Television memories in mainstream Jewish Israel - SAGE Journals

Article

Together, nevertheless? Television memories in mainstream Jewish Israel

European Journal of Communication 26(1) 33–47 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0267323110395120 ejc.sagepub.com

Jérôme Bourdon Tel Aviv University, Israel

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik

University of Southern California, USA

Abstract Drawing on 40 life-stories of Jewish-Israeli television viewers collected over the years 2004–6, this article makes three claims. First, it suggests that the formation of memory is tightly intertwined with television viewing, both at the individual level and the collective levels of the family and the nation. It elaborates on a typology of television memories, differentiating between wallpaper memories, flashbulb memories, media events and close encounters. Second, it asserts that in Israel, the nation remains a major framework for apprehending collective memory. Nevertheless, fragmentation can be felt: immigration and ethnicity play a role, as does commercialization. Finally, it makes a methodological claim about the ways collective memory can best be studied. Examining the reception of audiences, in addition to the common focus on memory texts, reveals that even with commercialized, fragmentized television, Jewish-Israeli viewers share a strong sense of common memories and a collective past.

Keywords collective memory, Israel, life-story, television, television history

This article examines the relations between television viewing and the formation of memory, using life-stories of Jewish-Israeli television viewers. Our major hypothesis is that television viewing is tightly intertwined with the formation of collective memory. Television viewing affects both the shape and the content of collective memories

Corresponding author: Jérôme Bourdon, Department of Communication, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Email: [email protected]

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European Journal of Communication 26(1)

(Bourdon, 1992, 2003), be it routine memories linked to daily life or more dramatic memories of major ceremonies, of unexpected events, of actual, face-to-face contacts with the world of television. Four categories of television memories: wallpaper memories, media events, flashbulb memories and close encounters are connected to different ‘social frameworks’ (Halbwachs, 1992 [1952]), from the family to the nation and its various components. In this research the national aspect is prominent. We are dealing with a society heavily affected by the anxiety of war and terror, where remembrance and mourning are collective feelings, regularly activated by a host of mnemonic resources: monuments, ceremonies (Handelman and Katz, 1998; Zerubavel, 1995), with the media playing a major role (e.g. Meyers et al., 2009). While this can act as a unifying factor, Israeli society has also been affected by the relative fragmentation of the nation (Shafir and Peled, 2002), the end of the dominance of the Ashkenazi-Zionist-secular elite (Kimmerling, 2001), and the rise of ethnic collective identities. We investigate whether these processes affect television memories, forming subcultural memories among specific groups. The relation between television and memory is our starting point: we move from broad claims about memory based on textual analysis to a more audience-sensitive view of television and memory, based on reception studies. After discussing the relations between individual and collective memory, we present our typology of television memories. We then move to our fieldwork and findings, and a discussion of the partly fragmented, but still resilient, Israeli-Jewish nation.

Television and memory: From social amnesia to a new sense of the past In the growing field of memory studies, the relation between memory and cultural texts is a key question. Television has been linked to a far-reaching claim of ‘collapsing memory’, as it is ‘a medium of the present into which it interweaves fragments of the past’ (Hoskins, 2004: 110). These claims are not new. More than any other medium, television, through its disruptive flow of programming, has been blamed as a medium which fosters ‘the annihilation of memory, and consequently of history, in its continual stress upon the “nowness” of its own discourse’ (Doane, 1990: 227). Together with other factors, mainly generalized commodification, television and the media are often indicted within a more general claim of ‘social amnesia’ (Jacoby, 1997 [1975]: 49, 107), which argues that it is increasingly difficult for modern societies to relate to the past. The social amnesia discourses often start from very general theoretical claims and include little empirical research. When they do, they start not from social agents who remember, but from the cultural texts supposedly fostering amnesia, with the mass media, and television in particular, bearing the brunt of the blame. However, the direct inference from text to society is problematic, as historians have acknowledged (Confino, 1997). As reception studies have shown that the interpretation of widely consumed media content may vary among individuals, and cannot be deduced from texts only, this is particularly true for later remembering of such texts (Kansteiner, 2002). In reaction to this textualism, both media researchers and scholars of collective memories and contemporary history have suggested to take ‘real people’ into account. Although

