The Privatization of the Holocaust: Memory, Historiography, and Politics

Politically and culturally the collective memory of the Holocaust plays a key role in constructing Israeli identity. Three main periods can be discerned in Holocaust memory in Israel: divided memory, nationalized memory, and privatized memory. This article discusses the privatization of the Zionist-nationalized memory of the Holocaust in Israel during the 1980s and 1990s as an ideological product of the privatization revolution through which Israel has gone. The article focuses on the role played by Post-Zionism in privatizing Holocaust memory by depicting Zionist ideology and Israeli politics that portrayed the nationalized memory as oppressive. In privatizing Holocaust memory, Post-Zionism reaffirmed its nature as the meta-ideology of the Israeli privatization revolution and dismantling of the welfare state.