Israel's Moment

Israel's Moment is a major new account of how a Jewish state came to be forged in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Drawing on new research in government, public and private archives, Jeffrey Herf exposes the political realities that underpinned support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine. In an unprecedented international account, he explores the role of the United States, the Arab States, the Palestine Arabs, the Zionists, and key European governments from Britain and France to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland. His findings reveal a spectrum of support and opposition that stood in sharp contrast to the political coordinates that emerged during the Cold War, shedding new light on how and why the state of Israel was established in 1948 and challenging conventional associations of left and right, imperialism and anti-imperialism, and racism and anti-racism.

Independent Film for Solidarity of Traumas in the Cinema of Turkey

Michael Rothberg introduced the concept of multidirectional memory in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009). Later, many other scholars used his idea to analyze works of art, including films. Although multidirectional memory generally focuses on the possibility of establishing solidarity between memories/traumas that are geographically or culturally distant from each other, in this article it will be argued that this concept is also crucial within coexisting multicultural and multitraumatic societies. The concept of multidirectional memory, and subsequently concepts such as travelling memory and postmemory, will be examined through the analysis of an independent production from Turkey, Özcan Alper’s film Future Lasts Forever (Gelecek Uzun Sürer, 2011). With the help of critical film analysis, the multidirectional memory of Turkey’s traumatic past will be discussed as an opportunity to practice solidarity.

The Ethics of Elie Wiesel`s Storytelling as a New Theoretical Approach in Representing the Holocaust

Grounded on Giorgio Agamben's assertion that once the historical, technical and legal context of the Jewish genocide has been sufficiently clarified, we are facing a serious challenge when we really seek to understand it and becomes more thought-provoking when we try to represent it. The difference between what we know about the Holocaust and how this delicate issue should be represented is facing major challenges in the context of content abundance onboth Holocaust classical analyses or contemporary digital formats. Contemporary society is facing ethical and emotional limitation regarding Holocaust representation. What is the right way to represent the Holocaust after eight decades since the Holocaust took place is one of the relevant questions that arises in this context? How to live, what to do, and how do the consequences of my actions affect society after the Holocaust experience,are some of the questsof Elie Wiesel’s life.The paper will highlight how his storytelling provides some guidelines for shaping a possible good way of representing the Holocaust and what are its resources. It will also illustrate what are the ethical components of his storytellingthat constitute an example of ethical conduct and give some relevant suggestions on how to instrument them in order to place Holocaust representation on a progressive way of reflection.

The coloniality of Holocaust memorialization in post-apartheid South Africa

This article investigates local endeavours for Holocaust memory in post-apartheid South Africa in their relation to global memory imperatives that are, among others, produced by supranational organizations such as UNESCO and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Drawing on a larger case-study on globalized memory, I analyse to what extent a generalized mnemonic framework is reflected in South Africa's 2007 curriculum reform, namely its inclusion of the Holocaust and subsequent memory politics. In order to illuminate the coloniality of memorialization, I trace the epistemic location of the narrative that suggests that Holocaust memory nourishes democratic values and human rights—maybe even more so than local memories of violence and oppression such as colonization and apartheid. In this regard, I found that while many activists for Holocaust memory continuously and sometimes uncritically advocate for its global implementation, a decolonial perspective enables us to understand the power dynamics constitutive of universal moral norms around Holocaust memory that tacitly transmit global demands to local contexts. I therefore suggest that, within the global colonial matrix of power, a universally advised practice of memorializing the Holocaust to specific ends can be regarded as a technique of governmentality, because it risks limiting utopian thought beyond the Euro-modern paradigm.

Jewish Brazilian Post-Holocaust Fiction: The Body as a Source of Polymorphous Memory Discourse in Cíntia Moscovich’s Por que sou gorda, mamãe?

In this article, I propose a reading of the Brazilian novel Por que sou gorda, mamãe? (2006) through the prism of the body as an oblique signifier of polymorphous post-Holocaust memory discourse. I will be employing the idea of the “strange body” in the following, that is, an experience of estrangement that can arise from trauma-induced conflict or fracture and “is capable of testifying to complexes of social operations and realities well beyond not only a given subject, but also a given generation” (Atkinson 2017, 34). In Cíntia Mos­covich’s novel, this strange-bodiness is articulated through the uncanny presence of an obese Jewish female body; a body which bears witness to a subversive force of trauma and denounces the fascist ideology within the continuities of subtly intertwined European and Brazilian histories. European Jewish life in shtetlech, pogroms, exile, and the Holocaust merge not only with the Brazilian context of Jewish immigration, but also with the history of Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985).