Perceptions of holocaust memory: a comparative study of public reactions to art about the holocaust at the Jewish Museum in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (1990s-2000s)

Abstract

This thesis investigates the changes in the Israeli and Jewish-American public perception of Holocaust memory in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and offers an elaborate comparative analysis of public reactions to art about the Holocaust. Created by the inheritors of Holocaust memory, second and third-generation Jews in Israel and America, the artworks titled Your Colouring Book (1997) and Live and Die as Eva Braun (1998), and the group exhibition Mirroring Evil. Nazi Imagery/Recent Art (2002) were hosted at art institutions emblematic of Jewish culture, namely the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Jewish Museum in New York.

Unlike artistic representation by first generation, which tends to adopt an empathetic approach by scrutinizing experiences of Jewish victimhood, these artworks foreground images of the Nazi perpetrators, and thus represent a distancing and defamiliarizing approach which triggered intense media discussions in each case. The public debates triggered by these exhibitions shall constitute the domain for analyzing the emergent counter-positions on Holocaust memory of post-war generations of Jews and for delineating their ideological views and divergent identity stances vis-à-vis Holocaust memory.

This thesis proposes a critical discourse analysis of public debates carried out by leading Jewish intellectuals, politicians and public figures in Israel and in America. It suggests that younger generations developed a global discourse which challenges a dominant meta-narrative of Jewish identity that holds victimization and a sacred dimension of the Holocaust as its fundamental tenets.

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