ABSTRACT
Ruth Diskin examines how one of the most traumatic and present memories in Israeli identity and history discourses—the memory of the Holocaust—is negotiated in the made for TV documentary film Hadira (The Flat), a personal, autobiographical documentary by Arnon Goldfinger. Unlike documentary television series devoted to the memory of the Holocaust in the educational and official sphere, The Flat makes no use of archival footage, although it is about a major chapter in world, Jewish, and Israeli history. The filmmaker insists on documenting reality and commenting on it in the very personal, familial, and constrained space of an apartment located in the heart of Tel Aviv. The director, whose point of view and voice dominate the film’s narrative, perspectives and identifications, reconstructs the family history in reference to the Jewish Holocaust, both in Europe and in Israel, using personal, rather than national, artifacts, and perspectives. In another section of this anthology Liat Steir Livny discusses another turn in the collective Israeli memory of the Holocaust as negotiated on satirical television, and demonstrates how humor is legitimized in Israeli discourse about the memory of the Holocaust. In this section however, we are concerned with trends in memory discourse on Israeli television. The privatization of memory and personalized as well as familial identifications are major not only in Holocaust memory and Holocaust Memorial Day repertories on Israeli television, but also in the National Memorial Day television repertory.