Bourdon and Kligler-Vilenchik

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the term collective memory has often been associated with the vision of a larger ‘stream of thoughts’ enveloping the individual, the tendency to study it ‘from the bottom up’ is increasing. Examining the memories of individuals is seen as complementing and enriching the understanding of collective memory based on the analysis of public representations (Kligler-Vilenchik, 2011; Schwartz and Schuman, 2000). Television remembering is the mnemonic practice we want to tackle here. A small but substantial body of research has been devoted to memories of television viewing. Researchers have used written and oral life-stories to offer new perspectives about the relation between television and the formation of memory (Bourdon, 1992, 2003, 2009; O’Sullivan, 1991). Focusing on the memory of news and current affairs, others have analysed life-stories of students (Barnhurst and Wartella, 1998), and more recently, focus groups in a comparative international perspective (Volkmer, 2006). Finally, the memories of media users have also attracted attention in a field traditionally chained to textual analysis: cinema studies. A recent pioneering work has shown that in this field as well, text and reception studies can be fruitfully combined (Kuhn, 2002). Life-story interviews with viewers, focusing on their past experience of television, have proven a rewarding methodology, especially for gaining a sense of the accumulated experience of television viewing across the different stages of life (Bourdon, 2003). The request to ‘remember television’ enables us to reveal how people cognitively organize the huge amounts of time spent in front of the television set over the years. They often begin with television personalities who have been on screen for a long time, with long series scheduled at regular hours which intersect with their daily lives, or with major national events, integrated into the narrative of their own personal lives. Life-stories give us access to a television grammar different than that used by professionals and researchers, a grammar that is not only about television per se but about the many, often unexpected, points of contact between television and daily life.

Memories: Collective or individual? Since social scientists have taken an interest in memory, there has been an ongoing debate on the relations between its individual and collective dimensions (e.g. Brockmeier, 2002; Ricoeur, 2004; Sutton, 2007). Following Halbwachs (1992 [1952]), we emphasize the collective dimension of memory. However, in recent years memory scholars have tended to shift away from a radical ‘collectivist’ view of memory. Collective memory is now predominantly seen as coming into being through the agency of individuals, but constantly reshaped through social interactions. In addition, as Halbwachs already stressed, each individual can be considered as pertaining to different ‘social frameworks of memories’, or as a holding of collective memories (e.g. those of the nation, religion, the family). This leads to interactions not only between individuals, but within the individual, as we discuss later. Our reception-centred study of memory enables one to gain a dynamic view of memory, rather than a grand ‘top-down’, static view of it. From this viewpoint, stressing the collective aspect is in no way synonymous with denying the role of the individual in the formation of memory. In the analysis, we did choose to disregard the more idiosyncratic, individual aspects of the television memories collected. It was quite possible to assign the vast majority of

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our life-stories to different forms of collective memories. We took into account the way the individual built his/her relation to the different collectives, especially through the constant to and fro between the ‘I’ and the ‘we’. In the Israeli case, the ‘we’ is remarkably present even in individual interviews, including the family, the neighbourhood, and sometimes the whole of the Jewish-Israeli nation. In many cases, the ‘we’ is used in a remarkably ambiguous manner – a characteristic of the first person plural, oft commented on by semanticians (e.g. Greenberg, 1988).

