Agents of memory in the post-witness era: Memory in the Living Room and changing forms of Holocaust remembrance in Israel

Abstract

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.

Keywords

commemoration generations Holocaust memory Israel memory agents

Introduction

Over 70 years have passed since the end of World War II, and the last survivors of the Holocaust are reaching the ends of their lives. The imminent disappearance of the generation of memory (Winter, 2001: 5) can be seen as signifying a critical juncture in the developmental course of Holocaust remembrance. Indeed, 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. It is the purpose of this article to examine the impact of this generational transition on the creation of new mnemonic practices related to the Holocaust, with focus on a specific remembrance project, known as Memory in the Living Room (MIL; in Hebrew Zikaron Besalon), which was begun in Israel in 2011.

The transition from witness to post-witness memory, and concomitantly the generational transition of memory, is of particular significance in Israel, where survivors have come to play a pivotal role in Holocaust remembrance and where Holocaust remembrance has become a central part of the cultural and political landscape (Arad, 2003; Lustick, 2017; Ofer, 2000; Young, 1993). Since the early 2000s, many new state and, particularly, non-state commemorative initiatives have emerged. Among them, MIL stands out, both in terms of its divergent format and structure and in terms of the magnitude of its appeal. The structure of MIL commemorative activities takes the form of small gatherings in private homes; the gatherings are promoted as being intimate and informal, with focus on active dialog and engagement. As such, they constitute a significant change from the official, formal and highly scripted format of Holocaust commemoration that has characterized remembrance activities in Israel for many years. Moreover, what began as—to quote one of the founders—“a guerilla-like phenomenon”, with a few hundred participants in a few dozen homes, has grown, in the course of less than a decade, into a massive remembrance project, with approximately 750,000 participants who have gathered in close to 100,000 private homes both within Israel and outside of Israel, including those of the President of Israel and of other leading public figures.

It is thus clear that MIL, although relatively new and hence not yet widely studied, constitutes a central phenomenon in the commemorative landscape in Israel, with a potentially long-term impact on the culture of remembrance. While some attention has been paid to its innovative structure and anti-paradigmatic components (Steir-Livny, 2019), little, if any, study has focused on its agents and founders or on how they came to conceive 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, and to an understanding of the ways in which the generational transition has impacted contemporary commemoration. The paper thus seeks to theorize the relationship between memory agents, social structure, and identity.

The research reported in this paper is based on a series of 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews that I conducted with members of the core MIL group. It also draws on insights obtained from my participation in MIL leadership seminars and volunteer meetings. My findings suggest that MIL’s emergent commemorative agenda is focused on form and not content; it aims to create a type of remembrance that offers both a fresh means of national commemoration and a form of remembrance that transcends the national by focusing on the constitution of local communities of memory. The outcome is a hybrid version of contemporary remembrance informed by concepts and practices drawn from a globally based digitalized culture, alongside the more traditional and local practices of face-to-face testimony and discussion. This hybridity, I argue, is reflective of the generational identity of its founders.

This article thus makes three main contributions to the larger study of collective memory, namely, to our understanding of: (i) the ways in which non-state memory agents formulate mnemonic agendas and how these agendas inform commemorative practices; (ii) the impact of generational transition on the landscape of Holocaust remembrance in Israel through highlighting and studying a significant, yet understudied, phenomenon—MIL; and (iii) the hybrid nature of contemporary remembrance trends and how they reflect the intersection of local, national, and global agendas.

Generational transition of memory

The ability of the memory of an event to survive after the deaths of those who experienced that event is the seminal issue of collective memory. From Halbwachs onward, examining the transition from embodied to cultural and social memory has remained central to the understanding of the possibility of collective memory (Assmann, 2015; Hogervorst, 2015). Building on Mannheim’s original sociological conception of generation, Assmann (2008) has proposed the concept of “generational memory” to highlight the connection between generational transition and changes in memory. The emphasis on generational transition highlights the contextual and constructed nature of collective memory, forging a political and sociological link between past, present and future generations. As the memory of events gains distance from the event itself, it becomes increasingly mediated by material forms of commemoration, education, and other forms of collective participation (Connerton, 1989), taking on a multiplicity of forms (Berliner, 2005; Olick and Robbins, 1998). Indeed, as has been widely investigated, processes of memory transmission are generationally contingent, influenced by contemporary contexts, such as hegemonic conceptions of belonging, dominant ideological discourses, and political norms and values (Assmann, 2008, 49–72; Corning and Schuman, 2015; Luzón, 2007, 68–94; Macdonald, 2013; Vinitzky-Seroussi, 2002).

