{"title":"A British-Jewish Film Genre?: Consider Gasbags (1941)","authors":"M. Berkowitz","doi":"10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.2.0139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.2.0139","url":null,"abstract":"There is sparse comment on the feature-length movie Gasbags (Marcel Varnel, Walter Forde, UK, 1941), which starred Bud Flanagan (1896–1968, born Chaim Weintrop), the leader of the “Crazy Gang” comedy troupe and a performer clearly marked as a Jew. Gasbags is in many respects comparable to Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (USA, 1940) and, similarly, includes a schlemiel posing as Hitler. Jewish elements are prominent in other Crazy Gang films, especially A Fire Has Been Arranged (Leslie S. Hiscott, UK, 1935) and O-Kay for Sound (Marcel Varnel, UK, 1937). What differentiates Gasbags from other expressions of wartime humor is the extent to which it confronts social-class divisions. It also reflects the degree to which the British film business was comfortable with Jewish approaches, which would change in the 1950s. The British Film Institute hails Gasbags as one of two 1940 films “so outrageously disrespectful of the Nazi menace” that it retains “a surreal effectiveness”—yet it is not often shown or studied.","PeriodicalId":40351,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Film & New Media-An International Journal","volume":"100 1","pages":"139 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83339857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Eforgan’s Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor","authors":"Miriam Spiro","doi":"10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.2.0207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.2.0207","url":null,"abstract":"On Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (revised 2d edition). By Estel Eforgan. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013. 296 pp., 978-0853039150 (pb). US $32.95.When actor and screenwriter Leslie Howard died in a mysterious plane crash over the Bay of Biscay in June 1943, the Guardian obituary described his most outstanding quality: \"the intensely English quality which made him popular everywhere.\"1 Even today, Howard is remembered primarily for his roles as English aristocrat in films such as The Scarlet Pimpernel (Harold Young, UK, 1934) and Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard, UK, 1938), or as tragic hero in productions like Of Human Bondage ( John Cromwell, USA, 1934) and Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming [George Cukor], USA, 1939). As a symbol of refinement and gentlemanliness, Howard's character spoke to the social instability British audiences were experiencing due to political crisis and war. It was a time when conceptions of \"Englishness\" were being challenged-not least because of the influx of Jewish migrants and refugees escaping persecution in Europe who created a space of difference in British society. Howard, as Estel Eforgan's meticulously researched biography, Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor, reveals, was nothing if not aware of the social and political influences of his dramatic persona.Eforgan's biography is a compelling and thorough overview of Howard's life and career within the context of social and political upheaval, migration, and war. As such it makes an important contribution to the fields of media and cultural studies, as well as Jewish studies, revealing the influential role that actors and filmmakers played in the political arena. As Eforgan uncovers, there was more to Howard's persona as \"ideal Englishman\" than most people consider. Leslie Howard Steiner, whose father was a Hungarian Jew and whose mother's origins were also Jewish (from Russia and East Prussia), was intensely committed to political activism and anti-Nazi efforts in the years leading up to World War II. And while the biography covers much more than that-including Howard's career on the English stage in the 1920s and the launch of his stardom in New York and Hollywood-Eforgan makes clear that by the mid-1930s Howard was making career and life choices that were influenced by politics. More specifically, he began to use his fame as a tool to resist Hitler's rise to power and the persecution of Jews in Europe.Eforgan's sympathy for her subject will strike a chord with readers and personalize the exhaustive amount of detail on Howard's life. The chapters that trace Howard's development as an actor, screenwriter, producer, director, and public intellectual from the 1920s to the 1940s are filled with lively anecdotes as well as with valuable comments on the social and cultural milieu. Some of the most entertaining points in the biography include Eforgan's musings on Howard's stage mishaps and love affairs, and the colorful cha","PeriodicalId":40351,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Film & New Media-An International Journal","volume":"36 1","pages":"207 - 210"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88518826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Niv’s Look Back into the Future: The Israeli Cinema and the 1982 Lebanon War: Israeli Cinema Faces the Specter of the Lebanon War Blindfolded","authors":"Slava Greenberg","doi":"10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.2.0211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.2.0211","url":null,"abstract":"On Niv's Look Back into the Future: The Israeli Cinema and the 1982 Lebanon War Israeli Cinema Faces the Specter of the Lebanon War Blindfolded Look Back into the Future: The Israeli Cinema and the 1982 Lebanon War. By Kobi Niv. Tel Aviv: New World Publishing (Hotzaat Olam Hadash), 2014. 158 pp., ISBN 978-965-920496-0 (pb), Israel 53 NIS [Hebrew].The specter of the First Lebanon War and the eighteen-year occupation of southern Lebanon still haunts Israeli society. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Israeli film industry. Kobi Niv's Look Back into the Future: The Israeli Cinema and the 1982 Lebanon War is an exploration of three Israeli feature films-Beaufort ( Joseph Cedar, 2007), Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), and Lebanon (Shmuel Maoz, 2009)-that won much international acclaim (including several major prizes) as innovative investigations into the horrors and lingering scars of that war. Niv tries to understand the attraction these films may have for audiences in Israel and overseas, but mainly what they may reveal about Israeli society today.Lebanon takes place during the first day of the war ( June 6, 1982), as it is seen by an Israeli tank crew through the canon periscope. Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary following the middle-aged director in his journey to resurrect suppressed memories of his involvement in combat during the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps (September 16-18, 1982). Beaufort takes place eighteen years later, during the last days of the Israeli occupation in Lebanon (2000). It is the story of soldiers in the \"last Israeli stronghold,\" the ancient crusader fortress of Beaufort.Because he is interested in the films' success in the stories they tell, and in the social meanings they hold as contemporary artifacts, Niv offers a dual perspective: cinematic and sociopolitical. At the cinematic level, Niv finds that, despite differences in genre and aesthetics, all three films share a view of the Israeli soldier as an innocent victim trapped in a war he is unable to make sense of, and he is consequently neither accountable nor responsible for his actions. Drawing from political analysis and historical data, Niv demonstrates that the films rewrite history so as to minimize Israel's active role in it, in particular Israeli involvement in the war crimes at Sabra and Shatila. Niv provides ample historical evidence of Israel's active involvement-at all levels of military and governmental hierarchy-in the Lebanese war, yet the films deny it. In particular Waltz with Bashir and Lebanon, which both acknowledge the connection between the Israeli military and the Christian Lebanese Phalangists, attempt to detach their protagonists from any real-time knowledge of events or retrospective responsibility for them. This is especially reprehensible to Niv, as the films were produced nearly twenty years after the events took place, and their directors clearly have this information today.The story of Beaufort is ","PeriodicalId":40351,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Film & New Media-An International Journal","volume":"34 1","pages":"211 - 213"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84284387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ritual Reconstructed Project, 2014–2015","authors":"Searle Kochberg","doi":"10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.2.0186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.2.0186","url":null,"abstract":"End of Project Event, JW3 (Jewish Community Centre, London, UK), November 24, 2015. Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research CouncilIn The Savage Mind1 Claude Levi-Strauss explains how mythological thought and rites are continuously broken down and rebuilt again through new constructions of already existing sets of events, and how rituals serve to bring unity to previously separate groups. This makes ritual particularly fertile ground for bricolage-Levi- Strauss's term for tinkering: the (re)working of found materials to piece together new structures, identities, and rituals.On November 24, 2015, at London's JW3-the Jewish Community Centre-a yearlong Jewish Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, and Intersex (LGBTQI) research project culminated in a bricolage \"happening\" of ritual objects, photographs, storytelling, rabbinical dialogues on \"queering religion,\" and an evening screening of the project's five LGBTQI Jewish ritual films-all part of the Ritual Reconstructed/Connected Communities project, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. In its efforts Ritual Reconstructed has in no small way been facilitated by Liberal Judaism, which in the UK has led the way on LGBTQI inclusivity by being responsive to social need and by being \"practical in so many ways,\" to quote Rabbi Janet Darley.2As a filmmaker, I have had the great pleasure in the last four years of working with the LGBTQI Jewish community on three big projects: my film-based PhD, My Jewish London; the Rainbow Jews project (funded by the UK National Lottery Heritage Fund); and now the Ritual Reconstructed project. What has struck me from the beginning is the way this community has-since the 1970s-indeed \"tinkered\" to create its own symbols and ritual, all to bring a sense of togetherness and to \"pump up individuals with emotional energy.