ABSTRACT
Orna Lavy-Flint studies discourses of place on television drama from a different perspective—globalization and its creation of a new form of diaspora, separating families whose members emigrate across oceans. Lavy-Flint discusses the television drama series Bat Yam–New York (1995–1996), which tells the story of the Zalayet Family, whose members are dispersed in the city of Bat Yam in Israel, and in New York and Los Angeles in the United States. As their means of communication, they mail each other video letters, thereby using video technology to erase the gap between the childhood home in Israel and the outside world, bringing the lives of the family “here” and “there” into a single space. Bat Yam and New York are no longer two distant locations, an ocean apart, but one united space composed of invading and merging locational representations. Lavy-Flint asserts that while technology brings all family members into one virtual space, the series’ diegetic world is constantly disassembled and reassembled through reflections, the use of small and large screens and countless film and television quotations and references, which maintain only a loose connection with national and geographic locales. Hence, while Zanger studies different televisual meanings of the real and imaginary Jerusalem and Friedman discusses the persistence of local Israeli vernacular within the global genre of music videos, and Lavy-Flint focuses on the uniquely novel view of the relationship between the small Israeli place and the “great big world out there,” the diaspora of global nomads, in the age of video technology and globalization.
