The National is Personal: Domestic Photographs in Israel’s Authorized Digital Heritage

Abstract This article explores the consequences of the digital heritagization of domestic photographs that the State of Israel has initiated as part of its aspiration to settle increasing tensions between traditional national values and modern identities in Israel’s Jewish hegemonic social sphere. The process has been realized through the implementation of the community-based crowdsourcing initiative Israel Revealed to the Eye. Launched in 2011, it was designed to identify valued expressions of perceived national heritage in the photographs kept in the households of Israeli citizens across the country, and incorporate them into a centralized database for their safeguarding, study and public deployment. The article opens with an investigation of the various circumstances that have officially led the state to consider domestic photographs as cultural resources of national significance. As well as examining whose heritage the digitized photographs effectively safeguard once absorbed into the database, it then analyzes how their collection through coordinated crowdsourcing activities has reconditioned definitions and understanding of national heritage in the country. In doing so, the article demonstrates that the digital heritagization of the photographs has assisted in mitigating citizens’ conflictual approaches to Israel’s national heritage without repressing contestations of the dominant cultural status quo.