From Exclusion to Inclusion: Jewish WWII Soldiers in the Israeli National Narrative

This study focuses on the case of 1.5 million Jewish soldiers who fought in the Allied Armies in WWII and explores its place in Israeli social memory. For decades the story of military combat and sacrifice of WWII Jewish soldiers was marginalized in the Israeli mnemonic narrative. Over the years, different groups of ex-servicemen living in Israel kept alive the memory of their involvement in the combat and contested its silencing and marginalization. Weaving the texture of those events from the dual strands of forgetting and remembering, I elucidate on the process by which the national historical narrative was formed, revealing the dynamics of Israeli nationalism and showing how symbolic boundaries of national belonging were reshaped over time.