Categorizing television memories: A typology In the analysis of our memories as television memories, we have elaborated on a previously suggested typology (Bourdon, 2003). This typology considers, in particular, which collective ‘we’ is referred to in each category. It also addresses the type of material remembered and the iterative vs singular character of the memory. It is based on four categories: wallpapers, media events, flashbulbs and close encounters. Wallpaper memories are the memories of viewing habits and routines. Although they comprise the major part of our lifetime, they represent only the minority of life-story texts. Wallpaper memories change according to programming, but also according to the different stages of our life-cycle, for example giving birth or getting divorced. In our interviews, while wallpaper memories are initially told in a first person plural, referring to the family, this changes with the fragmentation of the viewing experience. As wallpaper memories show little specificity in Israel, compared with other research on television memories, they are given limited attention in our analysis. In the discussion of both media events and flashbulb memories, viewers focus on memories of news and current affairs, which appear as a central genre in the Israeli schedules and in Israeli television culture (Cohen and Loffler-Elefant, 2006). Media events refer to the viewing of major, national or international, preplanned ceremonies analysed by Dayan and Katz (1992). Here the ‘we’ is used systematically in the context of organized, social viewing. In addition, this ‘we’ often has a national side to it, connected to the feeling that ‘the whole nation is watching’. Flashbulb memories are usually linked to unexpected, shocking news. This classic psychological term (Brown and Kulik, 1977) refers to ‘the vivid, detailed recall of a major event’ (Winograd, 1994: 288). This type of memory is often characterized by a move from ‘I’ to ‘we’, when interviewees relate how they learnt about a major drama (e.g. political assassination) on TV, and immediately contacted friends or family to share the experience. As we will see, in Israel, due to the nature of news coverage, it seems that memories of dramatic, unexpected events are also evolving into a sui generis category, that of ‘disaster marathons’ (Liebes, 1998). The fourth category, close encounters, concerns ‘real life’ interactions between viewers and the world of television. The experience may be told in the first person singular, but the excitement is shared by a collective, be it family or peer group. While media theory (coming mostly from major western societies) talks of a strong sense of distance between ordinary viewers and the mythical ‘media centre’ (Couldry, 2003), this proves to be less the case with our Jewish-Israeli interviewees.


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The fieldwork In the course of a communication seminar on ‘Television Remembering’, taught by the first author between 2004 and 2006 at Tel Aviv University, 90 students collected lifestories of television viewers, after being taught about the aims of the research and its theoretical implications. Each student conducted a life-story interview, starting in an open-ended manner with the question: ‘what are your first memories of television?’, and moving through the different stages of the life-cycle. During the first part of the interview, students asked less about specific content, and more about circumstances of viewing (where, when, with whom) and the way these were affected by stages of the personal biography. Towards the end of the interview, viewers were asked about a common series of events and programmes, which had been identified in preparatory interviews and from documentation about the history of television in Israel. The aim was to constitute a common core of programmes, events and television personalities, and to see if many viewers would react to the stimulation – which almost all did. Out of the 90 life-stories collected, 40 were selected as useable by the researchers. The social characteristics of the surveyors (who mostly came from the Jewish, Ashkenazi upper-middle classes) introduced some biases. All our interviewees come from the regions of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, with two exceptions from northern Israel. Of the 40 interviewees, 23 can be identified as Ashkenazi (European origin) Jews, 14 can be broadly identified as ‘Orientals’ (Jews who immigrated from Arab countries, a problematic definition we refer to later) and three of mixed descent. Notable are the immigrants from the former Soviet Union: our sample includes four who came in the 1990s, during the massive immigration to Israel following the collapse of the USSR, and two who came in the 1970s. This reflects both their significant presence in society and their relatively high level of education and hence proximity to the students’ world. On the other hand, relative to their percentage in the population, Oriental Jews are underrepresented, and Palestinian-Israelis do not appear in the sample at all, due to their small numbers in our interview pool and their differentiated viewing habits. The memories of the two groups mentioned – immigrants from the former USSR and Oriental Jews – have been found to have specific characteristics, distinguishing them from the ‘mainstream’ Israeli sample. To some extent, these can be seen as counter-memories, offering a different framework to the interpretation of shared events, or emphasizing alternative events (Zerubavel, 1995: 11). The range of the time-span studied, 2004–6, meant that current events slightly differed between interviews. In general, however, we did not encourage interviewees to focus on the present or the recent past – which, as it turned out, was not rich in major dramatic events. On the other hand, the years 1993–2003 were extraordinarily intense for Israeli viewers/citizens, including events such as the peace process, Rabin’s assassination, several waves of suicide bombings, the Second Intifada and finally the events of 9/11. The selected interviews were analysed by the authors, basing our analysis on the fourprong typology suggested in the previous section, but adapting it to the specificities of a different culture and a different time.

