The traumas and catastrophes of modernity uprooted and obliterated lands, cultures, and people; and in the wake of these disasters, mnemonic practices and mnemonic communities were disrupted, dismembered, and sometimes destroyed. In response to the assaults on memory, those in the social sciences and the humanities have tried to make sense of the effects of dramatic change and mass trauma on mnemonic communities. Much of the recent scholarship on social memory centers on the globalization of memory-the tendency of some memories to gain widespread purchase transnationally and transculturally-especially those of traumatic events, such as colonial pasts, genocides, state violence, and the Holocaust. An effect of the globalization of memory is the primacy of certain memories over others; popular theoretical paradigms have emerged in recent years to broaden our understanding of the social memory of these events, such as the "politics of regret" by Jeffrey Olick (2007), "mimetic memories" by Kathleen Stewart (1996), "regimes of memory" by Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin (2003), and "multi-directional memory" by Michael Rothberg (2008) among others. We engage with these concepts and theories, but do so in order to reinvigorate an older concept of memory theory, articulated first by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the twentieth century: screen memory. Here, we argue for the concept of screen memory as a way to both conceptualize and trouble contemporary notions of social memory. In the past, screen memory has been viewed and employed rather one-dimensionally as a memory that obscures other memories by blocking or replacing them (Freud 1901). Freud argued that memories from childhood may be incorrectly recalled or recalled in a way that magnifies or

Since the mid-1990s, Israeli television has broadcast soldiers’ memorial videos made by families commemorating their lost loved one. The videos are broadcast only one day a year during the National Memorial Day as part of an orchestrated, nationwide commemoration and mourning. In Israeli society these video productions are deemed private and personal, therefore existing outside political, economic, institutional and aesthetic discourses. This article argues that the positioning of family-made video productions outside the social sphere obscures the politics and economies of Israeli cultural memory. To evaluate the social impetus of family-made memorial videos, the article traces the history of their emergence in the public view and highlights two parallel processes of privatization: the privatization of commemoration and memorialization in Israel, and the privatization of the Israeli public broadcast system. It also explores the appropriation of such home movies by state institutions (the archives in particular) and official historiography, and proposes three concepts for the discussion: intimacy, fetish and cliché. It concludes by interpreting the videos’ intimate storytelling within the public, digital and broadcast sphere as a cultural and ritualistic speech-convention that projects political viewpoints and understandings.

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