Abstract

In 1964 an Israeli film was nominated for the first time ever for an Oscar as the best foreign film. This film has since become the most popular Israeli film ever made, and the herald of the only Israeli original film cycle: the Bourekas (1964-1977). The article, devoted fully to this film, Sallah, suggests a completely new reading of it. Until recently, critics tended to view Sallah as a subversive political satire set against the hegemony of the era's Zionist elites in Israel. The article, adopting a neo-Marxist approach to examining Sallah, suggests that the film actually serves as an "ideological state apparatus" for Zionist elites. However at the same time, the article suggests, Sallah reflects and promotes a change in the Zionist elite's ideology that happened at the time of its distribution: a turn from promoting Hebrewness as the major Zionist value to promoting Modernism as the central Zionist value. The Bourekas films that followed Sallah continued to emphasize this transformation in ideology, testifying to an ongoing centrality of modernism in Zionist ideology.

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