Cultural Diversity in the Media - Essay Example

?What role may a better understanding of history play in understanding media representations of diversity? History as Tool in Assessing Media Representations of Jews Understanding history, in particular reflecting on the lessons that it has taught us, is invaluable in making sense of the representations of diversity that media present to us. Being armed with a historical perspective makes us both sensitive to and critical to how media present certain ethic groups or racial identities. This paper will look in particular at the case of Jews in the Holocaust and will prove that being informed with a historical lens in imperative in trying to sort out, understand and critique media representations of the Jews and Israel at the present time. This paper will take on two parts. The first part will reflect on the portrayal of Jews themselves in media representations of them in relation to the Holocaust, focusing on the wounds wracked by that painful chapter in world history and their responses towards it. It will essentially use history to understand emotion and identity. The second part will take on a more contemporary approach and will look at how Israel is being portrayed in the media today, under the current context of the Middle East Conflict between Israel and Palestine. It will essentially argue that not only is history per se important, but it is also important what kind of history, and there is a need to be critical of how history is framed and deployed. History as tool to understand emotion and identity in media Media representations of Jews particularly during the holocaust have always shown the Jews as filled with so much pain and tragedy. And indeed, it is difficult to understand this if one is not imbued with a historical context. To give an example, we turn to the movie “Forgiving Doctor Mengele”, which was released in 2006. The film is about Eva Mozes Kor, a victim of the Holocaust and her decision to forgive the Nazis who killed her family, in particular Dr. Josef Mengele and his staff, who experimented on her and her twin sister Miriam Mozes, as well as approximately 1,400 other twin pairs. Along the film, there are different frames and situations, but the grand narrative of the documentary seems to be the question about the soundness of her forgiveness: portrayed as misguided and divisive by some, and inspirational by others. There are four main narratives, which are also the crucial and more dramatic points of the piece: Miriam’s death and the start of Eva’s journey; the interview with Dr. Hans Munch, a former Nazi doctor; a meeting in the West Bank with Palestinian teachers; and the destruction of the museum she built in memory of her sister by neo-Nazi hate-criminals. The documentary gives us situated knowledge, a personal experience of the Holocaust and forgiveness, although its links to larger historical and social facts are diffused and fragmented. It can be said, however, that ‘Forgiving Dr. Mengele’ is a classic Holocaust documentary film, in the sense that is meant to instruct through evidence; it poses truth[s] as a moral imperative1. But what is the media representations embedded in the film? And how does history help us understand these? A core idea being forwarded – by way of providing an example of embedded representations -- is the notion of ‘forgiveness’, its complexity and multiple dimensions. Indeed, it is noticeable how difficult is to portray what exactly is forgiveness in general, and what is the exact meaning of forgiveness for Eva, as in the debate at the Jewish center in Chicago, where she is "grilled" on the meaning of forgiveness and her right to do so, in the wake of those that continue suffering through the trauma of the acts. There is no way that we can understand the poignant meanings of this scene without having an idea of this painful history that the Jews had suffered. Representing history through film or any other media is always fraught with issues. First of all, it is the question of the limits of the language what Hanna Arendt2 calls the ‘unimaginable’, according to her, describing experiences that ‘can never be fully embraced by the imagination’, and that, as a consequence, can ‘never be fully reported’ leaves gaps in the story that brings some other problems besides the incapacity itself to express the content of that pain and cruelty. Secondly, as she writes, ‘anyone speaking or writing about the concentration camps is regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality’3 It is clear that the notion itself of forgiveness is very open, subjective, and depends of many contextual factors (e.g. time, the genuineness of it, asking or not of apologies, and so on); and the ontological and epistemological lenses with which it is treated (e.g. religious, philosophical, legal angles, etc.4 Along all the movies there are different scenes and situations that question the quality and the extension of Eva’s claimed forgiveness. The main representation of this would be the discussion with the Palestinian lecturers, where is noticeable her body language, defensive and unwilling to listen the perspectives and feelings of the Arab scholars and teachers. And second, her reaction after the fire in the Kor's Terre Haute Holocaust Memorial, where her face is framed very close, as if the camera would be looking for any sign or clue of a ‘negative’ reaction. Here, we see that pain and trauma are regarded as so fundamentally inaccessible and unshakeable that any attempt at recounting one’s experiences is haunted by the stark fact that one’s suffering will always and necessarily be received by others with radical doubt. The poverty of communicating traumatic experience was also expressed by Walter Benjamin, who suggests that ‘witnessing war . . . takes away the ability to speak about it’5. These profound truths would be difficult to understand without the lens of history. To give another example, in terms of categorization, essentialism and normalizing, a critique of the movie is that when dealing with such a complex issue as forgiveness, it tends oversimplify or reduce the different potential survivors’ responses of mass atrocities to a dual scenario: forgive or do not forgive. The experience of different fields dealing with reconciliation process, as international justice, mental health, history, education, among others, can give testimony of how a great variety of response there is between forgiveness or not6; and how important is to understand the personal experience of each of the people to understand their own approaches. The film fails in this sense. It is difficult to make an overall or comparative evaluation of the ideals for justice, healing, memory and reparations for the victims or even less, look for a common formula for success, since each society has its own history, culture and socio-political dynamics. Regarding how identity is represented in the film, Jewish links very strongly their identity as Jews with their experiences as victims and survivors of the Holocaust. In this way, the notion of victimhood would be a monolithic and closed representation without any reference of other categories that marked differences in this experience of victimhood as class, gender, age, etc. and that, would produce different conceptions of forgiveness for