New Article: Meiri, Sexual Violence as Represented in Israeli Holocaust-Related Cinema

Meiri, Sandra. “Visual Responses: Women’s Experience of Sexual Violence as Represented in Israeli Holocaust-Related Cinema.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22.4 (2015): 443-56.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350506815606439

 

Abstract

This article explores the function of Israeli narrative films’ persistent, albeit marginal, portrayal of women as victims of sexual violence during the Holocaust. While the marginalization of such characters may be attributed to the difficulty of representing sexually-related trauma/post-trauma, their portrayal attests both to the ubiquity of sexually-related crimes in the Holocaust and to its aftermath: namely, the persistence of women’s trauma. The first of the two waves of ‘retro films’ examined here evinces the importance of the visual, cinematic representation of women’s trauma. Its main function is to legitimize its disclosure through cinematic aesthetic/artistic mediation, for sexual violence was a crime committed against helpless victims. The second wave includes films made from the point of view of ‘the second generation’, and explores the topic further by dealing with the transmission of post-traumatic symptoms of women’s trauma to the second generation.

 

 

New Article: Steir-Livny, Holocaust Humor, Satire, and Parody on Israeli Television

Steir-Livny, Liat. “Holocaust Humor, Satire, and Parody on Israeli Television.” Jewish Film & New Media 3.2 (2015): 193-219.

 

URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jewish_film_new_media_an_international_journal/v003/3.2.steir-livny.html

 

Abstract
The politicization of the Holocaust has been reflected in Israeli culture from the late 1940s in cinema, literature, theater, and poetry; in the last several decades, it has also been depicted on Israeli television. Most of the representations of the Holocaust in the first decades of Israel’s existence were dramatic. But from the 1990s onward, Israelis also began to address the subject through satire. The case studies in this article focus on the satirical skits performed on episodes of The Chamber Quintet (Hahamishia Hakamerit; Matar Productions, Channel 2-Tela’ad, Channel 1, 1993–1997) and Wonderful Country (Eretz Nehederet; Keshet Productions, Channel 2-Keshet, 2003–2014). Diverging from arguments that these humorous skits addressing the Holocaust disrespect the Holocaust and its survivors, this article maintains that they instead articulate the powerful position the Holocaust holds as a constituting event in the consciousness and identity of younger generations in Israel.

 

 

New Article: Kokin, The Theological Sub-Text of Walk on Water

Kokin, Daniel Stein. “Between Eyal and Axel, Yahweh and Christ: The Theological Sub-Text of Walk on Water (2004).” Prooftexts 33.3 (2013): 365-280.

 

URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/prooftexts/v033/33.3.kokin.html

 

Abstract

The stereotypical character of Walk on Water (Israel, 2004) has represented a severe obstacle for many viewers, who have been quick to denounce it as both trite and superficial. This article argues instead that the film’s clearly intentional and self-conscious recycling of numerous clichés concerning Germans and Israelis alike points to its deeper meaning and purpose. In particular, it shows that these clichés constitute the essential infrastructure with which the film engages and attempts to resolve the problematic German–Israeli, and by extension Christian–Jewish, relationship in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It further suggests that the film offers its own “final solution” to this vexed relationship—a “messianic” deliverance from the respective traumas of each party—in the form of an allegorical synthesis of Jewish and Christian theology, directly reflected in the contrasts and evolving relationship between its two primary characters. Itself highly stereotypical, the theology upon which the film draws facilitates its critique of German and especially Israeli attitudes toward power and violence.

New Article: Zandberg, Humor and the Collective Memory of Traumatic Events

Zandberg, Eyal. “Ketchup Is the Auschwitz of Tomatoes”: Humor and the Collective Memory of Traumatic Events.” Communication, Culture & Critique 8.1 (2015): 108-23.

 

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cccr.12072/abstract

 

Abstract

This study explores the interrelations between humorous texts and the memory of traumatic events through an analysis of skits aired on Israeli television that are related to Holocaust memory. The study presents a typology of these skits indicating an evolutionary development: from the use of humor to criticize Holocaust remembrance to the use of Holocaust memory to create humorous effects. Contextualizing these findings in the fields of media memory and trauma theory, the study argues that this evolutionary development challenges the hegemonic commemorative discourse of the Holocaust: while commemorative discourse plays a distinctive role in performing cultural trauma, the media’s humorous discourse conveys a sacrilegious viewpoint and thus can play a vital role in recuperating from it.

New Book: Morag, Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema

Morag, Raya. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. London: Tauris, 2013.

 

Waltzing with Bashir proposes a new paradigm for cinema trauma studies – the trauma of the perpetrator. Recognizing a current shift in interest from the trauma suffered by victims to that suffered by perpetrators, the book seeks to theorize this still under-studied field thus breaking the repression of this concept and phenomenon in psychoanalysis and in cinema literature. Taking as a point of departure the distinction between testimony given by the victim and confession made by the perpetrator, this pioneering work ventures to define and analyze perpetrator trauma in scholarly, representational, literary, and societal contexts. In contrast to the twentieth-century definition of the perpetrator based on modern wars and totalitarian regimes,Morag defines the perpetrator in the context of the twenty-first century’s new wars and democratic regimes. The direct result of a drastic transformation in the very nature of war, made manifest by the lethal clash between soldier and civilian in a battlefield newly defined in bodily terms, the new trauma paradigm stages the trauma of the soldier turned perpetrator, thus offering a novel perspective on issues of responsibility and guilt.

Such theoretical insights demonstrate that the epistemology of the post-witness era requires breaking deep-seated psychological and psychiatric, as well as cultural and political, repression. Driven by the emergence of a new wave of Israeli documentary cinema, Waltzing with Bashir analyzes the Israeli film and literature produced in the aftermath of the second Intifada. As Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and other new wave films demonstrate, Israeli cinema, attached on one side to the legacy of the Holocaust and on the other to the Israeli Occupation, is a highly relevant case for probing the limits of both victim and perpetrator traumas, and for revisiting and recontextualizing the crucial moment in which the victim/perpetrator cultural symbiosis is dismantled.

Raya Morag is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Table of Contents

Introduction
From Victim to Perpetrator Trauma

Part I: Victim Trauma
1. The Body as the Battlefield
2. Chronic Victim Trauma and Terror
3. Queerness, Ethnicity, and Terror

Part II: Perpetrator Trauma
4. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Male Perpetrator
5. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Female Perpetrator
6. The New Wave of Documentary Literature

Conclusion
The Perpetrator Complex