Israelis are increasingly challenging the establishment Shoah discourse through humoristic perspective and breaking taboos. Interview with Dr. Liat Steir-Livny, researcher of Israeli culture. By Michal Levertov / Jerusalem Report, June 1,2015.

1. THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 1, 201540
IN FEBRUARY, a video of an Israeli pas-
senger coarsely ranting at a flight attendant
during an Israir flight from Tel Aviv to Var-
na, Bulgaria, swept the country. The video,
apparently filmed on a mobile phone fea-
tured the abusive passenger demanding that
the steward immediately sell her chocolate
from the duty-free cart. She was support-
ed by a couple of her relatives, one of them
threatening to use physical violence against
him.
The clip, in which another relative of the
chocolate-craving passenger yells, “Sell her
the chocolate, you piece of shit. What, is she
an Arab?” rapidly went viral, making the in-
cident headline news. The protagonist pas-
sengers of what was by then already coined
‘the chocolate flight’ became the most re-
cent embodiments of the “Ugly Israeli”:
vulgar, rough, entitled, and self-centered.
Parodies of the event soon appeared in
the Israeli mainstream and online media.
And it was then that Hitler took the stage.
A clip from the 2004 German film “Down-
fall,” depicting the Fuhrer (played by
Bruno Ganz) lambasting his generals, was
uploaded to YouTube, complete with He-
brew subtitles taken from the Israir video.
This “Hitler rants” phenomenon is, of
course, not unique to Israeli culture. Par-
odies in which an angry Hitler froths and
foams in myriad languages about almost
every possible topic in the world began
flooding the web shortly after “Downfall,”
an account of Hitler’s last days, debuted in
cinemas.
BUT IN Israel, says Dr. Liat Steir-Livny, a
researcher of local culture, “these videos
are created and consumed in a capacity and
intensity that exceed any other place in the
world; the numbers and viewers of these
[Hebrew-language] videos, relative to the
size of the population, is proportionately
much greater than of any other language I
checked.
“High school classes make ‘Hitler rants’
clips for their end-of-school parties; IDF
units create them to mark course gradua-
tions; high-tech employees send each other
such parodies highlighting their specific
Holocoaust
humor
Israelis are increasingly
challenging the
establishment Shoah
discourse through
humoristic perspectives
and breaking taboos
By Michal Levertov
Culture Report
Archaeology Books Dance Art Film Music

2. THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 1, 2015 41
companies’ internal work issues. It’s a pret-
ty amazing process,” she tells The Jerusa-
lem Report in an interview in a Tel Aviv
café. “Because paradoxically, by taking
these videos into such concretely personal
spheres, we actually turn Hitler into a repre-
sentation of ourselves.”
Steir-Livny’s own reaction to this type of
video was the trigger for wider research she
conducted on Israeli-Jewish Holocaust-re-
lated humor as part of the way in which the
Holocaust is represented in contemporary
Israeli-Jewish culture. “I have been re-
searching the cultural aspects of Holocaust
memory in Israel for 15 years, but I never
imagined that humor and Holocaust were
terms that could be combined until I saw
these videos and realized that, despite my-
self, I could not stop myself laughing.”
Finding herself laughing out loud from
the clips – her favorite is the really witty,
now classic, “Hitler rant” over the lack of
parking space in Tel Aviv – she felt, she says
“ashamed and shocked.” It was only when
shortly after that she attended an alterna-
tive Holocaust memorial ceremony in the
city of Holon, led by a Holocaust survivor,
where the participants, all of them relatives
of Holocaust victims, “cried, ate, told vulgar
jokes, laughed, and then cried again” that
she realized “the essential role of humor in
coping with Holocaust trauma.” This led her
to dig further into the subject.”
That was four years ago, and Steir-Livny,
a senior lecturer at the department of cul-
ture at Sapir College, located near the Gaza
border, and an academic coordinator at the
Open University, based in Ra’anana, re-
cently published her research as a book [in
Hebrew] entitled, “Let the Memorial Hill
Remember: Holocaust Representation in
Israeli Popular Culture.”
