Hakak, Yohai. “Filmed ‘Not During the Sabbath’: The Israeli Haredi Minority through the Camera’s Lens.” Visual Ethnography 4.2 (2015).
URL: http://www.vejournal.org/index.php/vejournal/article/view/80
Abstract
The Haredi (Jewish Ultra Orthodox) minority in Israel has an increased visibility in Israeli media in recent years. Many of its representations are negative and stereotypical. This article is an analysis of a documentary series about this minority group that the author co-directed also in an attempt to challenge these stereotypes. The article analyses the process of production of the series and the many decisions that had to be taken during it. It explores the difficulties in challenging the key stereotypes, especially in the context of Israeli commercial television.
Click here for Hebrew version:
Farrell, Nathan, and Stuart Allan. “Redrawing Boundaries: WITNESS and the Politics of Citizen Videos.” Ethnicities (early view; online first).
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1742766515606291
Abstract
This article engages with several pressing issues revolving around ‘citizen witnessing’, with specific reference to the human rights advocacy group, WITNESS. In the course of tracing WITNESS’ development over the past two decades, it offers an evaluative assessment of the challenges its members have faced in promoting a grassroots, citizen-centred approach to video reportage. More specifically, this advocacy is informed by an ethical commitment to advancing human rights causes by equipping citizens in crisis situations with cameras, and the training to use them, so that they might bear witness to the plight of others. In so doing, this article argues, WITNESS offers a tactical reformulation of the guiding tenets of peace journalism, one with considerable potential for recasting anew its strategic priorities.
Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2016
pp. V-VI
pp. 1-25
Avraham Sela, Avraham Kadish
pp. 27-53
Bosmat Garami
pp. 54-81
Rafi Nets-Zehngut
pp. 82-108
Offer Boord
pp. 109-131
Ziva Kolodney
pp. 132-156
Dror Greenblum
pp. 157-182
Assaf Peled
pp. 183-208
Tal Ben-Zvi
Johnston, Zachary. “Aliyah Le Berlin: A Documentary about the Next Chapter of Jewish Life in Berlin.” In Being Jewish in 21st-Century Germany (ed. Olaf Glöckner and Haim Fireberg; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015): 152-62.
Abstract
The American movie director and producer Zachary Johnston shares with us his insights on the emergence of a diaspora of Israeli youth in Berlin. In many ways – second only to Fania Oz-Salzberger – he is one of the pioneers in identifying the phenomenon that he follows in his documentary, and he had done it well before it became a hot issue in the Israeli media in 2014. Johnston challenges the common Israeli set of values about migration. “One cannot use the term ‘aliyah‘ out-of-context without eliciting a knee-jerk response due to its value-loaded nature of the word, which is tied to the ‘ascent’ of Jews to Israel.” He adds: “Perhaps, this new age of Israeli and Jewish exploration in Germany has a higher purpose that has yet to be ascertained, that down the road the concept of aliyah will receive a something deeper, stronger, and broader meaning for the nation of Israel and its citizens.”
Kohn, Ayelet. “Mehubarot: A Peep without a Show.” Jewish Film & New Media 3.2 (2015): 170-92.
URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jewish_film_new_media_an_international_journal/v003/3.2.kohn.html
Abstract
The Israeli television series Mehubarot (Connected, 2009) follows five Israeli women who use their performance before the camera—through both visual and spoken texts—as a means of biographical representation which blends public and private aspects of their daily lives. This article examines the use of spoken language as a central tool for signaling sincerity and closeness on the series’ visual stage, focusing on the unique setting of Israeli society and the exclusive genre of a televised diary in its written and spoken modes.
Unlike blogs or videos uploaded to the internet, which are contemporary precedents for this kind of intimate exposure in the public arena, the genre under discussion relies on established conventions of television and cinema to convey intimacy. Mehubarot is inspired by documentaries and films that use voiceover as an established device for informing the viewers of the characters’ thoughts. In its methods of presenting the “diaries,” the series also adopts patterns of confession and exposure commonly used in televised platforms that follow ongoing projects of identity construction, and frequently present them as journeys of self-discovery and personal development. Following a discussion of the series’ unique features, the article’s second part focuses on the journalist Dana Spector and the contradictory readings of her private-public identity, social and family identity, and “celebrity” identity in their transfer from the newspaper column to the television arena.
Israel Affairs, Volume 21, Issue 3, July 2015 is now available online is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online.
