"Everything is Connected to the Genocide." Intergenerational Memory, Diaspora Mobilization, and Armenian Youth Identities in Jerusalem
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.