Liat Steir-Livny, Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third-Generation Survivors in Israel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019. 376 pp.
This chapter assesses Liat Steir-Livny's Remaking Holocaust Memory (2019). This book is the first comprehensive English-language study of the Israeli Third-Generation engagement with the history of the Shoah in documentary films. In analyzing “how Third-Generation documentaries provide new ideas and concepts to commemorate and preserve the memory for future generations,” Steir-Livny contrasts Third-Generation documentary films with the works of second-generation directors and explores an extensive number of films in five key areas. These key areas include the role of gender; the changing attitudes toward Germany; the use and exploration of historical film footage in Third-Generation documentary films; the function of testimonies that feature in Third-Generation documentaries “in more complex ways”; and the representation of perpetrators and bystanders in Third-Generation films. Throughout her study, Steir-Livny discusses the documentaries against the background of documentary film theories, on the one hand, and Israeli/Zionist Holocaust memory, on the other.