Special Issue: Judea and Samaria Jewish Settlers and Settlements – Cultural Sociology of Unsettled Space: A Look From Within
This new issue contains the following articles:
Introduction
Introduction: Judea and Samaria Jewish settlers and settlements – cultural sociology of unsettled space
Miriam Billig & Udi Lebel
Pages: 309-312
Section 1: History and Philosophy of Jewish Settlement
Settlement in Samaria: the ethical dimension
Tamar Meisels
Pages: 313-330
The Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria (1967–2008): historical overview
Miriam Billig
Pages: 331-347
Section 2: Place Identities – Reality and Representation
Self-segregation of the vanguard: Judea and Samaria in the religious-Zionist society
Nissim Leon
Pages: 348-360
Settling the Military: the pre-military academies revolution and the creation of a new security epistemic community – The Militarization of Judea and Samaria
Udi Lebel
Pages: 361-390
Hilltop youth: political-anthropological research in the hills of Judea and Samaria
Shimi Friedman
Pages: 391-407
Judea and Samaria in Israeli documentary cinema: displacement, oriental space and the cultural construction of colonized landscapes
Eithan Orkibi
Pages: 408-421
Section 3: Dynamics of Regional Policy Making
Regional framing: Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip in the eyes of the security elite
Asaf Lebovitz
Pages: 422-442
Against all odds – the paradoxical victory of the West Bank settlers: interest groups and policy enforcement
Ami Pedahzur & Holly McCarthy
Pages: 443-461
‘A simple historical truth’: Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip in Menachem Begin’s ideology
Arye Naor
Pages: 462-481
Ra’anan Alexandrowicz presents 47 Years of Documentation
The documentation of the city of Hebron over the past five decades serves as a case study for examining broader questions regarding documentation, history, and politics. From the newsreels of the late 1960s, through TV coverage from the 1970s and 1980s, all the way to ubiquitous YouTube clips in the last decade, the process sheds light on the dramatic changes that have occurred in Hebron, and mainly on the transformations that have taken place in the act of documentation during that period of time.
Over the last two decades, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz has examined the social and political reality in Israel and in Palestine through a series of acclaimed cinematic works, including Martin (1999), The Inner Tour (2001), James’s Journey to Jerusalem (2003), and The Law in These Parts (2011), which won Best International Documentary at Sundance, a Peabody award, as well as best documentary at Jerusalem Film Festival and several other prizes.
Israel Affairs, Volume 21, Issue 1, January 2015
This new issue contains the following articles:
Articles
Ethnic Income Disparities in Israel
Pnina O. Plaut & Steven E. Plaut
Pages: 1-26
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984418
‘Mayhew’s outcasts’: anti-Zionism and the Arab lobby in Harold Wilson’s Labour Party
James R. Vaughan
Pages: 27-47
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984420
Israel Negev Bedouin during the 1948 War: Departure and Return
Havatzelet Yahel & Ruth Kark
Pages: 48-97
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984421
Good news: the Carmel Newsreels and their place in the emerging Israeli language media
Oren Soffer & Tamar Liebes
Pages: 98-111
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984422
From ‘Rambo’ to ‘sitting ducks’ and back again: the Israeli soldier in the media
Elisheva Rosman & Zipi Israeli
Pages: 112-130
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984423
Israel and the Arab Gulf states: from tacit cooperation to reconciliation?
Yoel Guzansky
Pages: 131-147
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984424
Building partnerships between Israeli and Palestinian youth: an integrative approach
Debbie Nathan, David Trimble & Shai Fuxman
Pages: 148-164
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.984436
Book Reviews
Flexigidity: the secret of Jewish adaptability
David Rodman
Pages: 165-166
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937913
Russia and Israel in the changing Middle East
David Rodman
Pages: 166-167
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937914
Social mobilization in the Arab–Israeli war of 1948: on the Israeli home front
David Rodman
Pages: 167-169
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937915
These are my brothers: a dramatic story of heroism during the Yom Kippur War
David Rodman
Pages: 169-171
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937916
Jews and the military: a history
David Rodman
Pages: 171-173
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937917
The Jewish revolt: ad 66–74
David Rodman
Pages: 173-173
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937918
The city besieged: siege and its manifestations in the ancient Near East
David Rodman
Pages: 173-175
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937919
The forgotten kingdom: the archaeology and history of northern Israel
David Rodman
Pages: 175-176
DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2014.937920
Barlet, Olivier. “‘We need to think again from the beginning!’: Interview with Erez Pery about Sderot, Last Exit, and the School of Sound and Screen Arts at Sappir College, Israel.” Black Camera 6.1 (2014): 215-219.
URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/black_camera/v006/6.1.barlet.htm
See also film review by Olivier Barlet and Melissa Thackway, pp. 219-220.
Excerpt
What is your feeling about Osvalde Lewat’s film?
Well, you ask the million-dollar question! I was surprised to see me and the school and my position within the structure from Osvalde’s point of view. It is what’s beautiful about cinema!
Does it serve or disserve the school?
It helps in the sense that more people get to know what we do here in the south of Israel. The festival is already quite known in circles in Europe. It’s funny because people in Paris know better what’s going on in the school than people here in Tel Aviv!
Would you have taken the same point of view?
The school is a part of my family. I wouldn’t do a film about it; it is too close, too intimate.
A lot of documentary films do that.
Yes, but I don’t really like that. I can only handle it when the private sphere and the public sphere connect together, when your private life some-how captures the zeitgeist of the society. I was surprised when Osvalde came to me with the idea of making a film about the school. It happened because of the festival: I saw Black Business in France and called to invite her. She was totally surprised. She has never been to Israel before. When she was at the festival, she was in a total shock. I think it was a kind of life-changing experience for her.
Does the fact that she is an African woman make a difference for you?
The festival is focused on the three continents: Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Finding good films from Africa is not easy these days. Sderot is inhabited by Jews from Africa: Algeria, Morocco, Ethiopia. …
Do the students of the school tackle the issue of these identities?
Yes, because Israel is a nation of immigrants who had to curb their own identity to be Israelis, and what we are doing now is going back to our original identity, our own roots, the language that we have never talked, to know who we really are. This is the kind of film that is made here. Films of hybrid people, half Israeli, half something else. This is what Freud called “the return of the repressed.”
When you present the school outside, what are your main points?
First and foremost, we are a kind of alternative to the hegemonic center, not only in the subject matter, but also aesthetically. As we are on the periphery, very close to the border with Gaza, we have this little laboratory of our own: we can explore things. We are not afraid of difficult subjects and to open old wounds. This is basically what we do here, in contrast with what is going on in the rest of the country. People from the center think that it is a kind of weakness, giving up the prestige of the conventional aesthetic and big festivals. …
Morag, Raya. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. London: Tauris, 2013.
Waltzing with Bashir proposes a new paradigm for cinema trauma studies – the trauma of the perpetrator. Recognizing a current shift in interest from the trauma suffered by victims to that suffered by perpetrators, the book seeks to theorize this still under-studied field thus breaking the repression of this concept and phenomenon in psychoanalysis and in cinema literature. Taking as a point of departure the distinction between testimony given by the victim and confession made by the perpetrator, this pioneering work ventures to define and analyze perpetrator trauma in scholarly, representational, literary, and societal contexts. In contrast to the twentieth-century definition of the perpetrator based on modern wars and totalitarian regimes,Morag defines the perpetrator in the context of the twenty-first century’s new wars and democratic regimes. The direct result of a drastic transformation in the very nature of war, made manifest by the lethal clash between soldier and civilian in a battlefield newly defined in bodily terms, the new trauma paradigm stages the trauma of the soldier turned perpetrator, thus offering a novel perspective on issues of responsibility and guilt.
Such theoretical insights demonstrate that the epistemology of the post-witness era requires breaking deep-seated psychological and psychiatric, as well as cultural and political, repression. Driven by the emergence of a new wave of Israeli documentary cinema, Waltzing with Bashir analyzes the Israeli film and literature produced in the aftermath of the second Intifada. As Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and other new wave films demonstrate, Israeli cinema, attached on one side to the legacy of the Holocaust and on the other to the Israeli Occupation, is a highly relevant case for probing the limits of both victim and perpetrator traumas, and for revisiting and recontextualizing the crucial moment in which the victim/perpetrator cultural symbiosis is dismantled.
