"Everything is Connected to the Genocide." Intergenerational Memory, Diaspora Mobilization, and Armenian Youth Identities in Jerusalem
Levenson, Lance · 2021
This ethnographic study examines how Armenian youth in Jerusalem construct their identities through inherited historical trauma and the pressures of contemporary conflict. Levenson draws on extended fieldwork at Jerusalem's Armenian school and participation in community life to trace how the genocide functions as the central axis of collective self-understanding, with young people declaring that everything in their lives connects back to it. The article shows how commemorative practices and diaspora activism become sites where inherited memory is actively reworked rather than passively received. Levenson demonstrates that memories are reinterpreted to construct novel identity narratives tied to an imagined Armenian transnation linking Jerusalem's small community to the global diaspora. The study contributes an unusually intimate portrait of one of the oldest continuous Armenian diaspora communities at a moment of demographic strain.
Read the publication ↗Citation
Levenson, Lance 2021. "Everything is Connected to the Genocide." Intergenerational Memory, Diaspora Mobilization, and Armenian Youth Identities in Jerusalem. International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2021), pp. 54–73 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0023. https://doi.org/10.51442/ijags.0023
What this offers a reader
Armenian teenagers in Jerusalem's Armenian Quarter explain in their own words how a century-old genocide shapes their friendships, protests, and sense of self today.
A school-based ethnography that operationalizes postmemory and transnationalism frameworks to show how commemoration actively produces, rather than merely transmits, diasporic identity.
A tender look at the young people keeping Armenian life alive in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, one of our most storied and most vulnerable communities.
A firsthand study of how Armenian young people in Jerusalem carry the memory of the 1915 genocide into their modern identities.
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