ACCORDING TO Steir-Livny’s findings,
the Israeli-Jewish collective Holocaust
memory, which she perceives as “imbued
with pathos and agony and focuses on the
remembrance of the Holocaust events and
on their Zionist lesson” is being challenged
in recent decades by alternative ways of re-
membrance generated by popular culture
Liat Steir-Livny: The Israeli-Jewish collective
Holocaust memory is ‘imbued with pathos and
agony and focuses on the remembrance of the
Holocaust events and on their Zionist lesson’
AYAEFRAIM

3. THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 1, 201542
since the 1980s.
The “new remembrance,” as she calls it,
seeks to expand the boundaries of the prev-
alent discourse through humoristic perspec-
tives and breaking taboos “to set up an emo-
tional buffer, even for one single moment,
for a brief second” from the trauma of the
Holocaust. This trauma, she elaborates, is
maintained by institutionalized collective
memory, which through formal ceremo-
nies, monuments and museums, and even
the media, focuses on the horrors and on
their current-day political lessons. “It’s not
a coincidence,” she stresses, “that polls and
research consistently indicate that young
Jewish Israelis tend to see the Holocaust as
one of the strongest components of their Is-
raeli identity. It even tops elements such as
‘living in Israel.’”
HOWEVER, SHE notes, “I am now often
approached by people from the second gen-
eration, who tell me that they were always
telling Holocaust jokes. The difference is
that they previously did it discretely,” she
says.
Eventhehumorproducedbyvictimsinthe
ghettos and in camps was suppressed here,
she points out. Research about that topic
was not conducted in Israel until the 1990s.
It revealed that humor was an important sur-
vival tool. Chaya Ostrower’s 2009 book [in
Hebrew] “If Not for Humor We Would Have
Committed Suicide,” reflects this perfectly.
An example is the gag about Hitler’s visit to
a lunatic asylum, where all the patients greet
him with a Heil Hitler salute, except for one
guy who remains silent, burying his hand in
his pockets. When Hitler demands angrily
to know why the man did not join the salute,
the guy replies, “I’m not crazy, sir. I’m only
the watchman here.”
Steir-Livny forcefully criticizes the for-
mer silencing of this black humor. “It was,
for the victims, a therapeutic tool of the
highest level. How come we – Israeli soci-
ety – did not know about it? It could have
contributed so much to our understanding
of ourselves, of the way we cope with that
past.”
Moreover, Steir-Livny’s own breaking
free from “the ridiculous generalizing that
sees in any use of humor in relation to the
Holocaust a defamation of its memory” al-
lows her to produce humoristic, self-obser-
vant comments on the way the Holocaust
penetrates her daily life. Only recently, she
says, she told her students that on her first
visit to Poland a while ago, she noticed that
the local custom is to serve sparkling wa-
ter, rather than regular water. “I joked that
I then realized that in Poland the default
option is always gas,” she adds.
“We Israeli Jews all view everything
through the perspective of the Holocaust,
without even being aware of it,” she ex-
plains. “Humor is therefore a very effective
tool to create such self-awareness and to
cope with this reflex, paving a way to heal-
ing.” This healing, she points out, would
come “not from forgetting, but from dis-
mantling the turbulence that keeps mixing
past and present and that, therefore, leaves
us in an ongoing state of trauma.”
When she writes or talks about the sec-
ond and third generations in Israel, she
Hitler rant: A clip from the 2004
German film ‘Downfall,’ depicting Hitler
lambasting his generals, was uploaded
to YouTube, juxtaposed with Hebrew
subtitles taken from unruly Israelis on an
Israir flight
I NEVER IMAGINED
THAT HUMOR AND
HOLOCAUST WERE
TERMS THAT COULD BE
COMBINED
Books
COURTESY

4. THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 1, 2015 43
stresses that she is “speaking in cultural terms,
rather than in biological ones, and am referring
to all the Israeli Jews who grew up in Israel after
1945 and who went through the country’s edu-
cation system.” Her research does not relate to
the attitude of Israeli Arabs to the Holocaust.
Israeli-born Steir-Livny grew up in Bat Yam
and Ramat Gan on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Her
mother is a medical secretary, and her father,
now retired, headed teaching programs at the
Technion institute of technology in Haifa. Her
paternal grandparents, from Poland, fled the
Nazis to Siberia. Her maternal grandparents,
also from Poland, endured the Nazi horrors in
their country of birth.
