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No. 56: Waltz With Bashir

Drawn out memories

by
Allison Hoffman
December 06, 2011
Ari Folman in Waltz With Bashir(Sony Pictures)
Ari Folman in Waltz With Bashir(Sony Pictures)

2008, dir. Ari Folman. As a people, Jews are committed to the task of remembering. The flight from Egypt, the shaming of Haman, the heroics of the Maccabees—it was all there, ingrained long before the Holocaust cemented the collective responsibility to never forget. In the 1980s, Art Spiegelman used a comic to explore the Nazi genocide, paving the way for the Israeli artist Ari Folman to use animation to convey the confused memories he and other Israelis of his generation shared of the 1982 Lebanon War. The result is both intensely specific and starkly universal.

Allison Hoffman is a senior editor at Tablet Magazine. Her Twitter feed is @allisont_dc.