Event

Idith Zertal. Nation and Death

Lecture by Idith Zertal on the occasion of the launch of the book La nación y la muerte. La Shoá en el discurso y la política de Israel (Gredos, 2010), which was published in English as Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Since the creation of Israel, the Shoah and its millions of dead has always been present in the country’s legislation, prayers, ceremonies, courts, educational centres, the press, poetry, funeral texts, monuments and commemorative books. Israeli society has constantly defined itself in relation with the Shoah and its victims by way of a twofold expression of expiation of the guilt attributed to these victims and redemption of their deaths. Idith Zertal offers a lucid account of this complex, ambiguous relationship, which constitutes the starting point of her reflections on the centrality of death in the construction of national identities.