Central to Israeli identity is the experience and memory of the Holocaust and the emergent concept of Israel strong enough to protect itself. Survivors of the Holocaust, and the memory of those who were killed, shaped the creation of the nation. The will to survive individually and as a people made the creation of a new nation possible. The memory of the Shoah is, however, also a commonly felt burden, and the conflicting feelings of that memory have significantly impacted later generations. This is a memory that is at the same time omnipresent and a taboo. Imagining the unimaginable, visualizing a darkness of human existence that defies adequate representation and negates artistic interpretation, has become a central challenge and theme in Israeli visual culture. 

Anat Gilboa is an art historian and a visiting professor at UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. She has also held a position at the Schwalb Center for Israel and Jewish Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha as its first Schusterman Visiting Israel Professor in the Fall of 2013. She specializes in early-modern European art, Jewish and Israeli visual culture. She has a number of publications in American and European journals and conferences and has also published a book Images of the Feminine in Rembrandt’s Work. 

Sponsor(s): Germanic Languages, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies