Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments I wish to thank the following institutions for their financial support: the Authority for Research and Development at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and especially Shula Woltz and Ofer Kela, who were very helpful in obtaining and securing this support; The Levi Eshkol Institute for Economic, Social and Political Research, Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University, and its director Yoram Bilu; and the Shaine Center for Research in Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University, and its director Michael Shalev. I also thank the following institutions and persons for lending me stills: Israel Film Archive/Jerusalem Cinematheque, its director Lia Van Leer, and head of research and library services Costel Safirman and his deputy Nirit Avni; Tsipi Reibenbach; Havakuk Levison, Amos Gitai, and Ilan Moscovitch; Yehuda (Judd) Ne’eman; Dani Setton and Set Productions; Nissim Dayan; Shmuel Hasfari, Hanna Azulay Hasfari, and Yoram Kislev, H.L.S. Ltd.; Dan Wolman; Nicole de Castro; Daniel Wachsmann and Amnon Rubinstein. I am also deeply grateful to Haim Bresheeth for his support; to Levana Nir for allowing me to use her interesting work; to Jessica Bonn for her intelligent comments; to Amy Kronish for her helpful tips; and to Marilyn Kulik, director of the Spielberg Archive, Hebrew University, and Hillel Tryster, her deputy, for their help and generosity. Special thanks goes to John Downing for his invaluable insight and perceptive reading and to Jim Burr, the Humanities Editor of the University of Texas Press, whose faith in my project and persistent support brought this book into being. Some of the material used in this book has already appeared in print in somewhat different form and appears here courtesy of the following publishers . The analysis of Don’t Touch My Holocaust appeared in The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures, and Dynamics, edited by T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper (Routledge, 2000), and inVisual Culture and the Holocaust, edited by Barbie Zelizer (Rutgers University Press, 2001). A slightly different version of chapter 4 appeared under the ix title “Authenticity in Crisis: Shur and New Israeli Forms of Ethnicity,” in Media , Culture, and Society 18, no. 1 (January 1996): 87–103 and is reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd. The analysis of My Michael in chapter 5 appeared under the title “From Orientalist Discourse to Family Melodrama: Oz and Volman’s My Michael,” in Edebiyat: A Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures 5, no. 1 (1994): 99–123. x Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen ...