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Reviewed by:
  • Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion Edited by Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg
  • Haya S. Feig
ISRAELI CINEMA: IDENTITIES IN MOTION. Edited by Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg. Jewish History, Life and Culture. Pp. xvii + 373. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Cloth, $55.00.

For a few years I have been thinking of preparing a course about Israeli cinema. One of the problems I was having was that there is not a single, comprehensive book dealing with Israeli cinema. This meant that my students would need to assemble many articles written over time about the various topics related to Israeli cinema. Well, no need to research a good list of articles, this book is an answer to our request for a good comprehensive textbook about Israeli cinema.

From the moment I opened the book and looked at the table of contents, I realized that this will make life easier for anyone teaching about Israeli cinema. It includes almost any subject related to Israeli cinema one would look for when creating a course of this topic: from the first Israeli movies made during the 1920s and the 1930s through the movies made during and [End Page 474] about the Israeli wars, movies that deal with the diversity of Israeli society, even movies that project the Holocaust and the trauma it caused to the first, second, and even third generation. There is a part about Jewish orthodoxy on the one hand and Palestinian people and politics on the other. The last part deals with cinematic discourse such as queer-gay cinema, the kibbutz and its changes, and the collective memory. There is no doubt, this book can form the base for a full curriculum of a comprehensive undergraduate course on the subject.

The articles are short, to the point, and easy to read. Each of them has a good list of references, so students or teachers can learn each topic to a more profound level. The variety of movies mentioned in each article is good and most of the movies can be found in libraries and shops that sell Israeli movies.

It is impossible to create a book that will have everything in it, but there is one chapter I would have liked to see and that is Israeli documentaries. There are not many of those, but in recent years they portray a good picture of Israeli society. Also, there is not much about the change in Israeli cinema over time. The book is mostly a timeline discussion and a subject based treatment of the topic. I am not saying this as a criticism, but it is a point that anyone teaching Israeli culture who would like to use this book should take into account. As good as this book is, and it is excellent, it has its limitations.

In writing about movies that deal with controversial subjects such as Israeli wars, especially since 1967, and the Israeli Palestinian conflict, there is a relatively balanced opinion presented by most writers. In his chapter “From Hill to Hill” written by Uri Cohen (pp. 43–58) the writer deals with the change of approach of the different film makers starting from “Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer,” made by Thorold Dickinson, 1955, about the Independence War, up to “Beaufort,” made by Joseph Cedar, 2007, dealing with the last days of the IDF in Lebanon at the end of the first Lebanon war. Cohen writes about the comedy “Halfon Hill Doesn’t Answer” by Assi Dayan, 1976: “This…is the first real film to satirize the war machine itself and is among the earliest cinematic reactions to the 1973 war, dwelling affectionately on the degeneration of the Israeli military” (p. 49).

Another part of the book talks about ethnicity. There are three articles about ethnicity. This includes a discussion about the “Bureka films” from the 1970s and immigrants’ films. In his article, Yaron Shemer, discussed the “Mizrachi” cinema, writing about films made in the 1970s that at the time were snubbed by the majority of the viewers, yet became almost cult films since. He mentions the different films made in the 1970s and later, yet does not talk about the differences between films made...

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