Humor as a Defense Mechanism: Dismantling Holocaust Symbols and Icons in Israeli Culture

For many years, Holocaust humor, satire and parody were considered borderline blasphemy in Israeli culture. Official agents of Holocaust memory still adhere to this approach. At the same time however, as of the 1990s, a new unofficial path of memory began taking shape. This alternative, subversive path still seeks to remember, albeit differently. Texts that combine the Holocaust with humor, satire and parody are major facets of this new memory. Based on Oren Baruch Stier’s definition of “Holocaust icons”, that is, visual pointers that act as vehicles of Holocaust memory (Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory. New York: Rutgers University Press, 2015 ), this chapter aims to analyze the ways in which over the last three decades Israeli Jews have tapped a range of cultural fields to huomoresly deconstruct Holocaust symbols and icons such as barbed wire, barking dogs, Hitler, Anna Frank and Auschwitz. Drawing on the research literature in the fields of humor studies, Holocaust studies, trauma studies and memory studies, this chapter analyzes examples from films, TV skits and satire shows, and social media to argue that in Israel, a post-traumatic society whose problematic security situation only reinforces constant anxiety, and where canonic memory agents foster the acting out of the trauma, Holocaust humor is a much-needed defense mechanism. It is the way many Israeli Jews dismantle the factors underlying fear so as to protect the individual and collective soul from sinking into constant victimization and anxiety.