\"3 The philosophy behind the LGBTQI ritual activities of the Ritual Reconstructed project is essentially Reconstructionist, based on the ideas of Mordecai Kaplan.4 It is an approach to Jewish custom and belief that aims toward communal decision-making.One of the films screened at JW3 was Pride Seder,5 a record of the 2015 eveof- London Pride Seder at South London Liberal Synagogue. An orange takes center stage at this Pride ritual, along with other \"foreign\" queer objects to be tinkered with at this LGBTQI bricolage event: a drag queen's high-heel shoe, a brick, foreign \"fruits,\" rainbow-colored ribbons. The orange on the seder plate is a key ritual motif for many LGBTQI Jews. Indeed, the Ritual Reconstructed logotype incorporates this image. Where does the orange motif come from? As Rabbi Janet Burden has commented on www.ritualreconstructed.com, \"Some years ago, a group of students at Oberlin College wished to make a statement about Jewish inclusiveness. . . . Either they, or a Jewish feminist called Susannah Heschel, had the idea of using an orange to symbolize inclusivity: It was made up of many segments, but it for","PeriodicalId":40351,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Film & New Media-An International Journal","volume":"12 1","pages":"186 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81748077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Lumby’s samuel-613","authors":"Gil Toffell","doi":"10.13110/jewifilmnewmedi.4.2.0196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/jewifilmnewmedi.4.2.0196","url":null,"abstract":"samuel-613. Directed by Billy Lumby. 2015. UK: Commissioned by Dazed and Confused Magazine. Available online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT1BLg9FtNw. 16 minutes.By chance, my first viewing of samuel-6 13 occurred at the end of May 2015-the same week the \"Hasidic driving ban\" story broke as headline news in the UK media. Apparently provoked by the minatory notion of the itinerant independent woman, leaders of the Belz sect issued a letter requesting that mothers desist from driving their children to communal schools in the Haredi heartlands of Stamford Hill in North London, stating that women drivers were in danger of breaching \"traditional rules of modesty.\"1 With the request widely reported as analogous to the state-imposed Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia, and declared to be in contravention of equal rights legislation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Belzer authorities were forced to publicly back down, in a move that leftthe sect appearing decidedly vulnerable to the encroachments of modernity. That the temptations of twenty-first-century metropolitan London might infiltrate Haredi citadels of isolation is the central conceit behind samuel-613. Significantly, the depiction of the havoc such an event might wreak seems symptomatic of trends in thinking about cultural identity in the current moment.With a running time just under sixteen minutes, samuel-613 quickly gets to the point: Shmilu has a problem-he is horny. For most twenty-something Londoners, developing a strategy to tackle such a situation is relatively straightforward; Shmilu, however, is a Haredi Jew living in Stamford Hill. As such his contact with women outside the family is restricted to porn magazines smuggled into his bedroom and anonymously flirting online. Angry and frustrated, he constantly challenges his father's authority, a struggle that culminates in his scandalous wrecking of a Shabbos dinner. Shorn of beard and payot, he strikes out on his own, moving into a high-rise flat where he goes about the work of remaking himself-gorging on bacon and beer. However, following a disastrous date with \"Jezebel\"-his online crush-Shmilu realizes that entry into the goyishe world demands more than purchasing a baseball cap. Cut adrift, he returns to Jewish ritual and dreams about bridging an impossible cultural gap by fantasizing a strictly Orthodox marriage between himself and Jezebel. As Shmuli becomes strung out on pharmaceuticals and descends into derangement, the film ends with the arrival of a hallucinatory flock of parrots, a perverse echo of a joke told by his grandfather at the fateful Shabbos supper a few weeks earlier.While Haredi life has received only minimal attention in mainstream cinema, of those films that have appeared, the narrative of the individual who has strayed \"offthe derech\" is something of a common theme. The derech-Hebrew for path-is the life of devotion to the 613 mitzvot: biblical commandments