Generations and Holocaust memory

One of the central tropes in Holocaust memory involves the concept of “generation”. Implicit in the usage of the term is the notion that the experience of the Holocaust wreaked such deep trauma on its survivors that its memory defined their collective identity and hence forged them into a social “generation”. This trope was first introduced by the theorists writing on the “second generation”, who focused on the knowledge of trauma transferred from parents to children (Aarons and Berger, 2017; Braiterman, 2000). “Second generation” has subsequently emerged as a basic and accepted concept in discussions of trauma transference, focusing on the different ways in which knowledge of a traumatic event is “inherited”—either biologically or sociologically (Hirsch, 2008).

Since the first decade of the 2000s, with the gradual aging of the second generation, discourse on Holocaust memory and remembrance has started to engage with the notion of “third generation”. Outside of Israel, it appears that the concept of “third generation” is used mainly as a biological term to refer to the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors (Flanzbaum, 2012). In contrast, in Israel itself, it is common to use the notion of “third generation” as a larger socio-cultural category that encompasses the entire cohort of Israelis who were born in the 1980s and onward. Underlying this usage is the assumption that the identity of this age cohort as a generation is implicit within their identity as Israelis and as members of a society increasingly infused with Holocaust memory—in education, politics, and culture (Ben-Amos and Hoffman, 2011).

Attempts to theorize the shift from second to third generational address two main processes (Bayer, 2010; Bayer and Kobrynskyy, 2015). The first is the shift away from the need to “fill in the gaps” in personal memory, which was seen as characteristic of second generation memory. The second comprises a redirection of the commemorative gaze from history and the past toward the future, motivated by a sense of ethical responsibility to future generations. As the gaze is turned more toward the present and the future, and as ethical responsibility to future generations replaces the sense of historical responsibility toward the generation of victims and survivors, the task of speaking about and of negotiating remembrance discursively becomes more central. Hence, as the third generation has an increasingly tenuous connection to the memories themselves, the narratives they produce become increasingly invested in and engaged with contemporary and future-oriented contexts.

Memory agents and generational transmission

The transition from embodied to collective, cultural memory entails the growing involvement of a wide array of intermediaries, interpreters, and mediators whose role is to act as “memory agents”. While the traditional conception of memory agents was associated with state actors and elites, the expansion of research that focuses on a multiplicity of memory arenas, and the investigation of non-state cultural memory, have brought to the fore a wider variety of agents (Cutcher et al., 2016: 3–9; Macdonald, 2013; Neiger et al., 2011; Wertsch, 2008: 120–135). Many of these studies, however, often conflate the study of memory agents with the study of their “cultural tools”, that is, with the various mechanisms and instruments through which memory is constituted. Thus, for example, studies of memory and media (Neiger et al., 2011; Olick, 1999; Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013; Zelizer, 2008) often identify the media themselves—whether “media”, “new-media”, or “social media”—as memory agents with agentive capacities. Mnemonic agendas, interpretations of the past, and visions for the future are therefore identified as characteristics of different types of media and are hence not necessarily traceable to any particular actor or social or political class or category. Other studies, which highlight individual agency as the “source” of memory work, often treat the agents as “instruments of memory” and not as particular, socially situated individuals whose own identity informs the mnemonic agenda they produce: The individual and distinct identities of the agents are subsumed within the general goal of the commemoration, and hence the agenda is derived from the outcome and not from the source (Vinitzky-Seroussi, 2002).

Recent scholarship has sought to address this lacuna, producing numerous typologies aimed at theorizing the motivations and interests of different types of memory agents. Bernhard and Kubik (2014) for example, focus on state actors and distinguish between four different types of memory actor, based on their political motivations and modes of political maneuvering. Underlying their typology is that state memory actors use history as an instrument and means for attaining power and legitimacy (Bernhard and Kubik, 2014: 20). Gutman (2017) distinguishes between four types of “ideal type” memory agents: entrepreneurs, practitioners, state actors and memory activists. The first three types are distinguished by their particular relationship with the past: personal, pragmatic, and power driven. The fourth type, the memory activist, is primarily interested in the future, or in “advancing moral and political agendas that extend beyond commemoration” (Gutman, 2017: 18). While the different typologies contribute different perspectives, they share a focus on the ways in which memory actors or agents influence the particular memory narratives that they seek to commemorate. Thus, they are “content” oriented in their analysis, highlighting the narrational dimension of memory and commemoration at the expense of a focus on structure and form.

While content is clearly a significant dimension of commemoration, many of the contemporary commemorative initiatives, particularly those based on digitalized forms of media, stand out—because of their focus on innovative form rather than their choice of historical narrative. The research that I conducted highlights a lacuna in the existing typologies that overlook those instances of commemoration in which the agents focus on structure and form rather than narrative and hence are neither motivated by a desire to promote a certain version of history (as are, for example, memory activists) nor characterized by a certain mode of operation in promoting a specific version of history (Bernhard and Kubik, 2014). The agents interviewed for this research aim at promoting commemorative practices that will ensure the perpetuation of the collective memory of the Holocaust by adjusting the form of commemoration to reflect current dominant cultural practices and concepts and thus maintain a widespread appeal. Analysis of their mnemonic agenda underscores the inextricable connection between narrative content and commemorative form, and how deeply structure and form can influence not only the ways people remember but also what they remember. Finally, as I discuss below, my choice to study the agents of MIL was intimately tied to the diffused and participatory nature of MIL, which rendered the mnemonic agenda of MIL rather elusive. It became clear that to gain a wide understanding of the aims and meanings of these mnemonic practices, it was necessary to interview those who had established them.

