ABSTRACT
Anat Zanger traces the writing of the city of Jerusalem in three Israeli television drama series, aired during the first decade of the third millennium: Mishehu Larutz Ito (Someone to Run With, 2006), Asfur (2010–2011), and Srugim (literally knitted, in Hebrew, referring to the type of knitted yarmulke Modern Orthodox Israeli Jews wear) (2008–2010). Through a textual analysis of the television dramas’ narrative and televisual aesthetic, Zanger identifies utopian and heterotopic aspects of space, the sacred vs. the profane, and the masculine vs. feminine in order to delineate the portrait of Jerusalem in contemporary Israeli television fiction as a forbidden place. The distinction between “Jerusalem above” and “Jerusalem below”—heavenly and earthly Jerusalem—contains an inherent awareness to the divide between the symbolic and the actual Jerusalem. The encounter with the “ordinary city,” the concrete city of everyday life, is present in the series discussed in this chapter due to the televisual medium’s concreteness, charging the existing tension between real and imaginary with additional meanings.
