National Days,National Identity,and Collective Memory: Exploring the Impact of Holocaust Day in Israel

This study uses the case of Holocaust Day in Israel to examine the premise that national days impact national identity and collective memory. Specifically, the study examines whether a very unique type of national day—Holocaust Day—impacts national identification, nationalism, and collective memory in the form of Israeli Jews' perceptions of the “lessons” of the Holocaust. This study uses panel survey design data on national identity and perceptions of the Holocaust's lessons from the same sample of Israeli Jews (N = 665) collected two months prior to Holocaust Day and again during and after Holocaust Day. During and after Holocaust Day, respondents expressed increased levels of nationalism and more perceptions of both particularistic and universalistic Holocaust lessons. Participation in Holocaust Day practices had a stronger relationship with nationalism and national identification during Holocaust Day than before but a weaker relationship with the perception of a universalistic lesson during Holocaust Day. These findings indicate that Holocaust Day impacts national identity and collective memory and highlights the multifaceted nature of the relationships between national identity, collective memory, and national days. The theoretical implication of the findings as well as the case comparability are discussed in light of the findings.     

Emotional impact feedback affects how people remember an analogue trauma event

Do external motivational processes—in the form of social influences—shape people's memories for trauma? In this experiment, we examined the effects of social influence on memory and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomology for an analogue traumatic event. Seventy-two participants watched a distressing film; some received feedback about others' reactions to the film that either emphasised or downplayed the distressing nature of the film; control participants received no feedback. A week later, participants reported their symptoms, rated their memory on a number of characteristics and we tested their memory for the film's content. Participants who received feedback downplaying the film reported fewer PTSD-related analogue symptoms and weaker memory characteristics than their counterparts. The results suggest that people's memory phenomenology and analogue symptoms are influenced by others' feedback, but only when others' reactions downplayed the distressing nature of the film.     

Visualized Collective Memories: Social Representations of History in Images Found in Finnish History Textbooks

This study focuses on visual collective memory, a topic that has long been neglected in the social sciences and particularly in social psychological research on social representations of history. It explores the contents and meanings of images in the construction of Finnish national history. Through examination of official history writing, a better understanding is sought of how collective memory is constructed as part of history politics. The data for the present study consist of images (N = 541) included in recent textbooks on Finnish history. Barthes' three‐meaning approach is used in combination with qualitative content analysis to examine a large corpus of images. The visualized collective memory is approached from five perspectives: (i) the years of memory; (ii) the places of memory; (iii) the themes of memory; (iv) the main actors and (v) the silence of memory. The investigation shows that, in official discourse, politics, culture and war are the main contents of Finnish visual collective memory. The key actors in the narrative are politicians, especially the eighth president of Finland, Urho Kekkonen. The most important moments in time are situated in the war years 1918 and 1939, while the geographical focus is the central square in the capital, Helsinki. The result is a national history that is positive, homogeneous and exclusive. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Investigating the variability of memory distortion for an analogue trauma

In this paper, we examine whether source monitoring (SM) errors might be one mechanism that accounts for traumatic memory distortion. Participants watched a traumatic film with some critical (crux) and non-critical (non-crux) scenes removed. Twenty-four hours later, they completed a memory test. To increase the likelihood participants would notice the film's gaps, we inserted visual static for the length of each missing scene. We then added manipulations designed to affect people's SM behaviour. To encourage systematic SM, before watching the film, we warned half the participants that we had removed some scenes. To encourage heuristic SM some participants also saw labels describing the missing scenes. Adding static highlighting, the missing scenes did not affect false recognition of those missing scenes. However, a warning decreased, while labels increased, participants' false recognition rates. We conclude that manipulations designed to affect SM behaviour also affect the degree of memory distortion in our paradigm.     

Why drive? Psychoanalytic reflections on the film Never let me go

The author presents a psychoanalytic interpretation of Mark Romanek's film Never Let Me Go, which concerns a society in which young adult clones have their internal organs ‘harvested’ for transplantation. Following some general remarks on the method of psychoanalytic film interpretation, strongly emphasising the aesthetics of form and artistic elements specific to film, the author develops the notion that through its cinematic perspectives and shots, Never Let Me Go dramatizes a specific relationship between the sublime and solitude. The film therefore deals with a particular intrinsic difference between expanse and constraint, as well as the limited and the eternal. This leads the viewer to participate directly in a film‐specific way in the inner conflicts at work both in the film's theme and in its protagonists. In terms of aesthetic content, these conflicts are revealed as those of an inescapable thanatological theme that is essentially intertwined with an erotic one. The film shows how love, sexuality, and internal and external images arise from thanatological forces, and it simultaneously provides a way of sublating them (Hegel's Aufhebung) – that is, the film itself represents a benign drive fusion. The film's protagonists, however, struggle with a lack of early parenting and thus with the helplessness of facing individual drive development and the longing for a holding object. Hence, in formal terms, the film deals with the sublime, and, as I will show, it also deals with sublimation at the level of its content.     

Misleading postevent information and working memory capacity: an individual differences approach to eyewitness memory

The present study examines how individual differences in working memory capacity relate to the effect of misleading postevent information on memory for the original event. Participants were shown a film of a crime event and were then asked to unscramble a narrative that included misinformation regarding some of the film's details. Additionally, the working memory capacity of the participants was measured using the operation‐word span task. Finally, in a free recall test, participants recalled fewer correct details in the misinformation condition compared to the control condition. This effect was negatively correlated with working memory capacity. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Positive weighing of the other's collective narrative among Jewish and Bedouin‐Palestinian teachers in Israel and its correlates

Teachers play a pivotal role in the educational discourse around collective narratives, and especially the other's narrative. The study assumed that members of groups entangled in a conflict approach the different modules of the other's narrative distinctively. Jewish and Palestinian teachers, Israeli citizens, answered questionnaires dealing with the narrative of the other, readiness for interethnic contact, negative between‐group emotions and preferences for resolutions of the Israeli–Palestinian (I–P) conflict. Positive weighing of the other's narrative among Jewish teachers correlated with high levels of readiness for interethnic contact and low levels of negative between‐group emotions, across the various modules of the Palestinian narrative. Preferences for a peaceful resolution of the I–P conflict and rejection of a violent one were noted in two of the modules. Among Palestinian teachers, positive weighing of the other's collective narrative was exclusively noted for the Israeli narrative of the Holocaust, and this stance negatively related to negative between‐group emotions and preference for a violent solution of the I–P conflict, and positively related to readiness for interethnic contact and preference of a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Practical implications of these findings for peace education are discussed.     

Trauma memories on trial: is cross-examination a safeguard against distorted analogue traumatic memories?

Trauma memories can feel more disorganised than more mundane memories. That may be problematic in legal contexts. Here we examined: (a) whether that disorganised feeling makes people more susceptible to suggestive questioning during direct examination; and (b) whether cross-examination is the safeguard it is purported to be: that is, we examined whether cross-examination can uncover and correct distorted trauma memories. We showed participants a film depicting a graphic car accident. For some participants, the film unfolded in a temporally disorganised way. We then interviewed participants immediately after the film regarding what they had seen: this ‘direct examination’ included free recall, cued recall and yes/no questions, some of which were misleading. Then, 48 hours later, a second interviewer cross-examined participants. Contrary to our predictions, neither manipulation of the film's temporal organisation, nor participants’ self-reported feelings of event disorganisation significantly affected their accuracy of the film during direct or cross-examination nor their recognition memory of the film. Instead, we found that regardless of whether participants’ memories were distorted by the direct examination, the suggestive nature of the cross-examination introduced sufficient doubt that participants were willing to change their answers. We conclude that traumatic memories are vulnerable to suggestive questioning and, unfortunately, cross-examination is not the legal system's fail-safe corrective influence.     

Perception of the Minority's Collective Identity and Voting Behavior: The Case of the Palestinians in Israel

Abstract

The author investigated how Palestinian (n = 130) and Jewish (n = 153) Israeli university students perceived the collective identity of the Palestinian minority in Israel. The Palestinian and Jewish respondents perceived the “identity space” of the minority as linear, or bipolar, with 1 pole defined by the national (Palestinian) identity and the other defined by the civic (Israeli) label. The Palestinian respondents defined their collective identity in national (Palestinian, Arab) and integrative (Israeli-Palestinian) terms; the Jewish respondents perceived the minority's identity as integrative (Israeli-Palestinian). Different political outlooks among Palestinian respondents were related to their identification with the civic (Israeli) identity but not to their identification with the national (Palestinian) identity. In contrast, different political outlooks among Jewish respondents were related to their inclusion, or exclusion, of the national (Palestinian) component in their definition of the minority's identity. Implications of the results are discussed in terms of a minority acculturation model (J. Berry, J. Trimble, & E. Olmedo, 1986).     