Holocaust remembrance in Israel

Much has been written about Israeli collective memory of the Holocaust and the deep changes it has undergone over the years. From the end of the WWII up to the mid-1960s, collective memory of the Holocaust was ambivalent and limited—ambivalent in its attitude toward what was perceived as Jewish passivity and victimhood and hence limited to the commemoration of heroic fighters, that is, partisans and those who fought in the ghetto uprisings (Ofer, 2000). Governed at that time by a statist political culture that positioned the state as a central actor in promoting national identity, Holocaust remembrance was constituted within very rigid official paradigmatic structures (Handelman, 2004; Ofer, 2000). However, following the Eichmann trial in 1961 and with the coming of age of second-generation survivors in the 1970s, social and public remembrance of the Holocaust in Israel gradually underwent significant changes (Arad, 2003). More and more attention was paid to survivors and their testimonies (Shapira, 1998), and patterns of remembrance began to reflect a compelling need to record the past. By the late 1980s, reflecting these changes, a number of significant new forms of remembrance joined the pantheon of remembrance activities in Israel. These include, to cite a few, the official remembrance protocol entitled “Every person has a name” (Ofer, 2000); educational and commemorative trips to death camps in Poland (Ben-Amos and Hoffman, 2011); and the establishment of archival video collections of survivor testimonies (Kushner, 2006). Finally, the major renovations that took place at Yad Vashem (completed in 2005) reflect this shift away from grand narratives and toward an emphasis on the individual and on the individual stories (Goldman, 2006).

Since the early 2000s, with the aging of the second generation and the emergence of the third generation, collective memory of the Holocaust once again began undergoing major shifts characterized by two major trends. The first can be seen as a “pluralization” of events, which are conducted via local theater, cinema and dance events and range from alternative protest-like events, such as the Alternative Holocaust Memorial Ceremony in the fringe Tmuna Theatre in Tel Aviv (Steir-Livny, 2014), to the commemoration of particular groups, such as the gay community and women’s groups. This commemorative pluralism is related to the second trend, which can be seen as the retreat of the state and the strengthening of grassroots and non-official modes of commemoration. While state-sponsored events are still widely viewed on television, ratings have consistently weakened over the years (Meyers et al., 2009), as has participation in local and national ceremonies (Ben-Amos et al., 2005). The majority of new commemorative events are initiated by local groups and private individuals. Many of them employ non-ceremonial language, humor, satire, and other modes of communication considered taboo for many years (Steir-Livny, 2014; Zandberg, 2006). It is within this larger context that MIL emerged.

Agentive agents of memory—the establishment of Memory in the Living Room

MIL was established in 2011 by Adi Altschuler, a young social activist and social entrepreneur, a founding member of Krembo Wings (the world’s first, and only, youth movement for children with disabilities), and one of Time magazine’s 2014 Next Generation Leaders (Time Magazine 2014). As Altschuler has recounted many times, the impetus for establishing MIL emerged from her growing sense of alienation from the official ceremonies and her efforts to commemorate the day in a different way by inviting friends over, listening to the testimony of a survivor, and talking (Nir, 2017).

Despite the fact that 8 years later, MIL boasts three quarters of a million participants, the fundamental structure of the event has surprisingly remained the same, as has its vision. The vision of MIL coalesced very quickly. Altschuler, along with a circle of close friends and colleagues, many of whom had cooperated with her on previous social activism projects, pushed the project ahead. After that first year, the idea spread largely by word of mouth, and in the first couple of years it grew exponentially, with no official framework, organization, or hierarchy. MIL became a close-knit organization of dedicated members who devoted much of their time on a voluntary basis. No-one drew a salary. Once the volume of gatherings started to grow, the organization secured some donations and hired two people. By 2015, what had begun as one evening, in one living room, with forty people, had grown into a remembrance phenomenon on a national scale, with close to 100,000 participants. The following year, MIL had four salaried employees, and in 2017 MIL became a not-for-profit organization. In 2018, MIL hosted three quarters of a million participants in close to 20,000 living rooms (Table 1).¹

Table 1.

Participants in memory in the living room.

Year	Number of living rooms	Number of participants
2011	1	40
2012	80	3200
2013	370	14,800
2014	1000	40,000
2015	2000	80,000
2016	3700	150,000
2017	12,500	500,000
2018	18,750	750,000

Data from Rabinovitch, 2019.

The idea behind MIL is to promote a form of remembrance that is based on small, intimate gatherings that take place in the privacy of people’s homes—hence Memory in the Living Room—and comprises three interrelated parts: A typical evening will begin with a testimony, followed by some kind of artistic interlude, and will end with an open discussion. Participants in the events are expected to be active rather than passive and to take part in the discussion, which is seen as a central defining element of the project. Moreover, hosts and participants are urged to relinquish the traditional commemorative symbols of Holocaust memory, such as recitation of the memorial Yizkor Prayer for the Dead, and the presence of soldiers in uniform as symbolic of national redemption (Handelman, 2004). The emphasis on the “private” sphere as the place of memory should also be viewed in the context of the major changes that have occurred in what Israelis do at home on Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day (HHRD). With the decline in the appeal of the televised National Ceremony at Yad Vashem, many Israelis have begun to rely on internet-based entertainment, and many others, according to certain reports, chose to “do nothing” (Nir, 2017). It would seem that much of the appeal of MIL lies in it’s providing an alternative to “doing nothing”.

At present, the organizational structure of MIL remains decentralized, consisting of a small national office, and numerous local coordinators spread out over 10 regional areas throughout Israel (Rabinovitch, 2019). The local coordinators are recruited entirely on a volunteer basis and work for a total of three months a year, that is, the time preceding the annual HHRD, which usually falls sometime in April (on the Hebrew calendar date of the 27th of the month of Nisan). Thus, organizationally, MIL is highly diffuse and relies entirely on a network of dozens of local volunteers. The activity of the national office focuses mainly on facilitating the ability of local communities to independently initiate and implement gatherings, assisting local coordinators when needed, and working hard at securing the participation of testimony givers. The Website (https://www.zikaronbasalon.com/; in Hebrew) plays a central role: potential hosts and participants can sign up on the Website, and it offers a wealth of information and advice on organizing gatherings, including discussion plans, tips for running the evening and a do-it-yourself kit that includes a variety of useful templates. Close to 70% of hosts use the Website to download “host” packets (Rabinovitch, 2019).

Core founding members

As mentioned above, MIL is a non-centralized organization run by dozens of volunteers who join for diverse reasons. While most of the original group of core founders no longer hold official positions within the organization, they remain intimately involved. Moreover, the preferences, norms, and understandings of the core group are those that still constitute the vision of the organization, particularly as volunteers are less prone to maintaining a clear agenda and usually see their participation as a means of doing something “meaningful” for the memory of the Holocaust.² In the course of my interviews with members of the core group, it became clear that they constituted memory agents not merely in the instrumental sense of facilitating and promoting certain institutions of memory, but also by seeing themselves as acting toward promoting goals that aimed, in a purposeful and intentional way, to influence the future of Holocaust remembrance, both within and beyond Israel.

The core members of MIL whom I interviewed may be divided into two groups of people. The first comprises ten of the founding members (nine women and one man), who joined MIL in its early stages. Only two out of the ten come from families of survivors, and, nine out of the ten had previously engaged in some form of social activism, though none described the 2011 social protest movement in Israel as being a significant event. Members of this group belong roughly to the same cohort, in terms of age, gender, religiosity, and background. All ten grew up in middle-class, Zionist, secular and in what appeared to be left-leaning households where the memory of the Holocaust was maintained in more or less conventional ways. They attended Israeli high schools whose history curriculum had included extensive study of the Holocaust. Some—but not all—had participated in organized trips to the death camps in Poland, but almost all expressed a sense of “alienation” from traditional commemorative forms, disappointment at the Poland “pilgrimages”, and an overall sense of “saturation” with Holocaust memory. Moreover they all came of age as the poverty and destitution of many of the Holocaust survivors in Israel became high on the political agenda—particularly during HHMD.

The second group of core members, consisting of individuals who had mostly joined three to four years after the establishment of MIL, was more diverse—more men, different religious backgrounds, and a wider socio-economic purview. However, like the “founding generation” most of the new members came to MIL with backgrounds that included social activism and most had no direct family connection to the Holocaust. As one of the newer members, Tal, put it: “I came to MIL not for Holocaust reasons, but for social reasons”. Some of them had formerly worked directly with Altschuler in her previous social initiatives, and others were attracted to MIL because it seemed to be an appealing platform for social activism. Shira, for example, stressed her desire to engage with Israeli society and to explore its identity, whereas Noa and Sara were attracted to MIL because it offered a change from the high-tech paradigm influencing most members of their generation and an opportunity to gain experience in the not-for-profit sector. Hence, all of them grew up in a political culture that places high value on the memory of the Holocaust, and all of them shared that value and commitment. However, all were equally committed to changing the fabric of that culture.

Finally, it is clear that the core members were mainly women, secular, and from Ashkenazi backgrounds. In terms of gender, MIL would appear to be no different from other not-for-profit organizations, for which it has been demonstrated that often most active members are women (Humbert, 2012). The fact that the majority are secular might testify to a more ambivalent attitude of the religious population toward social change organizations, and their Ashkenazi identity to the long standing critique that Holocaust commemoration has excluded non-Ashkenazi Israelis, a point I return to later in the article.

