Preface

In the last few years, scholars interested in Israeli culture in general and in Israeli cinema in particular have been able to add quite a few academic publications to their shelves, as more and more articles are published in journals. Books focusing on Israeli cinema as their subject of study are also becoming available in Hebrew, and in English and French, some of which are listed in the Notes below. ¹ The list of published books is still too short, compared to the volume of studies of other national cinemas—even those as young (60 years) and as limited in production (about 400 features) as Israeli cinema. Nevertheless, as part of a growing interest in the study of national ideologies, their effect on national culture and its structure and construction—and thanks to a plethora of other approaches to culture such as post-colonial, gender, homosexuality, and minority discourse, and their applications to the study of cinema—more and more students of culture are embracing the centrality of cinema to the understanding of cultural phenomena and processes.

These theoretical interests have coincided in Israel with a growing critical tendency to re-read texts of Zionism, Zionist culture, and Zionist ideology—an approach that has gained the name of “post-Zionism.” These studies do not accept the Zionist ethos as a given, but read culture as a product of the Zionist meta-narrative, and thus as the result of a process of exclusions and inclusions which has yet to be spelled out and analyzed. The result of this new approach has been a re-reading of many texts and cultural products, both canonical and from the periphery, produced by both major contributors to Hebrew and Israeli culture and by artists pushed to the margins—re-readings that have aimed at exposing the subordinating and, at the other extreme, the subversive modes these texts used and offered.

These readings have informed the study of Israeli cinema, as well. This is not to say that all scholars in the field are involved in the study of the reflection of Zionist ideology in films. But it does mean that the majority of writings today on Israeli cinema is heavily influenced by post-Zionist thought, and that most scholars do use current theories in their studies, whether they are about Feminism, Post-colonialism, Gay Studies, or are new understandings of nationalism and its relation to culture-construction. The major issues to interest both scholars and students have to do with reading films in terms of their relation to other cultural fields, to politics, social conflicts, and ideology. Topics such as the representation of “Others”—Palestinians, Mizrakhim, women, homosexuals, Orthodox Jews, and newcomers, all “Others” to the hegemonic Zionist ethos, which places as its protagonist a Jewish, Ashkenazi, heterosexual, secular, male, “native”—have become the main concern of conferences, articles, M.A. theses and Ph.D. dissertations, anthologies, and large sections in books. Courses offered in schools of film throughout the country focus on new theories and their contribution to the reading and interpretation of Israeli films, on ideological forms developed in Israeli films, and on modes of resistance offered by cinematic representations and critiques of social and political conflicts. In its turn, this richness of study and ideas makes its way into the study of Israeli culture, thus influencing the understanding of other media and forms of art. This interchange between studies of cinema, literature, theater and visual art, electronic and printed communication, political culture, and popular has media evolved into a huge field, within which a re-phrasing of Israeli culture is happening.

The study of Israeli cinema takes part today not only in the re-phrasing of understandings and ways of analysis of Israeli life and culture, but also in the development of the relation between theoretical concerns and cinematic representation. Thus, the study of cinema and literature, of feminism and the representation of women, historiography and its cinematic manifestations, cinema and identity politics, the representation of the body, national construction in films, construction of “place” and of “self” in cinema, “otherness” and its cinematic formulations are all developed not only as modes of interpretation and...