ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at four annual international festivals that take place in Israel, in order to theorize their cultural meaning in the context of cultural globalization. The core sociological argument is that the festivals serve the quest of certain collective and individual actors – especially the educated upper middle classes, professionals in cultural sectors and related class segments – for status and self-identification as equal participants in what they perceive as the innovative frontiers of world culture. The festivals celebrate the intertwining of national cultural uniqueness and aesthetic cosmopolitanism, and this is also their purpose. If the cultural public sphere, in its national context, is envisaged as an arena in which various social actors interact, compete on and negotiate the meaning of ‘national culture’, then international festivals of film and the performing arts are one site in which a cosmopolitan standpoint is manifested on national culture in a collective and orchestrated manner.