Steir-Livny, 42, lives in Shoham, east of Tel
Aviv, with her husband, a scholar researching
the work of poet Haim Nachman Bialik, and
their two daughters. She chose for her book’s
cover a drawing by her older child, Almog. The
black and white drawing depicts a woman killed
by a man with a gun, near a house surrounded
by barbed wire. A mournful figure inside the
house says, “The Nazis are coming,” and two
other figures, watching the scene hold togeth-
er a torn heart that proclaims “sad, sad, sad.”
Almog, 9, who drew it a couple of years ago,
titled it “Holocaust Days.”
THIS DRAWING, Steir-Livny explains, demon-
strates the prevailing state of mind into which
every Jewish Israeli is channeled from infancy
and to which humor and satire is, she believes,
reacting. “Almog did not sketch this at home,”
she emphasizes, “but at school. They sit the kids
down and tell them to paint the Holocaust. You
look at such drawings and you feel like crying;
you practically see how the system is profession-
ally scarring the next generation. No wonder
that at least some of the kids who grew up in
such a society choose eventually to address the
Holocaust through black humor.”
A healthier education system, she says, would
not expose little children to such gruesome
sights and stories – “at home we switch the TV
off on Holocaust memorial day,” she notes – and
would include in the curriculum taught to the
older ones contents of universal understanding
of the Holocaust, including the stories of other
groups the Nazis sought to exterminate.
In the book, Steir-Livny points out fringe and
online expressions of that black humor and of
satire, as well as mainstream, even popular pro-
grams, which dared, and still dare, to criticize
the damaging effects of Holocaust pathos on the
Jewish-Israeli soul. She mentions, among oth-
ers, “The Cameri Quintet,” a TV comedy show
from the 1990s that was the first to ridicule the
profitable industry of youth trips to Poland’s
death camps and the emotional roller coaster
these trips are seeking to create. “There’s a basic
package of five concentration camps in 10 days
with a four-star hotel,” shrills a pushy travel
agent in one of the show’s most famous skits.
She also notes current prime-time satirical
shows such as “Eretz Nehederet” (“A Wonder-
ful Country”), where Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s repetitive comparisons of Iran to
Nazi Germany were lampooned, in 2012, in a
skit about a remembrance ceremony in an Ira-
nian nuclear plant. The protagonists of the skit,
scientists at the plant, are shown as struggling
with the heavy emotional burden of the nation’s
collective memory of the massacre of tens of
thousands civilians alongside Haman’s 500
co-conspirators.
A major part of Steir-Livny’s research focus-
es on the cultural representations of the Holo-
caust by comedians, writers, performers, poets
and filmmakers of Mizrahi origins. The second
and third generations of this population, she ex-
plains, had to cope with a double trauma: The
overwhelming sense of perpetual victimhood
enforced upon all Israelis alongside a clear mes-
sage that places them at the margins of the Israe-
li Holocaust hierarchy. “Even the fact that many
North African Jews were deported to death
camps in Europe was totally silenced until the
1980s,” she stresses.
There is another exclusion involved, asserts
Steir-Livny. The Mizrahim do not qualify for
the rewards of victimhood – a sense of enti-
tlement for past suffering. This was typified
in another Cameri Quintet sketch portray-
ing an undistinguished Israeli hurdler at the
World Championships in Germany in 1995.
An Israeli official approaches the German
track official seconds before the race begins,
half-pleading, half-threatening him to cut the
Israeli runner some slack. “Just give him a
five-six meter start,” he demands. When the
stunned German hesitates, the Israeli official
explodes. “Haven’t the Jewish People suffered
enough?” he thunders. ■
YOUNG JEWISH ISRAELIS
TEND TO SEE THE
HOLOCAUST AS ONE
OF THE STRONGEST
COMPONENTS OF THEIR
ISRAELI IDENTITY
Let the Memorial Hill
Remember: Holocaust
Representation in Israeli
Popular Culture [Hebrew]
ByLiatSteir-Livny
ReslingPublishing
199pages;69shekels