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This chapter begins by presenting a comic strip,Non Sequitor, by Wiley. This strip of popular culture indicates that the universalization of the Holocaust is alive and well, even as the collective consciousness continually addresses fears of forgetting. Then, it provides a historical context for “The Social Construction of Moral Universals”. It examines how the movement, from a progressive tragic trauma narration created moral particularism alongside universalism, and fueled social splitting and antagonism at the same time as cooperation and expanded solidarity. This chapter also looks at Israeli Jews.

This book starts by presenting the deconstruction of the myths presented which enabled the denial of the destruction of Palestine. Questions of guilt, responsibility and accountability are regularly debated in Israel in relation to Nazi culpability. It also reviews the layers of denial the story of the Nakba encountered. It investigates Nakba co-memory practices from an anti-Zionist rather than Zionist standpoint. Jeffrey Olick explores the moral agonies of German defeat, the most consequential for Germans. There is a link between denial and ‘working through’ in the exploration of the co-memorative work by Israeli Jews. Moreover, this book interrogates the potentialities of internal emigration, questioning whether such co-memoration ultimately appropriates the Palestinian memorising voice. It then presents an Israeli-Jewish story about Palestine.

This chapter reviews the memory and melancholia nexus through several prisms. It starts by asking whether Israeli-Jewish Nakba co-memoration ultimately serves to construct activists' Jewish identity with melancholia being not for the land or the lost Palestinians, but rather for an uncomplicated and idyllic lost Jewish Israeli identity. It then revisits Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance and counterposing co-memorative practices. It asks whether Israeli Jews engaged in the co-memory work what David Goldberg calls ‘racial melancholia’. National identity serves as an instrument of separating ‘us’ from ‘them’, as national identity, differently from all other identities, and demands exclusive allegiance and fidelity. The necessary conclusion of co-memorating the Nakba must be recognising the Palestinian right of return. Most Jewish immigrants to Palestine and then to Israel did harbour a vision of a new, free, Jewish life.

This chapter links the theoretical foundations and politics of social memory in relation to the building blocks of the current ‘memory turn’ in the social sciences to social memory in the Israeli context. It also places memory as social, constructed and mediated and it is divided into three main themes, theorising memory in spatial, temporal and social terms. It then pursues a temporal line of inquiry, beginning from Marianne Hirsch's notion of ‘postmemory’. It reiterates memory as a social process. Collective memory is often equated with official memory, popular memory and cultural memory. Claiming the authenticity of collective memories is very evident in Pierre Nora. The Nakba embodies an unbridgeable gap between two qualitatively different periods, pre- and post-Nakba, making generational time a third key element of memory time for Palestinians. It is suggested that it is more apt to think of Nakba commemoration by Israeli Jews as co-memory.

This introductory chapter illustrates how the Hummus Wars were motivated by the strained relations between Israeli Jews, Palestinians, and Middle Eastern Arabs. The Hummus Wars are a great example of the kind of internal debates that pervade the culinary sphere, where members of a given social group negotiate different aspects of their identity—such as ethnicity, religion, gender, and class—among themselves over the dining table. The chapter shows the process of culinary globalization and attempts at transcending the local that were evident at Abu Gosh. It also presents some of the seminal definitions of power by social scientists and then applies them to the culinary sphere.

This chapter explores the strained relations between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians living in the territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war, based on a study conducted in an Israeli military prison for Palestinian detainees. The reserve soldiers charged with guarding the prison insisted that their poor military performance and their sense of weakness within the prison power structure were due to a lack of meat. A discourse of victimization evolved among the soldiers in which their apparent weakness—which they claimed to be a result of their meatless diet—became the justification for institutional and personal abuse inflicted on the Palestinian prisoners. The chapter also shows the intimate realties of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and exposes some of the implicit mechanisms that maintain a sense of victimization among Israeli Jews.

This chapter describes the psychic reproduction of Nakba comemory by Israeli Jews. It discusses Sigmund Freud's ‘Mourning and melancholia’. It reports Haim Bresheeth's rereading of Freud. It then develops Bresheeth's line of inquiry about Palestinian film-making about the Nakba. The preoccupation of some Israelis with Palestine and the Nakba may provide a creative way of assuaging the melancholia engendered by the destruction of Palestine. Haim Guri's work depicts the illusory paradox of the simultaneous Israeli Jewish melancholic yearning for the loss of Palestine and the delusion that conquest means co-existence. It is suggested that the shadow of the Palestinians' pre-1948 existence and of their dispossession impinges in ways which cannot always be accounted for rationally, resulting in grief which is not necessarily given to a successful resolution of mourning work, resulting rather in ongoing melancholia which pushes some of ‘us’ into the arms of a like-minded political (or comemorative) community.

This chapter describes how the teachers in the bilingual Jewish-Palestinian schools view the education with which they are involved. Through data representing multiple perspectives from years of observations and interviews, the experiences and attitudes of Palestinian and Jewish teachers are presented together with analyses of how these elements affect their classroom practices in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinian-Arab teachers, for example, saw Hebrew-Arabic bilingualism as a key element to reconciliation, whereas Jewish teachers believed that learning Arabic was not a central issue for participating Jewish families. The analysis also revealed that teachers are caught between contradictory expectations expressed by the initiative’s shareholders and by their own personal perspectives. The teachers, unlike their many critics, were aware of the contextual constraints posed by the parents’ expectations, the strictures of the Israeli Ministry of Education, and their own socialization.

This chapter argues that we must not allow fears of the Protocols in the 21st century to blind us to the differences between the text's role in our day and its role a century ago on the one hand, and not allow our fears of anti-Semitism to silence responsible self-criticism, in particular that of Jews criticizing aspects of Israeli policy, on the other. A rigorous critique of Israel is thus not only legitimate, but necessary. The very creation of Israel has fundamentally changed the situation, as Jews are no longer in the ghetto or an oppressed minority, therefore one cannot compare the real victims of Protocols-inspired genocidal paranoia to Israeli Jews, who can now defend themselves.

This chapter explores how cultural differences influence the use of communication technology. It also discusses how adolescent Israeli Jews and Arabs who belong to different cultures entirely were studied regarding their use of communication technologies to see the role culture plays in technology use. The chapter presents the difference between the incorporation of communication technology of adolescent Israeli Jews and Arabs, wherein it is shown that the culture of Israeli Jews appears more liberal and individually oriented toward adopting communication technology. It explores how language is also seen as a possible barrier to adopting communication technology such as the Internet for the Arabs, who unlike Israeli Jews, do not seem to have a good command over English language as they study Arabic at high school.

This chapter studies Omri Asscher's Reading America, Reading Israel: The Politics of Translation between Jews (2020). This book employs translation to think about how two groups — American and Israeli Jews — understand and relate to one another. It stresses how adoption of different everyday languages and residence in distinct territories produced two collectives possessing divergent modern Jewish identities: when Jewish people and institutions came to mediate, manage, and regulate the social meanings of translated texts in the United States and Israel, they employed translations to define their center in contradistinction to its perceived antipode. Asscher also convincingly demonstrates how Israeli critics of the 1950s through the 1980s took pride in the literary successes of American Jewish writers, while dismissing the contents of their writing on ideological grounds. In contrast with his points about American Jewish translations of Israeli literature and Israeli translations of American Jewish literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, Asscher's broader claim about translation lacks effective substantiation.