ABSTRACT
The memory of the Holocaust and its victims has always been a locus of controversy in the Israeli public sphere. Searching for a term that would convey its temporal and qualitative difference from survivor memory, Marianne Hirsch has chosen to call this secondary or second-generation memory, ‘postmemory’. As Roni Perchak observes, many Israeli film-makers come from survivors’ families, for many years the Holocaust occupied a marginal space in Israeli cinema. For many second-generation Israelis, film has become the main vehicle through which they articulate their Holocaust postmemory. The relative silence of Israeli cinema can be explained by its role as both a mirror of, and complicit participant in, the construction and perpetuation of dominant Zionist ideology, including the negation of exile; and by the association of the Holocaust with diasporic consciousness. Paradoxically and tragically, however, identification with the Jewish victim increases as acknowledgement of Israel’s primary victims, the Palestinians, wanes and is denied.
