Above the Death Pits, beneath the Flag. Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity
Abstract
The contribution is a review of a book 'Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag' by Israeli social anthropologist Jackie Feldman. Using anthropological methods such as participant observation, group discussions, text analysis, Feldman explores youth voyages of Israeli high school students to places of Holocaust commemoration in Poland.
The study demonstrates transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli society through the means of tourism, that shapes Poland into a living deathscape of Diaspora Jewry. Feldman uses Turner's concept of pilgrimage and describes a rite of passage students undergo during less than two weeks of their travelling.
Carefully planned itinerary, Holocaust survivors' testimonies, structure of collective experience simulates Israeli national narrative "from ashes to redemption", a victorious story of survivor of Jewish nation that crystalized in the creation of the State of Israel. Viewing, touching, and smelling Holocaust-period ruins and remains; accompanying the survivors on the sites of their suffering and survival, crying together and performing commemorative ceremonies at the death sites, enables students to experience the story first hand and to be changed into its actors.
In the same way as forebearers of the State they are transformed first into victims, then into victorious survivors, and finally witnesses of the witnesses. As witnesseses of suffering of Jewish nation they are ready to become citizens of the Israeli state, to take over all the responsibilities stemming from such a commitment and to transmit Holocaust memory to next generations.
The book is not only contribution to analysis of nation building mechanism, but it profoundly reflects on the uncertainity of national identities in increasingly globalized and fragmented society and attempts to restore it, paradoxicaly, by means of delocalization of national identity that only globalized world permits..