Abstract
eva.stories is an Israeli Instagram project. Entrepreneur Mati Kochavi and his daughter, Maya, adapted the diary of thirteen-year-old Eva Heyman, a Jewish Hungarian girl who was murdered in Auschwitz, into Instagram stories that were uploaded to Instagram on the Israeli Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day in 2019. Combining the Holocaust with Instagram, a social network service that is highly popular among young people and is associated by the public with silliness and the mundane, stirred up considerable controversy in Israel during its promotional campaign. Opinions changed after the stories went viral (1.8 million followed Eva’s Instagram account at one point, for a total of 300 million views internationally), and the project was commended for having altered Holocaust commemoration. This article takes a historiographic and cultural approach to analyze the project in the context of seventy years of Holocaust memory in Israel. It examines the intersection between a vertical plane that deals with knowledge and the transfer of information and a horizontal plane that deals with new ways of presenting Holocaust memory. It is argued the project may have extended the vertical plane of knowledge but failed to augment the horizontal plane of Israeli Holocaust commemoration.
Recommended Citation
Steir-Livny, Liat
(2020)
"eva.stories: Disrespect or a Successful Change in Holocaust Memory?,"
Jewish Film & New Media: Vol. 8:
Iss.
2, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/jewishfilm/vol8/iss2/1