Raya Morag is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Table of Contents
Introduction
From Victim to Perpetrator Trauma
Part I: Victim Trauma
1. The Body as the Battlefield
2. Chronic Victim Trauma and Terror
3. Queerness, Ethnicity, and Terror
Part II: Perpetrator Trauma
4. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Male Perpetrator
5. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Female Perpetrator
6. The New Wave of Documentary Literature
Conclusion
The Perpetrator Complex
SOAS Centre for Jewish Studies
Shadow in Baghdad
Film Screening and Panel Discussion
7pm Thursday 20th November
Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS
The film will be followed by a panel discussion with
Linda Menuhin Abdul Aziz (journalist, film protagonist)
Adel Darwish (author and journalist);
Amal al-Jubouri (Director of the Arab Human Rights Academy)
Chair: Dr. Yair Wallach (SOAS)
SHADOW IN BAGHDAD (director: Duki Dror, 2013) tells the story of Linda Menuhin Abdul Aziz, who escaped the upheaval of Iraq in the early 1970’s to Israel, and her father, who disappeared shortly thereafter to an unknown fate. The film follows Linda as an unexpected connection with a young Iraqi journalist sets her back on the path towards Baghdad and the truth behind her father’s disappearance. What they ultimately uncover is not only the fate of Linda’s father but that of the once thriving Iraqi Jewish community whose glorious history came to an abrupt end in the 1970’s. At once a story of tragedy and redemption, Shadow in Baghdad tells of an important chapter in the turbulent history of the Middle East as it points to a distinct hope for the future as well.
THE PANEL DISCUSSION will consider Iraq’s Jewish past against the country’s current predicament and the question of human rights, civic solidarity and minorities in the Middle East.
All Welcome
The event is free and there is no need to book
SOAS, University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG
Yosef, Raz and Boaz Hagin. Deeper than Oblivion. Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
URL: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/deeper-than-oblivion-9781441199263/
In this collection, leading scholars in both film studies and Israeli studies show that beyond representing familiar historical accounts or striving to offer a more complete and accurate depiction of the past, Israeli cinema has innovatively used trauma and memory to offer insights about Israeli society and to engage with cinematic experimentation and invention. Tracing a long line of films from the 1940s up to the 2000s, the contributors use close readings of these films not only to reconstruct the past, but also to actively engage with it. Addressing both high-profile and lesser known fiction and non-fiction Israeli films, Deeper than Oblivion underlines the unique aesthetic choices many of these films make in their attempt to confront the difficulties, perhaps even impossibility, of representing trauma. By looking at recent and classic examples of Israeli films that turn to memory and trauma, this book addresses the pressing issues and disputes in the field today.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Sweet on the Inside: Trauma, Memory, and Israeli Cinema Boaz Hagin and Raz Yosef
Chapter 2: Postscript to Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation Ella Shohat
Chapter 3: Gender, the Military, Memory, and the Photograph: Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling and American Films about Abu Ghraib Diane Waldman
Chapter 4: The Event and the Picture: David Perlov’s My Stills and Memories of the Eichmann Trial Anat Zanger
Chapter 5: The Agonies of an Eternal Victim: Zionist Guilt in Avi Mograbi’s Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi Shmulik Duvdevani
Chapter 6: Traces of War: Memory, Trauma, and the Archive in Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort Raz Yosef
Chapter 7: Memory of a Death Foretold: Fathers and Sons in Assi Dayan’s “Trilogy” Yael Munk
Chapter 8: Queering Terror: Trauma, Race, and Nationalism in Palestinian and Israeli Gay Cinema during the Second Intifada Raya Morag
Chapter 9: “Our Traumas”: Terrorism, Tradition, and Mind Games in Frozen Days Boaz Hagin
Chapter 10: History of Violence: From the Trauma of Expulsion to the Holocaust in Israeli Cinema Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni
Chapter 11: Last Train to the Holocaust Judd Ne’eman and Nerit Grossman
Chapter 12: Passages, Wars, and Encounters with Death: The Desert as a Site of Memory in Israeli Film Yael Zerubavel
Chapter 13: “Walking through walls”: Documentary Film and Other Technologies of Navigation, Aspiration, and Memory Janet Walker
Notes on Contributors
Index
A panorama of Israeli modern dance and a unique window into Israeli society and history. With vivid performances from many of Israel’s most innovative contemporary choreographers.
This extraordinary documentary tells the story of Israel’s innovative dance history, exploring how the need to move, shift, and be in constant motion has produced generations of great dancers and choreographers. Through insightful interviews with leading choreographers, including Ohad Naharin, Rami Be’er, and Yasmeen Godder, spectacular performances, and rich archival material, the film traces Israeli dance back to its roots – from the hora circles of the kibbutz to the influences of Martha Graham and the avant-garde – to reveal how dance has become a vital form of expression in Israel today.
