| Abstract | Part of a forum on Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982). Zakhor was ahead of its time in establishing memory as a topic of scholarly investigation. However, it did not fully anticipate memory's ultimate significance as a larger cultural phenomenon. In identifying history as partly culpable for the erosion of memory, Yerushalmi fails to recognize the looming paradigm shift that was developing with respect to memory within Western cultural and intellectual life. The modern rise of history that Yerushalmi details in his book did not entail the evisceration of memory but rather an explosive growth both in scholarly studies of collective memory and in institutional efforts at forging collective memory. A central catalyst in this development was the Holocaust, whose growing prominence in American life deserved more attention in Yerushalmi's account than it received.
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