The Head,the Heart,and Hysteria in Jeanne Flore's <Emphasis Type="Italic">Tales and Trials of Love</Emphasis> (c. 1542)

This essay examines a challenge to common literary representations of female mental illness in the Early Modern period—the hysterical woman—in a collection of French short stories contemporary to Vesalius's De Fabrica: Jeanne Flore's Tales and Trials of Love (1542). Jeanne Flore's tales depict several mentally disturbed female protagonists, young women prone to paroxysms of madness and self-mutilation. This study maintains that while Tales and Trials of Love superficially participates in the literary tradition that grew out of those accepted social and medical beliefs, it also questions the long-accepted paradigm of female hysteria and points to a shift in the socio-medical climate. Jeanne Flore's fictional narratives suggest that mental illness no longer consists in the realignment of a uterine imbalance, but rather in the telling of personal stories, a precursor to psychoanalysis and narrative medicine.     

When Love and Violence Meet: Women's Agency and Transformative Politics in Rubaiyat Hossain's Meherjaan

In official and unofficial histories, and in cultural memorializations of the 1971 war for Bangladeshi independence, the treatment of women's experiences—more specifically the unresolved question of acknowledgment of and accountability to birangonas, “war heroines” (or rape survivors)—has met with stunning silence or erasure, on the one hand, or with narratives of abject victimhood, on the other. By contrast, the film Meherjaan (2011) revolves around the stories of four women during and after the war, and most centrally the relationship between a Bengali woman and a Pakistani soldier. In this article, I investigate the anxieties underlying the responses to Meherjaan, particularly in association with themes of trauma—its absence or omnipresence—to nonnormative gender frames of national sexuality, and the notion of loving the Other. Drawing from feminist theories of vulnerability, ethics, and love, I want to explore these themes at two levels: the political message the film transmits, and its aesthetic choices and affects. Finally, I want to comment on the potential of this film, as feminist art, in furthering a dialogue around healing and ethical memorialization in relation to 1971 in Bangladesh.     

Film violence and the American civil religion: A Girardian analysis of the birth of a nation

In concert with an evolving scholarship rethinking relations between media, religion, and culture, this article revisits one of the key media events of the twentieth century: D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation. It locates Griffith's picture in relation to the problems of American Protestantism during the early part of the last century, and discusses the film as a response to the upheavals of modernisation in the United States. Applying a theoretical perspective based in the ideas of Rene Girard, it examines the way in which the film's appeal to white nationalist sentiment was organised in terms of sacrifice, and argues that Griffith was quite deliberately seeking to transform the religious bases of American national identity.     

Behold … All Things New: Uppsala 1968 and Its Mediatization as Film

The 4th Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1968 occurred during a period of increasing influence of the media in shaping society and culture. The documentary film Behold … All Things New, produced by Radio Sweden for the WCC's 1968 assembly in Uppsala, reflected this development. It was, however, both a promotional tool for the church and a sort of documentary. This article analyzes the film from the context of church media relations, examining the strengthened mediatization of the religious arena in the 20th century and giving close attention to the circumstances of the film's production, its narrative techniques, and visual realization. In this way, the film is made accessible as a historical source for the WCC and thus also for the history of the globalization of churches. The film places into perspective the connection between mediatization and secularization, as it represents the churches' integration into modern media society with all of its visual symbols of globality, ecumenism, and willingness to enter into dialogue.     

Feminist Phenomenology and the Film World of Agnès Varda

Through a discussion of Agnès Varda's career from 1954 to 2008 that focuses particularly on La Pointe Courte (1954), L'Opéra‐Mouffe (1958), The Gleaners and I (2000), and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), this article considers the connections between Varda's filmmaking and her femaleness. It proposes that two aspects of Varda's cinema—her particularly perceptive portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment—make a feminist existential‐phenomenological approach to her films particularly fruitful. Drawing both directly on the work of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and on some recent film‐ and feminist‐theoretical texts that have employed his insights, it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy in The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda's blurring of fiction and documentary, and the dialectical relationship of people with their environment often observed in her cinema. It concludes that both Varda's female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement, and relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which Varda's own subjectivity is registered within her film‐texts.     

INVENTING HOME: (Re)Membering the nation

This paper examines how identity is constructed and given meaning, especially for diasporic subjects. It focuses on a recent documentary film My Mother India by the Sikh-Australian, Safina Uberoi, whose work is a powerful mechanism to interpolate questions that are germane to considerations of identity, trauma and memory that have been characteristic of the Sikh condition. Safina Uberoi's film makes one confront civil violence through a personal narrative, centring on the experiences of an ordinary family. It illustrates what happens when neighbours perpetrate violence on their fellow citizens. Such violence fundamentally alters the way in which communities function. There is little wonder that the trauma which arises from such carnage is hardly talked about. A silence pervades the most horrific instances of violence that have marked Sikh identity in the last century.     

Does post-event cognitive load undermine thought suppression and increase intrusive memories after exposure to an analogue stressor?

