ABSTRACT

The essays in this anthology study Israeli television, its different forms of representation, audiences and production processes, past and present, examining Israeli television in both its local, cultural dynamics, and global interfaces.

The book looks at Israeli television as a creator, negotiator, guardian and warden of collective Israeli memory, examining instances of Israeli original television exported and circulated to the US and the global markets, as well as instances of American, British, and global TV formats, adapted and translated to the Israeli scene and screen. The trajectory of this volume is to shed light on major themes and issues Israeli television negotiates: history and memory, war and trauma, Zionism and national disillusionment, place and home, ethnicity in its unique local variations of Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, Israeli–Arabs and Palestinians, gender in its unique Israeli formations, specifically masculinity as shaped by the military and constant violent conflict, femininity in this same context as well as within a complex Jewish oriented society, religion, and secularism.

Providing multifaceted portraits of Israeli television and culture in its Middle Eastern political and local context, this book will be a key resource to readers interested in media and television studies, cultural studies, Israel, and the Middle East.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction

part I|50 pages

Television, history, and collective memory

chapter 1|16 pages

Remembering television in mainstream Jewish Israel

From one–channel nation to commercial tribalization 1

chapter 2|14 pages

Dis-covering the Holocaust

Third generation discourse and collective memory in the documentary The Flat

chapter 3|18 pages

“Remember them all”

Reimagining collective memory in Sayed Kashua’s Israeli sitcom Arab Labor

part II|48 pages

Trauma, terror, and the nation

chapter 4|15 pages

Television in a time of terror

Trauma and singular plurality in the series Fauda

chapter 5|12 pages

The impossible homecoming

The Israeli television series Prisoners of War (Hatufim) 1

chapter 6|19 pages

In the name of the father

The paternal lineage in the television drama series Betipul 1 and In Treatment

part III|46 pages

Discourses of place

chapter 7|16 pages

A place outside of place

Jerusalem in television drama of the early 2000s 1

chapter 9|12 pages

A family self-portrait with a home-video camera

The drama series Bat Yam–New York 1

part IV|60 pages

Varieties of television drama

chapter 10|15 pages

Painting the wall

Generations and gentrification in the Israeli television drama Florentine

chapter 11|15 pages

Mary Lou’s Glee

Screening young gay men’s musical odyssey in Israeli and American TV musicals

chapter 13|13 pages

Our telenovelas

Israeli telenovelas and globalization

part V|44 pages

Humor and identity politics

chapter 14|12 pages

Not just another day at the office

On the subversive dimension of the Israeli adaptation of British TV series The Office

chapter 15|12 pages

Beyond The Chamber Quintet

Holocaust humor on Israeli television in the 2000s

chapter 16|18 pages

Political opponents as unruly women

Gender representations of body, voice, and space in Israeli televised satire

part VI|49 pages

Documentary and reality television

chapter 17|16 pages

Identity, politics, and everyday life

Tomer Heymann’s The Way Home

chapter 19|16 pages

Mother rules?

Wife Swap becomes Israeli