False Nostalgia and Cultural Amnesia: The City of Tel Aviv in Israeli Cinema of the 1990s

This article deals with the cinematic representation of the city of Tel-Aviv in the last decade, beginning with the end of the first Intifadah in the late 1980s and ending with the outburst of the second Intifadah in 2000. The emergence of new identities in this seemingly peaceful decade—due to the very large wave of immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union and the emergence of post-Zionist ideology—created the ground for a new form of contestation, characterized by passivity and oblivion. The purpose of this article is to analyze the cinematic gaze through which the city is reflected, using three major strategies—heterotopia, simulacra, and amnesia.