example. Representation constructs identities and subject-positions for its users7. To quote: Identities in contemporary Israel, as in most of the contemporary world, derive from a multiplicity of sources -nationality, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexuality and religion- that may conflict and thus lead to a society market by fragmentation and polarization [...] one of the three mayor foundational sites of the struggle of the Israeli identity: the Holocaust, the question of the Orient, and (in an ironic historical twist of the Jewish question) the so-called Palestinian question.8 It is not just history that is important, but what version of history and whose frame But a very strong critique of the film, which would not have been possible without understanding the historical context, particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict is the absence of narrative about the Palestinian conflict, currently, one of the most denied conflicts, but would have made the watcher more easily understand the scene with Eva and the Palestines. But this is completely omitted in the film, reproducing the silencing of it in the world. To quote: Cultural attitudes are already encoded in language, and these determine what belongs to the realm of the understandable, the utterable, the ‘real.’ Single texts-whether they are pornography, ‘high literature,’ the news, films, political debates, advertisements-mostly repeat and recirculate in the stylistic conventions of that particular medium, what is already there. The ‘real’ world is constantly being transmitted and created through textual and visual discourse.9 Which now brings us to other media representations of Israel in a post-Holocaust period. Now we see that media overwhelmingly supports Israel. In the Israeli-Palestine conflict, a website called If Americans Knew published a report in the year 2006 analysing the coverage of the Associated Press (AP) of the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians. It had discovered that there was a correlation between the likelihood of a death being covered by the news wire agency and the nationality of the person who was killed, such that there was a greater likelihood that an Israeli death would be reported over a Palestinian death. To quote: In 2004, there were 141 reports in AP headlines or first paragraphs of Israeli deaths. During this time, there had actually been 108 Israelis killed (the discrepancy is due to the fact that a number of Israeli deaths were reported multiple times). During the same period, 543 Palestinian deaths were reported in headlines or first paragraphs. During this time, 821 Palestinians had actually been killed10. The tendency of media to report Palestinian atrocities and downplay Israeli atrocities has been explored, but has not really prompted much action or rectification. In the same website, an article written by Alison Weir in 200911 has illustrated how the chronology of violence in the Israeli-Arab conflict has routinely been reversed to make it appear that the Palestinians have always made the first strike when in fact, in several occasions the violence emanated from the Israelis but it was not reported. If a uni-dimensional sense of history was used, then we fail to look at the social and political context that makes mainstream media and virtually the whole mainstream world ascribe acts of terrorism and violence to the Palestinian groups without looking, first at whether or not Israel is not guilty of such violence as well. Of course, one must never justify terrorism, and this paper does not. The argument is that judgment of behaviour deemed “terrorist” behaviour must be done with an even hand – to look at the atrocities committed by both sides and assign liability based on an objective assessment of the situation. More importantly, it is not just history that matters in looking at media representations of ethnic groups, but what kind of history and whose perspective. In telling the narrative from a particular vantage point, it is important to ask, are there other vantage points, other historical narratives that are obscured? Harms and Ferry12 remind us that: “Over the course of the war, approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes and into Arab-held Palestine or the surrounding Arab countries. The remaining Arab population was distributed between Israel (150,000), the West Bank (400,000) and Gaza (60,000). (99)”. What appears to be lesser known is the degree to which these dispossessions were Zionist policy. Harms and Ferry demonstrate that Arab transfer was a key strategy by top-level Zionist leadership, throughout history, in its desire to build a Jewish state in territory that had Arab settlers13. The book quoted David Ben-Gurion as saying, in 1937: “Transfer is what will make possible a comprehensive settlement programme. Thankfully, the Arab people have vast empty areas. Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our probabilities to carry out the transfer on a large scale.”14 Conclusion This paper has made two points. First, this paper has argued the need to have a historical perspective when reflecting on and perceiving media representations of certain ethnic groups, and in this particular paper, the Jews have been chosen by the author as ethnic group. Focus was made on the film “Forgiving Doctor Mengele” as indicative of a typical media representation of Jews during the Holocaust period. The second point made by this paper is that while a historical perspective is important, it is likewise important to ask “whose history” and from what perspective. As example to illustrate this point, the example of the Arab Israeli conflict was used and the uneven media coverage of Israel and Palestine was discussed. In sum, history is necessary to go forward. Looking at the past is necessary to illumine the present. But an important question to likewise ask is “are we looking at all versions of the past”? Bibliography Arendt, H. The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1958 Dauphine, E. ‘The Politics of the Body in Pain. Reading the Ethics of Imagery’ in Security Dialogues 38(2), 2007. ‘Deadly Distortion: Associated Press coverage of Israeli and Palestinian Deaths.’ IfAmericansKnew.org. 26 Apr. 2006. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/ap-report.html Dobles, I., 2009, Memorias del dolor. Consideraciones acerca de las Comisiones de la Verdad en America Latina, Arlekin: San Jose. Harms, Gregory and Ferry, Tom. The Palestine-Israel Conflict: A Basic Introduction. Second Edition. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Loshitzky, Yosefa. Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen. Texas: University of Texas Press. 2011. Meijer, M. ‘Countering Textual Violence: On the Critique of Representation and the Importance of Teaching its Methods' in Women's Studies International Forum 16(4), 1993. Minow, M. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing history After Genocide and Mass Violence, Beacon Press. Boston, 1998. Rabinowits, P., They must be represented. The Politics of Documentary. Verso. New York. 1994. Weir, Allison. ‘Killing Palestinians Doesn’t Count: Is a Ceasefire Breached Only When An Israeli is Killed?’ IfAmericansKnew.com. 29 Jan. 2009. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/cfb.html Read More