Ethics and Responsibility: The Feminization of the New Israeli Documentary

The article characterizes the nature of several recent Israeli documentary productions. Following Levinas's concept of responsibility toward the Other, it reviews the various forms of alterity that seem to dominate today's Israeli documentaries. Beginning with the forgotten Edna Politi's Anou Banou: The Daughters of Utopia (1983), which engaged with the untold memories of the first Zionist women pioneers, it continues with more recent productions, focusing on the increasing number of women filmmakers, who in the past were traditionally voiceless. The article contends that the entrance of women into the traditionally male playground of filmmaking, particularly during the tense political times of the last twenty years, has paved the way for a more sensitive, empathic discourse on Self and Other, a discourse that is no longer limited to women's filmmaking. This new tendency, which can be related to as the "feminization" of the Israeli documentary discourse, criticizes the invisibility of society's weaker subjects and should be interpreted as an appeal for the creation of a new civil order in Israel.