As I show in the following section, the fundamental elements of the MIL vision were elaborated by the small intimate founding group.

Methodology

The analysis of MIL’s basic vision is based on two main lines of research that I conducted during 2018-2019. The first comprised 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews, 10 with members of the founding group of MIL and 10 with individuals who joined later but who were quickly incorporated into the small core leadership group. The second involved my participation in the annual leadership seminar conducted shortly before the HHRD and in a local organizational group of volunteers. The analysis below is based on a narrative analysis of the interviews (the names of the interviewees were changed to protect their privacy).

Memory in the living room—basic vision for remembrance

Three dominant themes emerged from the interviews: the idea of memory as a platform; the importance of the accessibility of memory; and the importance of conversation for remembrance. These three themes together constitute what can be seen as the charter of the MIL, i.e., the foundational core goals of MIL from the outset. These three words, or signifiers—platform, accessibility, and conversation—emerged as descriptions of both the form and the content of MIL. Employing these concepts, the interviewees addressed a wide variety of issues that touched on the ethics of memory, the political role of memory, and the role of memory in constituting social identity. In the following section I elaborate on each of the above three signifiers.

Platform

The concept that was probably most dominant in the narratives of the core members was platform, with the word being used as a metaphor, a description, and a defining characteristic. The word was thus endowed with multiple meanings, ranging from a form of social media to a type of stage. The term often took on a “millennial-speak” usage, which draws on the use of “platform” both as a method of communication and as a technology of communication. A platform in this sense is a vehicle, or an instrument, whose purpose is to facilitate engagement, but at the same time is flexible and malleable and adjusts itself easily to its users’ needs and identities. Shira joined MIL in 2013 and was considered a “strong” member of the group. Later on she decided to become a teacher in the south of Israel. She articulated the concept of “platform” most clearly and explicitly:

MIL is doing to memory what Google did to our email, and what Facebook did to the way we communicate. It takes this thing and personalizes it. Adjusts it just for you. . . this is why we are successful – [our generation] needs and loves things to be just right for us: our coffee, our Facebook – our memory. . . . And it’s amazing because it is to take something so sensitive like memory and adjust it . . . . Now there is a platform that is just right for me, and I can do what I want and talk about what I choose.

In addition to the malleability implied by the concept of platform, the word was also widely used to imply a “social platform” and to convey the idea that MIL is also—if not primarily—a means of bringing people together. This concept was central to the vision that MIL core members were promoting and engaged with the idea of both “active” remembrance and “interactive” remembrance. The interviewees’ narratives strongly conveyed the idea that during the commemorative activity of MIL gatherings people were not passively brought together—as anonymous individuals merely standing next to one another—but rather that MIL gatherings served as a means of promoting significant conversations and interactions among the participants and of catalyzing the coalescence of local communities. In response to a question as to the most important aspect of MIL, Shira answered:

The memory is alive. I learn something new. The day didn’t just go by. For me – my connection is not the Holocaust. My connection is that it is a social platform. . . that I can use to meet people and to get them to look into each other’s eyes and talk. That’s what I really really like and what I loved from day one. . . .

While many of the interviewees spoke of the idea of a platform as enabling different types of discussion and enabling people to relate to the memory in the ways that made sense to them, others used the term platform as constituting a basis, a format, that enables and promotes social activism. Hence, while most of the interviewees made an effort to emphasize that the primary goal of MIL is Holocaust remembrance, all insisted that, at the same time, and perhaps no less importantly, MIL acts as a platform for social change. As Noa noted:

I am not sure that social activism is a formal goal of MIL – but it is definitely one of its main outcomes. And that is what is so wonderful about being a platform – it’s like the Internet. You can do whatever you want with it.

For some, the idea of memory-as-a-platform was a protest against what they felt was “imposed memory”, namely, the commemoration they grew up with—the ceremonies and the films—and the alienation and boredom they felt. Yael, who joined MIL after working in a high-tech office for a number of years, described it in the following way:

[The purpose of] MIL is to change the memory into something that I need. I want to talk about it – not to feel guilty, I want to remember it – and since I have been involved with MIL – each Memorial Day is a very special occurrence. I don’t feel like I need to sit and cry. . . .

There is this paradigm that we are taught all our lives about how to remember and what to feel – and I say that we are not denigrating the Holocaust if we sit together, drink a beer and talk about the Holocaust.

In many of the interviews, this idea of a platform as a means of promoting inclusion and democracy was linked to the idea of “the right to memory”—the idea that remembrance should be made accessible and available to everyone. Michal was a member of the core group and later left to work with an organization dedicated to informal education. In response to a question regarding efforts made by MIL to bring the gatherings to groups of youth at risk, Michal responded:

These kids do not have a platform to say what they really want to say. . . it is their right to also talk about things. . . . It is Holocaust Memorial Day – people come together and do something – so every person has the right to do this. We give them this platform.

