Irit Dekel

Indiana University Bloomington | IUB · Department of Germanic Studies and Borns Jewish Studies Program

Although the annual report by the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS) stated that 1 per cent of antisemitic incidents in 2021 were characterized as Islamic/Islamist, public accusations of antisemitism are increasingly directed at two groups: (1) designated Others (Muslims and other racialized minor...

This article examines the performance of philosemitism in contemporary Germany through media representations of Jews in 2014–2020. It claims that philosemitism is practiced in Germany as a routine accomplishment of civility. It is performed in three interconnected social domains: institutional, where state institutions declare their commitment to p...

Home museums in Israel and Germany produce a representational space in which the public figure, usually a ‘great man,’ is effectively ‘dragged home’ to the so-called private sphere so as to make the domestic worthy of musealization. Based on three years of ethnographic research in nine such museums (four in Israel and five in Germany), this article...

The circumcision debate in Germany in 2012 is an exemplary case for symbolic struggles over national boundaries. The debate became a site for the negotiation of traditions practiced by religious minorities. We ask, first, how the clinical gaze constitutes Muslim and Jewish others. Second, we investigate how ‘writing around’ the debate’s center, bod...

Tour guides in home museums perform a special mediating role: they connect past and present through stories that mark both proximity and distance from them. This paper is based on ethnographic research in four home museums in Germany, those of Konrad Adenauer, Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, Albert Einstein, and Kaethe Kollwitz. I analyze the per...

The "unknown soldier" symbol in Jewish Israeli commemorative discourse was referred to first by veneration in Avraham Stern's poem "Unknown Soldiers" (1932) and then by negation, such as in the popular Yehuda Amichai poem "We Do Not Have Unknown Soldiers" (1969). It is often cited and read in commemorative ceremonies. In negating this category, I a...

A darkened room, a cane, a hat on a bed: such items, former belongings of famous individuals, are presented in home museums in Israel and Germany. Such scenes are made to appear authentic through the mediation of objects and stories, which render them relatable to visitors but also strange and uncanny. Home museums are sites for the study of the so...

This paper looks at how historical museums in Germany that are not Holocaust or Jewish museums represent Jews. It examines the permanent and temporary exhibitions, as well as their visitors’ experiences, at the two largest national and state-sponsored historical museums: the House of History in Bonn and the German Historical Museum in Berlin. I fir...

Museums are prominent sites of memory in contemporary cultures (Nora, 1989). They make memory sensible, collectible and transferable through the objects, documents and images on display along with the discursive practices attending their exhibition (Katriel, 1997). According to Tony Bennett, museums give rise to particular forms of ‘civic seeing’ i...

Is the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a Jewish space? How are Jews presented there? What are the points of interest about Jews in the memorial from the perspective of the foundation that runs it as well as from various visitors' perspectives? This article focuses on interaction and performance at the memorial, an understudied topic in comparison to w...

Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin offers a novel approach to the memorial and its study through the focus on performances. Based on extensive ethnographic research, and drawing on dramaturgic theory, memory studies and theories of the public sphere, the book offers a fresh theorization of memorial experience by analyzing interaction bet...

The first chapter discussed the pendulum between abstractness and the seemingly new arena of interaction that is informed by the set of rules known from similar non-abstract sites of Holocaust memory, which determine a form of search and improvisation in the Holocaust Memorial and in most cases then deemed as having failed. In other words, the form...

When one comes to or passes by a place of memory, one enters the realm of engaging with public remembrance that is considered ethical, or simply put, good. The role of this place, of visiting and of experiencing it, is usually clear; thus we see in the recent two decades, as Leggewie and Meyer (2005) note, politicians and intellectuals speaking in...

The excitement and immediacy in and around the new Berlin memorial, connecting it to the mythical site of Holocaust memory, was very much part of the urgency of experience, motion and transformation that the memorial’s opening created. By 2010, I no longer encountered such intensity. Instead, the mix of metaphors pertaining to feelings and reflecti...

We have discussed the creation of virtual communicative memory and the transformative discourse which uses trauma discourse and posttrauma tropes in Holocaust memory as symbolic anchors but departs from them. In this chapter, we will discuss mediation in the memorial, or the interplay of material and symbolic practices that constitute its understan...

This chapter begins by defining what it means to experience the memorial, so as to lay bare the emotional and moral expectations the site has for its visitors and visitors have from the site. We will then look at the ways the memorial’s space (§2) and landscape (§3) are employed in its experience, and how, as an invented, new memorial, new practice...

The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is a site experienced by individuals in and outside its confines in time and place. This is true of other memorials whose experience always exceeds their physical boundaries and the temporal confines of the visit. Unlike other such memorials, this one, with its abstract form and location on a large lot in the center...

Observation is one of the core actions at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Observing fellow visitors, photographing and looking at photos at the memorial transcend its actual time and probe its space and the boundaries of discourse about the past. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article focuses on the ways visitors experience the memorial, a...