The Ma'ale School: Catalyst for the Entrance of Religious Zionists into the World of Media Production

In 1989, the Ma'ale School of Television, Film, and the Arts was founded in Jerusalem with the primary purpose of providing religiously observant Jews with the opportunity to receive the appropriate training that would prepare them to become engaged in the world of Israeli film and television production in a manner that is informed by the spirit of religious Zionism.¹ Until now the school has received little scholarly attention, and it still maintains a relatively low profile in Israeli society as a whole. Ma'ale, however, merits careful consideration for three main reasons: (1) The establishment of Ma'ale has constituted an important new stage in the development of the relationship of religious Zionists to modernity in general and to the secular majority culture in Israel in particular. (2) The school represents the first sustained attempt to arrive at a synthesis between traditional Jewish values and the relatively new visually-oriented field of media production, thereby raising important questions about the relationship between Judaism and the visual arts in general and film and television production in particular. (3) The films produced at Ma'ale as graduate projects attempt to explore issues of Jewish religiosity in ways that had been largely absent from the history of Israeli film and television production until the founding of the school, thereby suggesting the potential for the emergence of religiously-oriented trends in the world of Israeli media in the future.

Ma'ale as a New Direction for Religious Zionism

In a recent study of Israeli religiosity, Yair Sheleg notes that in the early years of the State, religious Zionists found much to admire in the idealism and sense of national purpose that pervaded the general secular culture, which was then still largely dominated by Labor Zionist discourse. Convinced that it was possible to synthesize a nationalist Israeli identity with the observance of Jewish tradition, religious Zionists "aspired . . . to be included, and often even to assimilate, into this idealistic atmosphere."² The prevailing religious Zionist consensus at the time was, as Menachem Klein puts it, "to bear the burden of building the nation and the state alongside secular Zionism. . . ."³ Daniel Tropper of the Gesher Foundation—an organization that is dedicated to bridging the gap between religious and secular Jews in Israel—writes of "a symbiotic relationship . . . between secular and religious Zionism," which was reflected, on the political level, in the frequent participation by the National Religious Party (NRP) in government coalitions dominated by the Labor Party.⁴ The NRP's participation in these coalitions was based on its support of the government's domestic and foreign policies in exchange for the government's ongoing affirmation of the religious arrangement established in the early years of the State. This arrangement included legislation mandating some degree of religious observance in the public sphere. Emblematic of this largely accomodationist approach to the majority secular society was the founding in 1955 of the religious Zionist-oriented Bar-Ilan University. Bar-Ilan was designed to provide religious Zionist Israelis with an opportunity to continue their education in traditional Jewish sources and remain steadfast in their religious observance while receiving the kind of academic and professional education that would allow them to contribute to Israeli society as a whole.⁵

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, religious Zionism has undergone a radical transformation in self-perception. Less willing to accommodate themselves to the majority secular culture, religious Zionists have been more inclined to affirm the unique features of their identity, which they have come to see as possessing an intrinsic superiority to that of secular Israelis. Two factors may be cited as leading to this transformation. One factor, suggested by Yair Sheleg, was that as secular Israeli culture came increasingly under the influence of late twentieth-century moral laxity beginning in the 1960s, religious Zionists began to develop a...