that range from dietary laws to the injunction that me","PeriodicalId":40351,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Film & New Media-An International Journal","volume":"95 1","pages":"196 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76968139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Sutak’s Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 1939–1949","authors":"S. Whitfield","doi":"10.13110/jewifilmnewmedi.4.2.0192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/jewifilmnewmedi.4.2.0192","url":null,"abstract":"On Sutak's Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 19 39-1949 Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 1939-1949. By Ken Sutak. New York: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum/CCAR Press, 2012. 106 pp., ISBN 978-1-884300-25-7 (ebook). US $9.99.Perhaps no decade in modern Jewish history-perhaps no decade since the destruction of the Second Temple-has been so packed with significance as the ten years that began in 1939. The horrifically unimaginable was followed by the thrillingly unpredicted. No catastrophe like the Holocaust can be said to have been redeemed. But the birth of a Jewish state, however much historians of the Yishuv can trace the achievement of sovereignty to forces independent of the shock of the Final Solution, cannot in retrospect be removed from the same cataclysmic decade as the torment of the refugee crisis, the plight of Diasporic Jewry beleaguered by anti-Semitism hardly limited to the distinctive terror of the Third Reich, the impact of totalitarianism, and the momentum of decolonization and nationalism.How did such extraordinary historical experiences register in the past century's supreme medium of mass communication? One answer is reflected in movie poster exhibits that were mounted in the spring of 2007 and then again in the spring of 2008 at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York City. This seductive, lovingly designed, and informative volume stems from those exhibits, which Ken Sutak very ably produced. Cinema Judaica constitutes an impressive feat of archeology, of an era that begins with a feature film like Warner Bros.' Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, USA, 1939), starring Edward G. Robinson, and ends with a quartet of obscure movies set during Israel's fight for independence.The phrase that serves as the title of this book, Sutak writes, may have originated in Los Angeles, \"to promote revival screenings of Jewish-themed films\" (99), and to attract audiences to concerts where the film scores by Jewish composers were performed. The author gives no exact dates, however. Nor is his own definition of a \"Jewish-themed\" movie unduly rigid. The Stranger (Orson Welles, USA, 1946), for example, includes documentary footage of concentration camps. But none of the major characters (portrayed by Orson Welles, who also directed the film, Loretta Young, and the ubiquitous Edward G. Robinson) is Jewish; and the Nazis were not too finicky about whom they chose to imprison and torture in the camps. What makes The Stranger Jewish is therefore dubious. Cinema Judaica even includes a Disney cartoon, Education for Death (Clyde Geronimi, USA, 1943). Or take The House I Live In (Mervyn LeRoy, USA, 1945). Perhaps no nine-minute short in the history of Hollywood has enjoyed more acclaim. This movie won a special Academy Award for \"Tolerance Short Subject,\" as well as a Golden Globe Award for \"Best Film for Promoting International Good Will.\" These prizes, in the immediate aftermath of the Final So","PeriodicalId":40351,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Film & New Media-An International Journal","volume":"66 1","pages":"192 - 195"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83704316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat: Holocaust Memory, Film Noir, and the Pain of Others","authors":"Yael Munk","doi":"10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.1.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.1.0025","url":null,"abstract":"This article engages with one of the most successful contemporary Israeli documentaries, Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat (Israel, 2011). Its success, both in Israel and worldwide, has been attributed to the unusual relationship it reveals: the sustained friendship between the Tuchlers, a Jewish-Israeli couple of German origin who were the director’s grandparents, and a German couple, of whom the husband was none other than the notorious Nazi officer Leopold von Mildenstein (1902–1968). Using a first-person narration, Israeli director Goldfinger sets out to investigate this weird friendship and discovers, completely by accident, what Susan Sontag termed “the pain of others.” He also comes to recognize himself as a second (or maybe third) generation survivor of the Holocaust: that he is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. These two discoveries shake the very foundations of his Israeli identity, since the new Israeli culture to which Goldfinger belongs has invested countless efforts in concealing the