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Wallpaper memories: From ‘we’ to ‘I’ We start our review with the most stable of our categories, and the least specific from a national point of view. From France (Bourdon, 2003) to the UK (O’Sullivan, 1991) to Israel, wallpaper memories show many commonalities. They are an iterative experience, a successful encounter between regular programming and some spatio-temporal arrangement in the daily life of the viewer: I would come home, turn on the TV and watch the Wheel of Fortune, then we would all sit together to see the Arab movie. (Sarah, 60. The ‘Arab movie’ of Friday night was for a very long time a popular fixture of Israel’s public Channel 1 schedule)

As we move in time in the course of a given interview, or from one generation to the next, a major difference emerges. At first, the narrative is told in a plural ‘we’, referring usually to the family, collectively watching a single channel. With time, the narrative fragments: the ‘I’ is more frequent, referring to shows which are watched alone, often on a separate set: … Until channel two began, it was very boring … now we have four television sets for five people, so everyone watches what they feel like. I usually like to watch in the living room and my wife watches in the bedroom, ’cause I like to zap through the channels and it drives her mad. (Evgeny, 48)

This is closely connected to the history of television in nations where a deregulated, multi-channel (and multi-set) environment has abruptly replaced state monopoly. In the interviews, this is often connected to the more general sense that a previously united society has been overrun by individualism and social fragmentation.

Media events: One nation under television The main common feature of our interviews is their focus on news and current affairs as a chronicle of drama. This connects two categories of television memories: media events, the well-organized, televised ceremonies (Dayan and Katz, 1992), and flashbulb memories, unexpected dramas vividly recounted. Both categories of memories have a common characteristic: they function as unifiers of the collective. Such events are often viewed collectively, in the family or with friends, but moreover there is a sense of an impact to a much larger community, when one is ‘anxious about something outside the home’ (Bourdon, 1992: 543). The ‘we’ which is used in the narratives of these events reflects this. Starting from the family, it seems to ‘grow’, to include other people, a whole nation. This semantic use does not belong to Israel only, but it seems to be stronger in a country where ‘especially in times of national crisis [and in its memorialism] both the people of Israel and the citizenry of the state often are referred to as a family’ (Handelman and Katz, 1998: 211). The first major television memory of Israeli TV is a classic media event, connected to a successful war: the military parade of the Israeli Army on Independence Day 1968.


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This is recounted by almost all our elderly viewers, and has obviously been recalled many times before our interviews. Dayan and Katz (1992: 26) term such events as ‘conquests’ – live broadcasting of rare events that are ‘giant leaps for mankind’. In national television histories, the first major media event often has a national character, for example a royal marriage. In our interviews, however, the interesting aspect is the sense of elation with which audiences remember these events, which are also markers of change in their everyday lives. For example, it is often on the occasion of the preparation towards a media event that people buy a set for the first time (Bourdon, 2003): Towards Independence Day in 1968 there was a heated debate at home about buying a television set. … My father made a special stand for the set and then he was afraid that if we’ll buy too big a TV it would not fit. My mom said that if we buy a TV, we should buy the best, and so the biggest. On Independence Day my mom and I worked many hours in the kitchen to prepare delicacies. (Atalia, 56)