Ironic process theory has been used in part to explain the phenomenon of intrusive memories in various disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder. How thought suppression interacts with other cognitive processes believed to be instrumental in the development of traumatic intrusive memory was tested. In an analogue design 120 participants were randomised to five conditions, four of which also required participants to attempt to suppress intrusive memories after viewing a film of traumatic content. Participants in three conditions were also required to perform concurrent tasks that acted as a cognitive load during suppression. Intrusive memories were recorded during the experimental phase and at 1-week follow-up. Contrary to predictions, post-film processing did not undermine suppression success. There was some suggestion that post-film processing resulted in those participants experiencing intrusions of shorter duration than the no-suppression control group in two 5-minute intrusion monitoring intervals at the initial and follow-up phase of the experiment, but this was not reflected in a 1-week diary measure of intrusions. All experimental groups performed in a similar fashion in terms of memory testing of the film's content. The findings are discussed in the context of ironic process theory and cognitive models of post-traumatic stress.     

TO CATCH THE SKY — THE JEWISH IDENTITY OF ISRAELIS

In the winter of 2000, Israel’s Channel 2 television presented the series To Catch the Sky. This series allows us to learn about the changes in the viewers’ — and especially the secular viewers’ — attitudes to the phenomenon of teshuvah. Studying the intentions of the programme’s creators, the narrative format, the mode of character design and, especially, the reception, reveals that To Catch the Sky is not only a family story, but, like many other Israeli dramas, also a dramatic document that faithfully represents the changes that have intensified among secular Israeli Jews in recent years. It is possible that the sadness expressed by many secular Israeli viewers at the separation of the parents at the end of the series is, perhaps unconsciously, an expression of grief over their weakening ties with Judaism.     

Accurate, inaccurate and omitted details in collective emotional memories: The case of Itzhak Rabin's assassination

Collective memory of the assassination of the former Israeli Prime Minister, Itzhak Rabin, was originally examined by asking 61 Israeli students, about two weeks after the assassination (T1) and about 11 months later (T2) to fill out an open-ended questionnaire about the assassination. About 13 years later (T3) a new sample of 80 students also filled out the memory questionnaire. In T2 and T3 the participants also self-assessed various emotional and cognitive variables about their memories. All answers were segmented and categorised into accurate and inaccurate memories. Data analyses showed that the amounts of accurate memories decreased from T1 to T2 by 18 per cent, and from T2 to T3 by an additional 16 per cent, and were positively correlated in T2 with national importance and emotional reaction, and in T3 with self-assessed ability to remember events and amounts of visual representations. Content analysis of the most frequently memorised accurate, inaccurate and omitted memories showed that they displayed differential qualitative characteristics and that the most prevalent accurate narrative has varied over time. It appears that the collective memories of Rabin's assassination showed episodic features similar to those shown by eyewitnesses exposed to emotion-arousing events only once. The data suggest a distinction between episodic "collective memories" and semantic "collective knowledge".     

Is war a good or a bad thing? The attitudes of Croatian,Israeli, and Palestinian children toward war

It has been documented that children's basic attitudes to social issues such as war and peace are formed during the early school‐age period. The aims of the study were threefold: (1) to examine the attitudes of Croatian school‐age children toward war and peace; (2) to explore the relationship between these attitudes and children's gender, age, and amount of experience with war and violence; and (3) to compare the attitudes of Croatian children toward war and peace with the attitudes of Israeli and Palestinian children examined using the same scale 18 years earlier. The sample consisted of 230 children aged 11–14 years who attended school in Zagreb. The results indicate that Croatian children generally have a negative attitude toward war, but strongly support the fight for the freedom of their nation. A relationship was found between the children's gender, age, and war experiences and their attitudes toward war. A comparison between Croatian, Israeli, and Palestinian children showed that nationhood had an influence on attitudes toward war. However, there is greater similarity in the attitudes of today's Croatian and former Israeli children than between today's Croatian and former Palestinian children, and between Israeli and Palestinian children 18 years ago.     

Integration and Rebirth through Confrontation: Fight Club and American Beauty as Contemporary Religious Parables

This article discusses the religious significance of two recent American films which raise pertinent questions about the nature and quality of human existence, its anxieties and aspirations, at the turn of the millennium. Both David Fincher's Fight Club and Sam Mendes's American Beauty wrestle with the efficacy of confrontation as a means of attaining redemption from the disconnectedness and estrangement that characterise the lives of the protagonists in each of these pictures. The import that the trajectories of the characters have for the film audience will also be examined, insofar as the films are accredited by some viewers with helping to facilitate a remedy to the malaise and disaffection in their lives, which the protagonists exemplify.