ABSTRACT

In his book Imagined Communities, 1 Benedict Anderson claims that, as a rule, a national narrative appropriates from its graveyards “exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars and holocausts,” and reconstructs them as paragons of bravery and heroism. Anderson claims that the nation’s establishment makes certain that these violent deaths will be “remembered [or] forgotten as ‘our own’.” He asserts that it is in this spirit that “the ancestor of the Warsaw Uprising is the state of Israel.” 2 In other words, although the Warsaw ghetto revolt is an actual, recorded historic event, in Anderson’s opinion the meaning and the central place that it has been given in Israeli, Jewish, and even the world’s historical memory were created by the State of Israel.