Another media event which stands out in the memories is the visit of Anuar Sadat to Jerusalem in 1977, broadcast on the still-monopolistic Israeli Channel 1. Unlike the grandiosity of the military parade, this media event is told as a fragile achievement: a wave of hope, strongly felt in the narratives, which did not translate into a full-fledged peace with the Arab world as imagined. It is telling that the major memory is not that of the ratification of the peace treaty in 1979, but of Sadat’s visit, which unfolded over a few days and occurred close to home. This event was considered as a major breakthrough, as it seemed a transgression of a taboo, a memorable act of ‘communication out of character’ (Goffman, 1959: 169) by the then Egyptian president: I remember him standing at the door of the plane. At that moment I was filled with a sense of being part of an experience that is a huge historic event. … The President of Egypt steps out of the plane in our country, just as if he were the Prime Minister of Britain. (Moshe, 60)

All members of our Jewish-Israeli sample share a sense of national belonging, and particularly so when talking about national achievements abroad. This has deep roots in Israeli history: from its establishment, the new nation has been busy projecting a specific image of the strong new Israeli, erasing the image of the scared, threatened diasporic Jew. Since the 1970s and the start of the occupation, the international image of Israel has changed in the western media, especially in Europe (Bourdon, 2009), and the country is covered in a much more critical way. More importantly, the Israeli media report on this international criticism to the Israeli public, with a sense that ‘the whole world is against us’. This phrase, coined in the 1970s, is now used each time global criticism of Israel emerges, most recently on the occasion of the Gaza flotilla raid. In this context, memories of national successes in the international arena have much significance. The Hebrew phrase representing this can be translated as ‘providing honour to the country’, and it can be applied to a head of state receiving a Nobel Prize for peace, but, more crucially, to sports champions. The relatively rare events of major Israeli sports success are seen as a source of great pride, both projecting a different image of Israel abroad, and creating some ‘good news’, for a change, at home:

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Of course I remember when Yael Arad won the Silver Medal in the Olympics, and in Judo of all sports, we were feeling so proud, I also remember the way the whole country talked about it. (Aharon, 56)

While Dayan and Katz consider media events as a unique occasion, in viewers’ memories there also are events which reoccur and, in fact, constitute the bulk of ‘media events’ in memory. In Israel, the major repetitive event of this sort is the Eurovision Song Contest. This event was launched in 1956 by the European Broadcasting Union, with the aim of helping to forge a European identity. It is generally considered an event of mediocre musical quality, but countries at the periphery of Europe who wish to integrate and become recognized in Europe often express this through an emotional investment in the contest (Raykoff and Tobin, 2007). Some of our viewers expressed a certain ambivalence between two affiliations: national pride which leads to viewing, and elitism which leads to disregard for the same event: There was something national to it, a sense that we were represented in a competition in Europe, but there was also our contempt for this kind of music, we would laugh at the contestants. (Yaakov, 63)

‘Flashbulbs’ become media events, too Stemming originally from psychological work (Brown and Kulik, 1977), the term flashbulb memories refers to the memory of sudden, dramatic events, that are remembered vividly and in great detail. If the classic event mentioned as eliciting these memories is the assassination of Kennedy, the Israeli parallel is the assassination of Rabin in 1995. The media played a major role in the commemoration of Rabin, immediately reinventing a mythical image that would address the societal need for integration (Peri, 1997). However, the relation between media and flashbulb memory is not as simple as it may seem. In one sense, television supplies the images which people later vividly recount. But when viewers recall the event, they remember not only the content, but its mediation through television as well, so that the memory of the event cannot be disentangled from its televisual format: The broadcasts mirrored the commemoration, and they are my memory of the assassination much more than the facts, because they were cyclical, and accompanied by commentary all the time. (Dani, 26)