Michal’s usage of the term platform was in reference to its meaning as a “stage”, an “arena”, that could give voice to those who had previously been silenced. This particular meaning and use of platform brings us to the second concept widely used to describe one of the main goals of MIL—accessibility.

Accessibility

The key concept of accessibility was referred to in two different ways. The first engaged with the common usage of the term, that is, that of making something accessible—making it easily available. In this sense, a major component of the vision of MIL is to make the memory of the Holocaust available and accessible to everyone. This notion emerged as a critique of the more conventional or mainstream attitude toward the memory of the Holocaust prevalent within Israeli society, namely, that the memory of the Holocaust “belongs” only to those who were directly—or through a family connection—impacted by the trauma (Lustick, 2017). This critique engages with yet another social critique in Israel that argues that Holocaust remembrance has been employed, during different stages of Israel’s history, as a type of exclusive form of “social capital”, available only to specific groups and hence exploited as an indirect means of marginalizing populations who did not have this kind of capital. This critique has been raised in particular in the context of the Mizrahi Jews (Arad, 2003). Hence, one of the main goals of MIL is to provide a remedy for this exclusionary function of memory. Yael noted the following:

Accessibility is an integral part of creating a discourse that everyone can take part in. . . we try to bring this memory to people for whom it is not “their” trauma. . . . The Holocaust created a kind of hierarchy in Israeli society and therefore you need to make the effort to bring it to everyone – all different groups. . . and if you don’t make it relevant to everyone you lose the attempt to create a different discourse in society. . .

While for Yael and others, rendering remembrance accessible to previously excluded groups within Israeli society was a means of creating a more inclusive Israeli identity, for others, it presented itself as a means of transcending the narrow national boundaries of identity and reconnecting and reinforcing the Jewish and transnational basis of Holocaust memory. Moshe, an Israeli of Mizrahi ethnic identity, joined MIL in 2013. He described his sense of removal from Holocaust memory, feeling that it was not “his” and that he had no “right” to this memory:

All those years I felt that the Holocaust wasn’t “mine”. I wasn’t connected . . . . But I celebrate Passover and my parent’s parents didn’t really leave Egypt but the fact that I am a Jew – that connects me to Passover. . . . So the fact that my great grandfather didn’t experience the Holocaust doesn’t mean that I am not connected to it. It is part of the history of the Jews so we need to commemorate it.

The second way in which accessibility was used, is similar to a more contemporary understanding of the term, i.e., accessibility in relation to people with special needs. It is highly likely that Altschuler’s success in establishing Krembo Wings—the youth movement for children with special needs—provided a strong impetus for pushing MIL in this direction. Thus, from 2013, 1 year after its establishment, MIL began facilitating gatherings of groups on the periphery of Israeli society, groups disconnected and alienated from the mainstream of most cultural and social arenas. These groups include, among others, prisoners, youth at risk, mentally challenged populations, chronic patients, women at risk, and asylum seekers. The efforts were not ad hoc, being considered a permanent facet of MIL outreach. By 2018, MIL gatherings had taken place in all of Israel’s prisons, and by 2018 close to 9000 people with special needs had participated in MIL gatherings (Rabinovitch, 2019).

The goal of making Holocaust remembrance accessible to people with special needs underscores the duality inherent in MIL. On the one hand, this goal seems to be an extension of the inclusive agenda of MIL and of the strong belief in the “right” to memory. Noa came to MIL with a rich background in social activism. She articulated this dimension very clearly:

If I say that I want MIL to be a social platform, all of society needs to be a part of this. Before MIL existed most of Israeli society was excluded from the discourse on Holocaust memory. . . Mizrahim – they don’t care – all special-needs people – we don’t talk to them. . .youth – it’s too much. . . .We say that from now on everyone can take part. . . everyone has the ability – that is MIL.

On the other hand, an integral and perhaps dominant aspect of MIL outreach to people with special needs is the ability to use the platform of Holocaust remembrance as a means of helping these people address their own traumas, and hence as a platform to advance other goals; this type of outreach differs from that to previously marginalized ethnic or religious groups. Michal spoke of their experience trying to convince the head of a shelter for women at risk to agree to host a gathering:

. . . it was hard to convince the head of the shelter to let us in. . . she said they were not capable of containing this. . . but then we did and wow. . . these women. . . for the first time they managed. . . really. . . to connect to their own feelings – by identifying with the trauma of someone else. . .You’ve been through so much pain and then there is a Holocaust survivor opposite you. . . and suddenly everything seems different. . . and her ability to talk about it – it opens them up.

In this sense accessibility resonates with the idea of platform and conveys the importance the group ascribed to making memory relevant.

