Remembering television in mainstream Jewish Israel: from one-channel nation to commercial tribalization

Jérôme Bourdon and Neta Kligler-Vilenchik discuss the formation of collective memory in relation to Israeli television viewing. They asked Israelis who grew up and aged with Israeli television what they remember. These memories provided revealing insights into how time spent in front of the television set over the years shapes personal memories and reflects collective ones. Life-stories provided access to a specific grammar of television, very different from the one yielded by textual analysis. Following Halbwach’s conceptualization of collective memory, their research discusses the debate around the place of television in the formation of memory, and specifically Israeli memories as articulated in recollections of television viewers. These memories suggest a strong sense of the collective in Israeli society, mainly around two “social frameworks of memory”, the family and the nation, and around the television genres of news and current affairs, which other researchers have found to be central to Israeli media culture, if not to media culture itself. These findings demonstrate how in Israeli memories underlying the “I” there is always the “we”, which, in Israel, is remarkably present. It is not about the televisual text per se but about the many, often unexpected, points of contact between television, daily life and identity.