1st Edition
Israeli Television Global Contexts, Local Visions
The essays in this anthology study Israeli television, its different forms of representation, audiences and production processes, past and present, examining Israeli television in both its local, cultural dynamics, and global interfaces.
The book looks at Israeli television as a creator, negotiator, guardian and warden of collective Israeli memory, examining instances of Israeli original television exported and circulated to the US and the global markets, as well as instances of American, British, and global TV formats, adapted and translated to the Israeli scene and screen. The trajectory of this volume is to shed light on major themes and issues Israeli television negotiates: history and memory, war and trauma, Zionism and national disillusionment, place and home, ethnicity in its unique local variations of Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, Israeli–Arabs and Palestinians, gender in its unique Israeli formations, specifically masculinity as shaped by the military and constant violent conflict, femininity in this same context as well as within a complex Jewish oriented society, religion, and secularism.
Providing multifaceted portraits of Israeli television and culture in its Middle Eastern political and local context, this book will be a key resource to readers interested in media and television studies, cultural studies, Israel, and the Middle East.
Introduction
Part 1. Television, History, and Collective Memory: TV Comes to the Israeli Home
1. Remembering Television in Mainstream Jewish Israel: From One Nation-One Channel to Commercial Tribalization
Jérôme Bourdon, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik
2. Dis-covering the Holocaust: Third Generation Discourse and Collective Memory in the documentary The Flat
Ruth Diskin
3. "Remember Them All": Reimagining Collective Memory in Sayed Kashua’s Israeli Sitcom Arab Labor
Shiri Goren
Part 2. Trauma, Terror and the Nation
4. Television in a Time of Terror: Trauma and Singular Plurality in the Series Fauda
Nurith Gertz and Raz Yosef
5. The Impossible Homecoming: The Israeli Television Series Prisoners of War (Hatufim)
Yael Munk
6. In the Name of the Father: The Paternal Lineage in the Television Drama Series Betipul and In Treatment
Miri Talmon
Part 3. Discourses of Place
7. A Place Outside of Place: Jerusalem in Television Drama of the Early 2000s
Anat Zanger
8. Places and Non-places in Israeli Music Videos as a New Type of Localization
Arielle Friedma
9. A Family Photo across the Atlantic Ocean: The Drama Series Bat Yam New York
Orna Lavy-Flint
Part 4. Varieties of Television Drama: The Popular and Social Discourse
10. Painting the Wall: Generations and Gentrification in the Israeli Television Drama Florentine
Alon Judkovsky
11. Mary Lou's Glee: Screening Young Gay Men's Musical Odyssey in Israeli and American TV Musicals
Gilad Padva
12. Transmedia Storytelling on Israeli Drama for Children
Yuval Gozansky and Gabriela Jonas Aharoni
13. Our Telenovelas: Israeli Telenovelas and Globalization
Gabriela Jonas Aharoni
Part 5. Humor and Identity Politics
14. Not Just Another Day at the Office: On the Subversive Dimension of the Israeli Adaptation of British Series The Office
Ronen Gil
15. Beyond the Chamber Quintet: Holocaust Humor on Israeli Television in the 2000s
Liat Steir-Livny
16. Political Opponents as Unruly Women: Gender Representations of Body, Voice and Space in Israeli Televised Satire
David Levin
Part 6. Documentary and Reality Television: Negotiating Israeliness
17. Identity, Politics and Everyday Life: Tomer Heymann's The Way Home
Dafna Hirsch
18. Privacy and Exposure on Israel’s Reality TV Show Big Brother
Amit Lavie-Dinur and Yuval Karniel
19. Mother Rules? Wife Swap Becomes Israeli
Tal Kurt and Miri Talmon
Biography
Miri Talmon is a scholar of media culture, cinema, and television, who specializes in the research and teaching of comparative approaches to the Israeli and American film and television cultures. She teaches at The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel-Aviv University. Talmon is the author of Israeli Graffiti: Nostalgia, Groups and Collective Identity in Israeli Cinema (2001, Hebrew) and the editor, with Yaron Peleg, of the anthology Israeli Cinema—Identities in Motion (2011).
Yael Levy holds a PhD from the Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, where she teaches courses in film, television, race, and feminist theories. She has published articles regarding gender, race, sexuality, and textuality in film and television, and her works have appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Lexington Books, and more.