Conversation

The two concepts discussed above—platform and accessibility—converge into the third and final concept—conversation. Conversation emerged as central in two interrelated ways. First, to the extent that the raison d’etre of MIL is to maintain the memory of the Holocaust in the post-witness era, for the core members, conversation was the main means of accomplishing this goal. Neta joined MIL as a student in the university. She noted the following:

The testimony is not the most important part. For testimony you can read Anne Frank’s diary and then analyze it. . . . The most important thing is that you talk. So that the memory stays alive. It stays alive when we speak about it – make it relevant to our lives. If we close the memory away – it means that once the last survivor dies – the memory dies along with him. So what have we accomplished?

Facilitating conversation between and among the participants was considered a guarantee that the memory of the Holocaust would last. Furthermore, conversation was considered as a way to connect younger generations to the memory of the Holocaust. This was underscored by Nir, who joined MIL in 2017:

In the ceremony you can’t respond. . . you just receive, you are passive. And you know – we are Millennials and we are active, we love to talk, to say what is on our minds. Israelis are very much like that. We are different from the generation of our parents. Our agenda is to create a conversation. OK – we heard the testimony – now, you make a switch and you become active. Let’s open up everything.

The second way in which conversation emerged as critical to the identity of MIL was in its relation to the constitution of local communities. For someone like Sara, a student who joined MIL in 2014, the provision of a platform that encourages and enables real conversations between people is the main achievement of MIL.

MIL is a means to create the kind of community that we all lack, to create a deep conversation. It just doesn’t happen on its own – to sit in a pub and talk about the Holocaust or other issues relevant to Israel – and if it does, it passes very quickly. MIL creates a platform that is really important. Most of our communication is through screens – we need face-to-face communication.

Ben, a recent recruit to MIL, regarded the facilitating of local communities as one of the three main goals of MIL. Such communities were forged both from the intimacy of the setting and from the emphasis on conversation:

How do we manage to escape from a world of loneliness and alienation?. . . if we manage to bring half a million people together, in intimate settings, to talk and listen – and that there is a follow up – I think we manage to create a community. . .

The emphasis on conversation was considered necessary for constituting the participants as active partners in the remembrance process. The three components—active participation, an intimate setting, and conversation—together produced a vision of remembrance that was, almost by definition, impossible to carry out in state, official paradigms. Ben explained this as the central mandate of MIL:

To take it out of the realm of the official, the national, the public and to bring it back into the private sphere—the home. Memory does not survive through public rituals—only through private rituals. It must be privatized in order to survive as memory.

Discussion and conclusion

In his discussion of third-generation Holocaust cinema, Bayer identifies two strategies that constitute a shift away from previous modes of remembrance: a move away from the focus on history, that is, on filling in the “holes” in the narratives, and a move toward what he calls an “ethical concern” directed at future generations (Bayer, 2010: 117). These two strategies are particularly prominent in the mnemonic agenda of the founders of MIL Indeed, ethical concerns for contemporary and future generations, rather than concerns regarding history per se, seem to constitute one of the primary motivations of MIL. However, an analysis of the mnemonic agenda of the memory agents revealed that these strategies were significantly informed by the social-cultural identity of the memory agents and by the dominant discourses of their generation. Moreover, the participatory and diffuse nature of MIL, alongside its emphasis on form rather than narrative, rendered the vision opaque, not directly articulated and not easily deciphered. Superficially, one might even conclude that MIL with its emphasis on the structure of commemoration altogether lacks a substantive agenda. Hence, the analysis of the agents’ perspectives—through the interviews—provides an essential interpretive context for a deeper analysis of the commemorative vision, one that is not easily derived from an analysis of the form and structure on its own. Four main conclusions arise from the analysis:

First, and most basically, the agenda reflected MIL’s identity as a hybrid form of remembrance that is informed by global discourses of digitalized memory alongside the more traditional practices of face-to-face testimony and discussion. On the one hand, MIL is seemingly engaged with traditional modes of remembrance, such as face-to-face testimony, and an almost nostalgic yearning for the conversation, discourse and the solidarity that emerges from local communities, at times expressing the idea that the most serious challenge to the quality of communities today comes from digitalized technologies. At the same time, the mnemonic agenda described above is deeply informed by digitalized culture not merely in its form and structure but mainly in its rhetoric and discursive orientation. As I have demonstrated, the notions of platform and accessibility reference digitalized culture in a myriad of forms and meanings and deeply inform the significance and meaning of memory held by the founders, as is to be expected, given the embeddedness of their generation in social media and the larger world of digitalized culture.

Secondly, and in reference to the first element, I suggest that the agenda is informed by the localized-transnational worldview shared by the founders. MIL has been referred to and examined as an example of a grassroots remembrance (Nir, 2017; Steir-Livny, 2019). However, “local” or “grassroots” memories are often conceived as the opposite of “national” and “global” memories. As De Cesari and Rigney have noted “[t]he former, no matter how far they reach out toward the world, are always imagined as being small-scale in scope and extremely localized, akin to a point on a map” (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014: 6). Analysis of the mnemonic agenda of MIL reveals an imaginary that is anything but “a point on the map”. On the contrary, the founding members’ vision for MIL is a grand one—localized, yet transcending national boundaries; retreating into the privacy of living rooms, yet aspiring to replace the scope of the official, public, state sanctioned forms of remembrance.