Directed by: Gabriel Bibliowicz, 2012 52 min.. In Hebrew with English subtitles
Post-screening discussion with art historian and professor of Israeli visual culture, Anat Gilboa, and Melissa Melpignano, Ph.D. student in Culture and Performance at the UCLA Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance, focusing on contemporary Israeli choreography.
RSVP in link.
We are very pleased to screen this film in conjunction with the Batsheva Dance Company’s 50th Anniversary performances at Royce Hall (Nov 1,2), presented by the UCLA Center for the Art of Performance and co-sponsored by the Y&S Nazarian Center. For further information, visit cap.ucla.edu.
Public parking available in UCLA Parking Structure 3. Enter the campus at Hilgard and Wyton, and make an immediate right turn onto Charles E. Young Dr. East. Signs will direct you to Parking Structure 3, “pay-per-space” parking. For additional directions to campus, visit http://www.ucla.edu/map.
Cost : Event is free and open to the public. RSVP is required.
Burstein, Janet. “Like Windows in the Wall: Four Documentaries by Israeli Women.” Nashim 25 (2013): 129-46.
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/nashim.25.129
Abstract
Within the frame of feminist theory, this paper analyzes the efforts of two Israeli filmmakers to disclose women’s perceptual struggle: against gendered imperatives that encourage women not to look; against the habit of looking at “others” as objects to be feared or controlled; against the forces of materialism, national insecurity and political/military power that make looking impossible. In The Women Next Door and Detained, Michal Aviad and Anat Even interview Arab and Jewish women, enacting the transgressive intention to occupy what Kaja Silverman has called “a viewing position other than that assigned” by their culture. In Ever Shot Anyone? Aviad interviews male reservists, making visible the gendered imperative not to look—even as she defies it. And in Closure Even constructs a metaphor for the gradual occlusion of vision that constricts awareness of others and changes the promising trajectory of Israeli culture.
Morag, Raya. "Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema." Camera Obscura 27.2 (2012): 93-133.
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URL: http://cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/content/27/2_80/93.abstract
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Abstract
This essay proposes a new paradigm for cinema trauma studies: the trauma of the perpetrator. Recognizing a current shift in interest from trauma suffered by victims to that suffered by perpetrators, it seeks to break the repression of the abhorrent figure of the perpetrator in cinema and psychoanalysis literature. This new paradigm is driven by the emergence of a new wave of Israeli documentaries such as Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling, and Avi Mograbi’s Z32, one that for the first time includes female IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) veterans. Israeli cinema, attached on one side to the legacy of the Holocaust and on the other to the Israeli occupation, proves a highly relevant case for probing the limits of both types of traumas. Taking as a point of departure the distinction between testimony given by the victim and confession made by the perpetrator, the paper addresses the questions of whether the trauma of the perpetrator indeed exists; how we might understand the somatic and epistemological conditions of guilt; how we should define the perpetrator’s trauma in contrast to the victim’s; and whether this cinematic trend indeed paves the way for Israelis to assume responsibility for their deeds. Analyzing the characteristics of perpetrator trauma defined as crises (of evidence, disclosure, gender, audience, narrativization) finally leads to a preliminary reflection on the possible relevance of this model for analyzing related new-war films in twenty-first-century world cinema.
Landesman, Ohad, and Roy Bendor. “Animated Recollection and Spectatorial Experience in Waltz with Bashir.” Animation 6.3 (2011): 353-70.
URL: http://anm.sagepub.com/content/6/3/353.abstract
Abstract
This article explores the ways in which Waltz with Bashir (2008), Ari Folman’s animated war memoir, combines a commentary on memory with a moral stance on war. The authors argue that the film exemplifies the capacity of animated documentaries not only to show what is otherwise difficult or impossible to represent in non-animated documentaries, but to serve as a vehicle for fostering new relationships between the viewer and the documentary text. In this vein, the authors argue that Waltz with Bashir synthetically produces a rich, consistent, and thus trustworthy sense of reality for its viewers not despite but because of its unique aesthetic choices – its innovative animation techniques and mixing of reality with fantasy. Accordingly, the authors weave together analyses of the film’s content and form with accounts of their reception, discuss how the film evokes certain somatic responses with individuals, and consider the political significance these responses may engender.
Online Israel Studies Bulletin Board 