Five Questions Stemming from Yellow Star, Red Star

Jelena Subotić presents a meticulously argued book that manages to stand at the intersection of multiple fields—Jewish studies, European history, Holocaust studies, and international relations among them. International relations scholars will welcome an extension of the "ontological security" tradition. Holocaust and memory studies readers will benefit from the country cases Subotić investigates. And Europeanists will be interested by the relationship between regional integration imperatives and domestic policy. In this short essay, I raise five questions that emerged for me after reading (and rereading) Yellow Star, Red Star. These questions address how to understand political memory, how to capture varying responses to ontological insecurity, how to define antisemitism, the potential role of autoethnography in studies like these, and what lessons should be drawn from the Holocaust.

MEMORY: PHENOMENON OR INSTRUMENT?

There's an inherent, though also productive, tension in memory studies. By definition, memory—whether individual or collective—is a phenomenological, experiential concept. We seem to remember what we remember no matter how others may seek to shape our memories. Of course, this becomes much trickier when the initial recipients of the experience have died. (Subotić cites Michael Rothberg's work on "postmemory" to capture this intergenerational dynamic, and there is also a burgeoning literature on epigenetics—beyond the scope of Subotić's study, but worth mentioning here as an example of how trauma is inherited at the physiological level.) But is there a role for state power—and other leaders—to actually shape our memories?

As political scientists and international relations scholars seek to deepen our understanding of political memory in various cases and contexts, we are understandably interested in how memory is deployed and instrumentalized for political ends. These ends may include dynamics like leadership consolidation, state-building, nation-building, and so on. It is natural, on one hand, to study the two aspects—phenomenon and policy—together: policy tools such as school curricula, memorial holidays, national ceremonies, and the erecting of monuments can end up shaping what may be perceived as experiential memory, particularly in subsequent generations. On the other hand, these aspects are distinct: these policy instruments will likely differ depending on whether actual survivors (and their families) of the commemorated event are involved in the process, or whether they have emigrated altogether (assuming there were many survivors to start with). I'd like to see more sustained discussion about the interplay between the two. The emotions-based turn—and especially the embodied aspects of emotion as studied through affect—may help bridge this gap.

VARYING RESPONSES TO ONTOLOGICAL INSECURITY

Subotić tells a story of a particular response to ontological insecurity in the cases examined, namely the partial erasure of Jewish suffering and its having been subsumed under the crimes of communism more generally. But in my own research on a different case—Israeli orientation toward the Palestinians following the events of the 1980s, I found what we could think of as a reverse set of actions from those described by Subotić flowing from a similar trigger. Threats to Israel's ontological insecurity—or challenges to its "role identity," the term I used—caused Israel to do something radical, I argued, to realign its actions with its identity. Namely, after the role-challenging events of the 1980s, specifically the 1982 Israel-Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) War in Lebanon and the First Intifada beginning in 1987, Israel had been experiencing a form of ontological insecurity. The response, I argued, was the extension of an olive branch to the PLO.¹

Given the disparate types of actions (one pro-social; the other possibly not) caused by similar triggers, we could ask under what conditions does this sort of insecurity (or "cognitive dissonance," as I called it, between a state's sense of itself and its actions) lead to policy change versus a doubling down? (I note that erasure of Jewish particularity in Holocaust memory in one case, and Israeli peacemaking in another, are not totally comparable types of policies, but for argument's sake I'm calling one pro-social and the other not.²) I hope this forum might inspire other scholars to...