Thus, MIL complicates, but does not negate, the relationships between memory and the nation and between remembrance and the state. In this sense, the mnemonic agenda of MIL suggests a different, non-linear configuration of memory, engaging the local, national and transnational in different constellations (Levy and Sznaider, 2006, 2010; Rothberg, 2014). In separating Holocaust remembrance from national and nationalized narratives, MIL seeks to recreate local intimate communities of memory that challenge not the sovereignty of the nation but the idea that the nation-state is the main vehicle for remembrance. This hybrid sentiment is underscored by a preoccupation with accessibility and with the inclusivity of memory, challenging the hegemonic control of the state over the “boundaries” of memory. The national community is seen by MIL as an aggregate of localized communities whose identities coalesce in the process of engaging with the past—a process in which the right to memory of all the community members constitutes them as both localized communities of memory and equal members in the larger, national imaginary.

Third, MIL reflects the impact of neo-liberal notions of individualism and personalization. The value of personalization, that is, adjusted to personal needs, was most clearly articulated in the context of the expression of the feelings of alienation from the official remembrance activities and the overall sentiment that these activities no longer resonated with the interests and identity of the generational cohorts of the founding members. They expressed the view that commemoration needed to be personalized and aimed at the identity of its consumers, drawing on a prevalent critique of the “bureaucratic state”, its growing difficulty in addressing the very real and very different needs of its citizens, and the importance of acknowledging “consumer choice” as a factor in developing commemorative practices (Bennett, 2012; Peters, 2009). In the narratives of the core members, personalization seemed to overlap with the desire for local, more intimate communities that would be more attuned to diverse interests. Personalized memory was also associated significantly with the idea of accessibility, and the notion that accessibility to collective memory was contingent on making it personally relevant. This was the main idea underlying the efforts to extend MIL to marginal communities.

Finally and perhaps most significantly, it is interesting and significant that the values that constitute the basis of the mnemonic agenda have more to do with the form and structure of the commemoration than with its content. Thus, while most analyses of memory agents focus on the ways in which agents redefine historical narratives to best suit their needs and agendas, this study has demonstrated that agendas can cohere from a focus on form, and not content, and through this focus on form and structure, recalibrate commemoration in deep and significant ways. Indeed, this insight echoes Connerton’s (1989) stance that while memory research in general tends to focus on content rather than form, it is often the form, to paraphrase McLuhan, that is the message. The interviews demonstrated that the founders were not intent on promoting one historical narrative over another, one version of Holocaust memory over another, and aligned themselves neither with the dominant perspective nor with a critical one. However, this research did reveal that in its form-focused agenda, MIL emerges as anti-establishment and even, at times, radical—aiming to redefine the memory of the Holocaust not through openly challenging the dominant narrative, and not through challenging the central place of Holocaust memory in Israeli identity, but through transforming its commemorative practices.

Hence, the emphasis on accessibility, platform and conversation constitute a deep challenge to the dominant norms of Holocaust commemoration in Israel and by extension, to the dominant norms of Israeli society. This is probably most apparent on three levels. First, by promoting a more inclusive form of memory MIL challenges what many see as the exclusionary, Ashkenazi bias of Israeli identity entrenched by years of Labor party hegemonic power. In recent years, the critical perspective in this debate has included a critique of the dominance of Holocaust memory in Israeli identity, arguing that the centrality of the memory of the Holocaust to Israeli identity—promoted primarily by the educational system—operated historically, and still operates today, as a form of exclusion (Oppenheimer, 2010). Second, by promoting a more participatory and active form of memory, MIL is aligning itself with recent critical voices that are protesting what is seen as the dogmatism of the political discourse in Israel and the emergence of a passive citizenry (Gutwein, 2009). Third, by promoting a form of memory that looks beyond the national to the local, MIL is contesting the dominance of nationalist discourse in Israeli society, and thus engaging with a growing movement of local community organizers and activists (Marom, 2013). Hence, a study of the mnemonic agenda deepens our understanding of the role that Holocaust memory has played in Israeli society, as well as an understanding of the wider political and cultural contexts that constituted this memory.

To conclude, much can be learned from an analysis of the mnemonic agenda as described by the founding members of MIL regarding the ways that Holocaust remembrance reflects and engages with larger social and cultural processes. However, as MIL is a relatively new remembrance activity, further research should be conducted to examine its long-term impact and to critically assess the direction that remembrance will eventually take in this post-witness era.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Rebecca Kook

Notes

Author biography

Rebecca Kook is a senior lecturer in the department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. She has published on issues related to identity and memory-politics. Her current research focuses on memory agency and the relationship between commemorative form and content.

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