vulnerability, physical weakness, and eventual flawed masculinity of the “Old Jew.” These two narrative lines intersect through the filmmaker’s adoption of one of the most fascinating cinematic genres, film noir—an unprecedented choice in Israeli documentary, which, as this article will demonstrate, was above all an ethical choice.","PeriodicalId":40351,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Film & New Media-An International Journal","volume":"73 1","pages":"25 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83734324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Adapting Masculinities: Israeli and American Genres Redefining Mizrahi Masculinity in the TV Series Haborer","authors":"Ronen Gil","doi":"10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.1.0090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.1.0090","url":null,"abstract":"The discussion proposed in this article on the Israeli television series Haborer (The Arbitrator, 2007–2014) focuses on the blending of three major genres that characterize and define it: the “masculine” American gangster film, the “feminine” soap opera, and the popular Israeli bourekas movie.I claim that the hybridization of these diverse and contradictory genres allows the series to propose a new and complex representation of Mizrahi masculinity. While the bourekas genre depicted Ashkenazi masculinity as the polar opposite of Mizrahi masculinity, the Mizrahi masculinity offered in Haborer adopts and contains bourekas Ashkenazi masculinity.","PeriodicalId":40351,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Film & New Media-An International Journal","volume":"7 1","pages":"108 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88212618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Genres in Jewish and Israeli Cinema","authors":"Yaron Peleg, Yaron Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan","doi":"10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Th is issue of Jewish Film & New Media continues the series on Israeli media studies, which began last year with an issue on the treatment of Jewish religious themes in Israeli fi lms and television programs. Th ese special issues are based on small scholars’ conferences usually held once a year at various academic institutions as part of a new scholarly framework for the exploration of Jewish and Israeli media. Th e current issue is dedicated to aspects of genre in Israeli media. Generic boundaries of visual arts have expanded greatly in the last decade or so with the increasing infl uence of the Internet as both a ubiquitous delivery platform as well as a medium in and of itself. In Israel’s multifaceted society these trends have a special restonance and are manifest in various genres, including Mizrahi productions, works that examine religious versus secular tensions, and even those categorized as more “fl uff y” genres, such as horror and other varieties. Th ese works refl ect the many faces of Israeli society and express its various contours. Th e reincarnation of television shows as Internet programs delivered on demand is one of the most obvious examples of this development. In this rapidly evolving world that combines art and commerce in ever-more complex ways, Israeli visual culture has become one of the most dynamic and innovative grounds for such creative activity. Th is is not only valid for so-called television programs, or Internet TV shows, which are an increasingly international trend. It is also true of cinema, which is infl uenced by these trends in various ways as well. Th is issue, which originated at a dedicated conference held at Haifa University in August","PeriodicalId":40351,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Film & New Media-An International Journal","volume":"8 1","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89640611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"DIY: How to (Not So) Safely Dismantle the Bomb of On-Screen Jewish-Israeli Identity: The Synergies with Art and Television in the Representation of Jewish-Israeli Identity and What Can Be Learned from Them","authors":"L. Weinberg","doi":"10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.1.0109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/JEWIFILMNEWMEDI.4.1.0109","url":null,"abstract":"Looking at the intersections between Israeli art history and Israeli television series, as well as their recent increased visibility at the international level, this essay seeks to understand what makes contemporary Israeli art and media works accessible to an international audience, and how this recent success may reflect changes in Israeli and Jewish constructions of identity. Furthermore, it attempts to address the crisis of Jewish-Israeli identity as it is portrayed on Israeli television screens and to ask what can be learned about it from the perspective of Israeli art history.","PeriodicalId":40351,"journal":{"name":"Jewish Film & New Media-An International Journal","volume":"17 1","pages":"109 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80770489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}