While the memory of the assassination exemplifies the ‘classic’ flashbulb memory, for other events the distinction between the sudden dramatic disasters of flashbulbs and the preplanned, well-organized ceremonies of media events increasingly erodes. Katz and Liebes (2007) claim that in the current media ecology, ceremonial media events are becoming less common, while live broadcasting of sudden, disruptive events such as wars, terrorist attacks and disasters has largely taken their place, framed by Israeli commercial media as unfolding chronicles of drama. Liebes (1998), analysing the coverage of major terror attacks in 1996, termed this pattern ‘disaster marathons’: television


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broadcasts long specials around such attacks with frequent returns to the sites of the events, reporting about the growing toll of victims, interviewing witnesses, talking to victims and also making comparisons with former attacks. Thus, these dramatic events seem to become a ‘genre’ of public life, and in a sense a form of media event, as television approaches them with a well-known, well-rehearsed pattern of broadcasting. This notion has not been missed by our viewers, who already recognize the ‘genre’ themselves. Furthermore, this form of broadcasting can be linked in the narratives to a sense of ‘drama fatigue’, when war and terror attacks are described as a form of routine: I remember the drama of the terror attacks, there have always been but since the 90s it has become a special sort of TV show, we know, all the cameras, the witness in a state of shock, the ambulance, the bus completely ruined … it has become both boring and horrible, we can’t help but stay glued to the screen. (Blanche, 50)

This sense of a ‘disaster genre’ is further linked to a sense that tragedies are always on the verge of happening. The interviewees describe a feeling of anxiety, in which one always expects the next ‘bad news’. The sudden newsflash disrupting regular broadcasting is symbolic of the disruption of normal life: The second I saw the newsflash I became all tense. In Israel each time there is a newsflash you know right away that something bad happened. … I immediately grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume. In the end it was just something, something important, but in my opinion not important enough to stop broadcasting on a Friday night. (Moshe, 60)

Being together: The proximity of ‘media friends’1 Our fourth category of television memory is the ‘close encounter’, a moment where the world of television is connected with our ordinary world: being on TV, seeing somebody one knows on TV, meeting a TV personality in real life. This category is present in our interviews but, although a more systematic comparison would be necessary, it seems that there is a manner specific to Israel, compared to larger, less collective societies such as France (Bourdon, 2003) or the United States (Gamson, 1994). In narratives of French television viewers, the experience of being interviewed on television or meeting a television personality was recounted as highly emotional, as a close encounter with a demi-god. In the Israeli narratives, on the other hand, interviewees who remember such experiences do not emphasize the exceptional or dramatic aspect. There is a sense here that celebrities, at least the national celebrities of Israel one has a chance to meet, are ‘one of us’, and are expected to behave that way. ‘Celebrity behaviour’, including whims and dramas, is the reserve of ‘real’ international stars, but such behaviour might be ridiculed in local Israeli stars. This is exemplified in Liora’s narrative, who attended a major variety show with Israeli star host Dudu Topaz: Each time there was an advertising break, he would start screaming at the makeup artist, get upset and nervous. You should have seen how the producer sighed in relief when the show was over. (Liora, 35)

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This tendency can be explained by the smaller demographic and geographic size of the country, but also by the ‘siege mentality’ discussed above – regular Israelis and celebrity Israelis still share the common, fragile destiny of Israeli life. Together, these two factors reinforce a sense of proximity, of ‘togetherness’, of the ‘nation as family’. Even participating in a TV show is not necessarily a very special experience as it would be in bigger, more hierarchical societies, as Evgeny, an immigrant from the former USSR, implies: You remember the show More or Less? Do you know that my wife and I we attended the show. We sent a letter to be part of the audience and they called us, there was no problem. I recorded the show, although we weren’t on screen, but I still have the tape, just to remember. … In Russia the chance for us to be on TV was almost nil, only if you have the right connections or if you are involved in TV. (Evgeny, 48)

