Prime Time Commemoration: An Analysis of Television Broadcasts on Israel's Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism

Abstract

This study explores the ways in which commercial media perceive and manifest their public mnemonic role. It does so via an exploration of the “memory menu”—the contents and flow of programming—offered by Channel 2, Israel's leading commercial television channel, on the eve of the country's Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism (MDHH), in which the airing of commercials is banned. In order to do so, the study incorporates a multilevel analysis that probes the structure of entire broadcasting evenings as well as the narrative building blocks that constitute each item. The study investigates the ways in which commercial media outlets operate in the context of “commercial vacuums” as they substitute material capital with symbolic capital. This process is illuminated through Channel 2's inability to work MDHH into its extremely successful routine broadcasting formulas. The channel's MDHH broadcasts construct a commemorative narrative that is insulated from day-to-day Israeli public Holocaust memory discourse; hence they operate as a significant site of Israeli postmemory work. Furthermore, such a narrative not only commemorates the memory of the Holocaust itself but also the ways in which Israeli culture used to narrate the memory of the Holocaust in the past.