, students, policy makers, journalists, and activists alike"--
