ABSTRACT
Dafna Hirsch explores Israeliness as documented and narrated in the private sphere as a reflexive discussion of fading and resistant forms of Israeliness. Baderekh Habayita (The Way Home) (2009), a television documentary series created by Tomer Heymann, which follows 13 years in the lives of the Heymann family members, focusing on the filmmaker’s relationships with his parents, siblings, and lovers. Hirsch argues that though Baderekh Habayita tells the story of a single Israeli family from a personal perspective of one of its members, the processes that the Heymann family undergoes in the series are in fact embedded in deeper social and political transformations in Israeli society and culture, and Heymann’s search for “a way home” is read as metonymic of a collective search. Hirsch argues that Baderekh Habayita demonstrates how the reproduction of collective social structures and ideological systems takes place on the level of individuals and the private sphere. At the same time, this documentary series exposes moments of contradiction, ambivalence and reflexivity, which undermine these same collective ideological constructions of Israeli identities and ways of life.
