Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration

How does a society cope with the challenge of acknowledging and commemorating difficult aspects of its past? In Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi develops a timely sociology of commemoration, drawing on the public memory of Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv in 1995. She identifies and analyzes the building blocks from which commemoration is made: agency, space, time, and narrative. Acting as a guide, she leads the reader through monuments and gravestones, memorial services and political demonstrations, rituals both moving and banal, and individuals determined to remember, as well as those who wish to forget. Yitzhak Rabin's Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration examines the meanings, boundaries, opportunities, and limits of commemoration, a phenomenon not unique to Israel but shared by many nations across the globe. Book jacket.

Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi is Senior Lecturer of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of After Pomp and Circumstance: High School Reunion as an Autobiographical Question. A volume in the SUNY series in Anthropology and Judaic Studies Walter P. Zenner, editor