Particular memories: Negotiating national belonging The narratives we have presented so far are quite united, representing a common, mainstream Jewish-Israeli culture. However, there are two main caveats to this commonality, two sets of particular experiences – one more current, the other more historic: that of immigrants from the former USSR, and of Oriental Jews. Immigrants from the former USSR, a population of almost 1 million people who have arrived in Israel since 1990, were well represented in our sample. They are generally characterized as a highly educated population, whose connection to traditional Jewish religion was relatively weak. Upon their arrival, many of these immigrants valued the conservation of their former culture, reflected by speaking their mother tongue, socializing among other immigrants, as well as maintaining a feeling of cultural superiority towards native-born Israelis (Elias, 2008). These tendencies are to an extent evident in the television memories of these immigrants, mostly through their criticism of Israeli television, describing it as ‘idiotic’ or ‘vulgar’. But more common memories from the first years of immigration seem to be attempts to become a part of Israeli society, where television is seen as a resource for learning the language, the culture and the common habits. This role is particularly heightened during important national events when, through television broadcasts, immigrants feel they are taking part in the collective emotions of Israeli society: A short while after I immigrated Rabin was murdered and I remember that people explained to me who he was and I went to see the TV broadcast about him at my friends’ house, my friends of course had to translate for me. They showed people going to the square to light candles so I also went to the square, after I understood exactly who he was. It was very moving. (Daniel, 26, immigrated from Ukraine)

One event mentioned in our interviews is of particular, and tragic, importance as a unifier of these immigrants into Israeli society: the suicide bombing of the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium discotheque in 2001. The victims of this terror attack were mostly youth from former USSR immigrant families, a fact that was significantly emphasized by the media. Through this ‘sacrifice’, many immigrants from the former USSR sensed that they were


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incorporated into the national collective, by taking part in the narrative of victimization (Elias, 2008). Thus, the tragic memory is also a marker of a positive change, felt even by those who have come from the USSR in former immigration waves: The Dolphinarium is my most horrible memory. I knew that some of our [Russian] kids were going there often, I remember going to the funerals for a family I knew. … But the media paid close attention to the whole story, they did a good job of reporting on it, the Russians were not members of the mafia for a change. (Yuri, 55, immigrated from the former USSR in 1979)

A second gap apparent in the memories occurs between Israelis of European (Ashkenazi) and non-European, Oriental, descent. The latter ‘ethnic’ term in fact refers to largely imagined geography, joining together Jews of Moroccan origin living in France, with Jews in Iraq or Iran. Still, an ‘Oriental identity’ does show in our sample as a form of counter-memory, despite the relatively small proportion of Orientals. The main case for the division, while vividly remembered, stems from over 30 years ago: the victory of Begin and the Likud over the dominant Mapai (Labor) Party in the 1977 election, which was famously termed ‘the reversal’. The event has great symbolic importance: beyond the political change, Begin (although an Ashkenazi) was seen as the representative of the peripheral world of Oriental Jews. The Ashkenazi establishment felt this as a major blow, expressed by one politician’s claim that if this is what the people decided, ‘the people should be changed’. In our interviews, we got a clear expression of contrasting perspectives of Jews of Oriental and Ashkenazi descent on the same event: I remember the elections in ’77. My parents were so excited. Begin had talked in our name. We had been excluded for so long. We watched it in a local restaurant, in our neighbourhood, the whole room was thrilled. (Haim, 40, Oriental) I remember Haim Yavin. I remember him announcing that night, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, a reversal’. We were shocked. We didn’t believe this could happen, especially since we’re not exactly from the Likud. We walked around for a few days and looked for explanations. How did this happen? (Atalia, 56, Ashkenazi)

Conclusion: Together, nevertheless. Despite the processes of fragmentation which are now often debated in Israel, within and beyond academic discourse, the overall picture of television memories collected between 2004 and 2006 shows a society with a shared culture. Social frameworks are evolving, some ‘counter-memories’ are gaining in strength, forms of television viewing change, and yet, the ‘Jewish-Israeli nation’ is still there. Processes of individualization and commercialization have certainly affected the sense of the unified Israeli collective, but it is hard to determine how much of the sometimes fondly recalled past is in fact idealized. Israeli history has entered, since the early 1990s, a process of continuous recomposition. At an academic level, the work of the ‘new historians’ has debunked several aspects of Zionist history, in a process that has been called ‘the shattering of myths’ (Zerubavel, 1995: 232). However, the sense of unity has, to some extent, been restored through a

