Vered vinitzky-seroussi

• Hebrew University of Jerusalem

While the literature on collective memory suggests that a multivocal type of commemoration will be constructed in response to a difficult past, Yitzhak Rabin's commemorations provide a case study of a different type of commemoration of challenging events: a fragmented commemoration. A fragmented commemoration consists of multiple times and spaces i...

In light of the incessant passage of ideas, images, cultural products, and people across cultures and borders, this research—located in the third wave of memory studies—examines how foreign events are imported and incorporated in national political rhetoric. Examining speeches made by American presidents (1945–2020), this analysis shows that the pr...

While the literature suggests that the Spanish Flu—despite the devastation it caused—suffers from social amnesia, this article begs to differ. Building on the multiplicity of manners in which the past maintains itself in the present and specifically focusing on Erll’s distinction between remembrance and knowledge as two poles of collective memory,...

This book explores cognitive sociology as an area of inquiry focused on culture, cognition, and the social dimensions of human thought. Highlighting differing traditions, from cultural sociological perspectives focused on emphasizing group differences in categorical knowledge to neuropsychology-influenced integrative perspectives analyzing the mech...

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...

In light of a long chain of horrific tragedies and catastrophes made by both nature and man, the current focus of memory studies on difficult pasts and shameful moments, and the expectation of political leaders to provide comfort and inspiration to their public, this article asks, ‘Is commemoration with joy possible?’ Based on an analysis of 860 Am...

In light of a long chain of horrific tragedies and catastrophes made by both nature and man, the current focus of memory studies on difficult pasts and shameful moments, and the expectation of political leaders to provide comfort and inspiration to their public, this article asks, 'Is commemoration with joy possible?' Based on an analysis of 860 Am...

Toward the end of the classic (1942) movie Casablanca, Captain Louis Renault instructs his men to ‘round up the usual suspects’ after a Nazi general is discovered dead under dubious circumstances. In this essay I would like to round up the ‘unusual’ suspects in the question of collective memory. For a great many theoretical and methodological reaso...

Collective memory quite naturally brings to mind notions of mnemonic speech and representation. In this article, however, we propose that collective silences be thought of as a rich and promising arena through which to understand how groups deal with their collective pasts. In so doing, we explore two types of silence: overt silence and covert sile...

Examines how Israeli society has commemorated Yitzhak Rabin. How does a society cope with the challenge of acknowledging and commemorating difficult aspects of its past? In Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi develops a timely sociology of commemoration, drawing on the public memory of Israel's P...

WHILE TEL AVIV commemorated Yitzhak Rabin and his assassination on the night of November 4th, 1995, Jerusalem virtually ignored both. By appropriating Rabin, Tel Aviv may have gained a measure of legitimacy as the real capital of Israel, while Jerusalem through neglect, relinquished its symbolic role as one. Through their distinct practices of comm...

Memory and Methodology. Susannah Radstone. ed. Oxford: Berg, 2000. vii. 228 pp., index.

According to the literature, commemorations of difficult pasts can be categorized into two main types, fragmented and multivocal—both of which serve to express, if not to enhance, social conflicts. Our analysis of the first apartheid museum in South Africa, however, points to a commemorative type that aims at agreement, not through disagreement and...

We asked in an open-ended way in 1999–2000 what national and world events Israeli Jews consider most important from the past 60 years. Ten events were identified as foremost, including three from the time of independence and one that was quite recent. All the major memories are associated with efforts of the state through commemorations and in othe...

While the literature on collective memory suggests that a multivocal type of commemoration will be constructed in response to a difficult past, Yitzhak Rabin's commemorations provide a case study of a different type of commemoration of challenging events: a fragmented commemoration. A fragmented commemoration consists of multiple times and spaces i...

Based on an analysis of ceremonies in thirty Israeli schools, this article focuses on the way in which the Israeli educational system grappled with the problematic narrative of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, a narrative that challenged the system's basic assumptions about commemorative logic. The challenge was met by playing with the narrative's mu...

Menacing, nerve-racking, uncomfortably intrusive, the high school reunion has become a dreaded encounter with the past and present for many Americans. It is a moment of both heightened self-awareness and public presentation, insisting that people account for themselves, not merely to their own satisfaction, but to the satisfaction of others as well...

This paper discusses death that occurs within organizations through an analysis of how deaths of soldiers are handled by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). While such deaths challenge the military's organizational order and legitimacy, the IDF handles them through the institution of a “moving bureaucracy”: a combination of fixed administrative proced...

Autobiographical occasions are perceived as an apportunity to constitute an identity, to lay claim to one's own life, to the right to tell one's own story. Using high school class reunions as a case study, I argue that those social moments that require accounts of one's life also generate a major threat to the identities constructed, by constitutin...

Menacing, nerve-racking, uncomfortably intrusive, the high school reunion has become a dreaded encounter with past and present for many Americans. It is a moment of both heightened self-awareness and public presentation, insisting that we account for ourselves, not merely to our own satisfaction, but to the satisfaction of others as well. For socio...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1992. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 406-418).