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July 2019 Vol. 56 No. 11

Transmitted Wounds constitutes a significant contribution to the scholarship on the role of media in the transmission and working through of traumatic experiences. Pinchevski, on the communication and journalism faculty at Hebrew University in Israel, discusses five case studies. The first is the radiocasting of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961—an event that transformed Israel from a society of repressed silence to one of bearing witness, facilitated perhaps by the separation of voice from body. Additional cases include the video testimonies of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project; military drone operators who witness on screen the casualties they commit; the New Dimensions in Testimony project, which brings recorded responses of Holocaust survivors to life in a three-dimensional format; and the use of virtual reality therapy as a strategy to diminish and manage PTSD. “What ultimately connects the different cases analyzed here … is human vulnerability as made tangible by and through media” (p. 100). This is an important book for anyone interested in the relationships among media, trauma, and historical memory.

--K. Sorensen, Bentley University

Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.