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memory of victimization. This has a long history in Israel, and began even before the Holocaust had become a key political and emotional resource (Zertal, 2005). Israeli television has made much use of the victim and the emphasis on painful experiences, be they related to wars, terror attacks or other sources of loss and mourning. This cultural aspect has both particularistic and unifying aspects. On the one hand, it can be appropriated by minority groups, for example Oriental Jews insisting on the symbolic and material repression they have undergone. But on the other hand, as many public commentators have noted, the shared notion of threat and danger triggers a sense of being together, with ‘the whole world against us’. This is particularly so since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000 (Dor, 2003), and has been exemplified in the preceding section by the case of former USSR immigrants. This (renewed?) sense of unity is strongly reflected in our interviews by the use of the first person plural. The Hebrew-Israeli ‘we’ is very specific. It is a Jewish-Israeli ‘we’, which can sometimes incorporate the diaspora, but never the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and it strongly implies a small nation remembering its woes and its moments of glory. Even in the supposedly highly fragmented, multicultural Israeli context, viewers’ memories show strong commonalities, regarding specific viewing habits, programmes and even particular moments in television history. Although sociologists have suggested an ‘end of Israeliness’ (Kimmerling, 2001), a fragile Israeliness remains present in television memories. This analysis of television memories corroborates findings inferred from textual analyses of commercial television in Israel (e.g. Yuran, 2001) and the ways in which commercial television commemorates the past (Meyers et al., 2009). The move that audiences have experienced over the period of time recalled is one analogous to that reflected in Israeli television. The oft-noted commodification of Israeli culture is a process which can easily incorporate the themes of the victimized nation. The new ‘commercial national’ narrative is less ‘solid’ and more emotional than the one previously provided by state institutions, on which traditional analyses of nationalism have focused so far, starting from Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) or Anderson (1991 [1983]). Recent theories of nationalism have only indirectly taken into account commodified or ‘commercial nationalism’ (Sturken, 2007; Volcic, 2009; White, 2004: 28), often focusing on the analysis of sports and sports coverage (e.g. King, 2006). Our life-stories show that commercialized television can promote old and new forms of nationalism and does provide a sense of shared memories and a common past. From a methodological point of view, our research suggests ways of cross-fertilizing media studies and memory studies (as suggested by Hoskins, 2009). Life-stories of television viewers offer a different perspective on television history, one that encompasses the perceptions of viewers, and analyses the medium as part of the fabric of everyday life. Moreover, this methodology provides a new way of analysing ‘how societies remember’ (Connerton, 1989), in a manner that goes beyond monuments, ceremonies and print material. By examining shared themes in the life-stories collected, and comparing these across nations, we can point to national specificity in television memories. In Israel, as opposed to France (Bourdon, 2003), the national framework is more dominant on the one hand, but on the other hand more fragile, perceived as threatened by outside hostility and internal fragmentation. Television appears here as a medium of memory


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which is connected to daily life in intimate ways, providing reference to major events that link to the national collective (viewing of media events, as well as disruptive, shocking events), while at the same time being experienced in the domestic sphere. Together, these lead not to ‘social amnesia’, but to a new sense of relating to the past, which deserves the full attention of media/memory scholars. Acknowledgement This article was first presented as a paper at the ‘On Media Memory’ workshop in 2009. We are thankful for criticisms and comments that were integrated in this version. We would also like to thank the students in the 2004–6 ‘Television Remembering’ seminar at Tel Aviv University who participated in the research as interviewers.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Note 1. The phrase comes from Meyrowitz (1994).

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