New Directions in Israeli Media, an edited volume, offers a comprehensive exploration of the evolving landscape of Israeli media in the post-cinematic age, building upon the editors’ previous work, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion (2011). In short, Netflix leads the trends.
The volume contains three parts, each addressing a facet of Israeli media. “Israeli Film in a Post-Cinematic Age” highlights how Israeli cinema navigates historical trauma and national memory often through innovative aesthetic strategies. Chapters in this part include Shmulik Duvdevani’s analysis of Avi Nesher’s trilogy and Olga Gershenson’s examination of “Palestinian Ghosts on Israeli Screens.”
Part II, “The Global Context of Israeli National Television,” examines how Israeli TV has gained international prominence via streaming platforms, with contributions like Homeland and Fauda that adapt local narratives for global audiences. This part emphasizes the shift toward populist aesthetics and the role of co-productions in amplifying Israeli content worldwide. Part III, “The Creative Imperatives of Online Media in Israel and Beyond,” explores the rise of digital platforms from the 2010s onward, focusing on new voices and technological innovations that have democratized content creation, including analyses of online series, genre fluidity, and transgender representations that highlight Israel’s leadership in digital media evolution.
Duvdevani’s analysis of Avi Nesher’s trilogy is representative of typical tendencies within Israeli scholarship on cinema. The name of the “development township” in which Turn Left at the End of the World (2004) takes place is not mentioned in the film itself, and Duvdevani claims that this symbolically indicates that its former Arabic name is “being “erased” by “Zionist Ashkenazi hegemony.” The film actually alludes to the town of Yeruham, with its mix of olim (immigrants) from India and Morocco who work in the local glass factory. In reality, however, the “development townships” in the Negev were not built on the ruins of Palestinian villages (the Arab population there was nomadic); hence, their names did not erase former Arabic ones. Later, the article cannot avoid mentioning the “Arab-Jew,” that elusive character who appears neither in Israeli cinema nor in Israel’s actual collective self-definition. Apparently this “Arab-Jew” continues to live and thrive only within the pages of academic research on Israeli cinema where it first came to life.
Itay Harlap analyzes Our Boys (2019) as a transnational docudrama that reinterprets the 2014 murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, whose killing by Jewish radicals drew widespread attention. The discussion scatters into numerous theories, and it references previous works, including a series about Kastner, a Jew who collaborated with the Nazis. The discussion veers into another direction when it turns to the film Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, 2005). Harlap reproaches the Israeli journalist Irit Linor for labeling this Palestinian film “antisemitic,” even though it employs antisemitic tropes bearing some similarities to the depiction of Jews in Nazi-era German films.
Harlap’s main argument concerns the portrayal of the Arab as a human being. According to the author, this type portrayal constitutes a revolutionary and innovative shift for the Israeli viewer. However, such a portrayal is not new and has appeared in many previous audiovisual works, such as Cup Final (1991) and Avanti Popolo (1986).
The volume’s scholarly integrity is occasionally challenged by politically charged assertions. This is notably evident in S. Greenberg’s contribution, which refers to: “the role of settlements in the ongoing, violent Israeli occupation of Palestine. Moreover, it also pinkwashes emotions associated with this notorious settlement aftermath of ethnic cleansing.”
By the way, the entire rant above pertains to scenes depicting kitchen-table conversations among transgender women.
Sariel Birnbaum • Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles
