Download or read book Israeli Bourekas Films written by Rami Kimchi and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A genre of comic melodramas produced in the 1960s and '70s, Bourekas films are among the most popular films ever made in Israel. In Israeli Bourekas Films, author and filmmaker Rami Kimchi sets out a history of Bourekas films and discusses their origin. Kimchi considers the representation of Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews in the films, noting that the material culture reflected in the the films presented a culture that was closer to the European Yiddish culture than to the Middle Eastern world of the Mizrahim. Kimchi reflects on the enormous popularity and commercial success of Bourekas films, uncovers how they were made, who made them and why, and discusses the impact of the films on Israeli cinema today. Israeli Bourekas Films is a film insider's view of the characters, stories, and cultures that made Bourekas films such an important part of Israeli life.

Download or read book A Shtetl in Disguise written by Rami Kimchi and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines Bourekas films - a cycle of highly popular Israeli comedies and melodramas that were produced during the 1960s and '70s - which depict the Mizrahi community (a community of non-Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants) in Israel. The dissertation pursues earlier studies on the Bourekas and attempts to answer some of the questions that this research has raised to date: What classifies a film as Bourekas? Which films make up the Bourekas film corpus? How can one explain the wide appeal of Bourekas films in Israel, or the fact that this group includes some of the most popular Israeli films ever made? According to the criteria suggested by the dissertation, the Bourekas films' corpus is comprised of 11 films, produced between 1964 and 1977, which share a particular paradigmatic representation of Mizrahi neighborhood/community, focalized through the agency of a director with an Ashkenazi cultural background; in these films the narrative is constructed around competition as a focal conflict, and the cinematic sequence is constructed using a rhetoric of low configuration. Seeing these films as textual phenomena, and utilizing a structural analysis, the dissertation further suggests that the Bourekas' paradigmatic portrayal of Israeli Mizrahi communities bears a strong resemblance to the paradigmatic portrayal which served classical Yiddish writers in their representations of the diasporic Jewish communities of the nineteenth century eastern European shtetl. The study suggests that the Bourekas films' adoption of these elements of Yiddish culture into their diegesis reflected a new balance, more favorable towards Yiddish culture - between the concurrent Zionist institutional oppression of Yiddish, and forces striving for a meaningful presence of Yiddish culture - that was established in the Zionist sphere during the era of Bourekas production. I further contend that this hybridity of Bourekas films - being at the same time Israeli/Mizrahi and Diasporic/Ashkenazi - is the primary reason for the Bourekas' success in Israel, since its satisfies - although in different ways - the political, sociological, and psychological needs of both Mizrahi and Ashkenazi audiences in Israel.

Download or read book Israeli Cinema written by Ella Shohat and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-07-30 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Hebrew edition of this groundbreaking book came out, it provoked a stormy public debate. The author has now up-dated "Israeli Cinema", adding a substantial new postscript that reflects on the book's initial reception and points to exciting new trends in the cinematic representation of Israel and Palestine. Ella Shohat explores the cinema as a productive site of national culture, dating back to the early Zionist films about turn-of-the-century Palestine. She offers a deconstructionist reading of Zionism, viewing the cinema as itself participating in the 'invention' of the nation. Unthinking the Eurocentric imaginary of 'East versus West', Shohat highlights the paradoxes of an anomalous national/colonial project through a number of salient issues, including the Sabra figure as a negation of the 'Diaspora Jew', the iconography of the land of Israel as a denial of Palestine, and the narrative role of 'the good Arab'. The new postscript examines the emergence of a richly multiperspectival cinematic space that transcends earlier dichotomies through a palimpsestic and cross-border approach to Israel/Palestine.

Download or read book Israeli Cinema written by Miri Talmon and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With top billing at many film forums around the world, as well as a string of prestigious prizes, including consecutive nominations for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Israeli films have become one of the most visible and promising cinemas in the first decade of the twenty-first century, an intriguing and vibrant site for the representation of Israeli realities. Yet two decades have passed since the last wide-ranging scholarly overview of Israeli cinema, creating a need for a new, state-of-the-art analysis of this exciting cinematic oeuvre. The first anthology of its kind in English, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion presents a collection of specially commissioned articles in which leading Israeli film scholars examine Israeli cinema as a prism that refracts collective Israeli identities through the medium and art of motion pictures. The contributors address several broad themes: the nation imagined on film; war, conflict, and trauma; gender, sexuality, and ethnicity; religion and Judaism; discourses of place in the age of globalism; filming the Palestinian Other; and new cinematic discourses. The authors' illuminating readings of Israeli films reveal that Israeli cinema offers rare visual and narrative insights into the complex national, social, and multicultural Israeli universe, transcending the partial and superficial images of this culture in world media.

Download or read book Identity Place and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel written by Yaron Shemer and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-07-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel, Yaron Shemer presents the most comprehensive and systematic study to date of Mizrahi (Oriental-Jewish or Arab-Jewish) films produced in Israel in the last several decades. Through an analysis of dozens of films the book illustrates how narratives, characters, and space have been employed to give expression to Mizrahi ethnic identity and to situate the Mizrahi within the broader context of the Israeli societal fabric. The struggle over identity and the effort to redraw ethnic boundaries have taken place against the backdrop of a long-standing Zionist view of the Mizrahi as an inferior other whose “Levantine” culture posed a threat to the Western-oriented Zionist enterprise. In its examination of the nature and dynamics of Mizrahi cinema (defined by subject-matter), the book engages the sensitive topic of Mizrahi ethnicity head-on, confronting the conventional notion of Israeli society as a melting pot and the widespread dismissal of ethnic divisions in the country. Shemer explores the continuous marginalization of the Mizrahi in contemporary Israeli cinema and the challenge some Mizrahi films offer to the subjugation of this ethnic group. He also studies the role cultural policies and institutional power in Israel have played in shaping Mizrahi cinema and the creation of a Mizrahi niche in cinema. In a broader sense, this pioneering work is a probing exploration of Israeli culture and society through the prism of film and cinematic expression. It sheds light on the play of ethnicity, class, gender, and religion in contemporary Israel, and on the heated debates surrounding Zionist ideology and identity politics. By charting a new territory of academic inquiry grounded in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, the study contributes to the formation of “Mizrahi Cinema” as a recognized and vibrant scholarly field.

Download or read book Film in the Middle East and North Africa written by Josef Gugler and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *A timely window on the world of Middle Eastern cinema, this remarkable overview includes many essays that provide the first scholarly analysis of significant works by key filmmakers in the region.

Download or read book Framing the Sex Scene A New Take on Israeli Film History written by Naomi Rolef and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-02-22 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book retells the history of Israeli film in the 1960s and 1970s in sex scenes. Through close readings of the first sex scenes in mainstream Israeli movies from this period, it explores the cultural and social contexts in which these movies were made. More specifically, it discusses how notions of collective identity, individual agency, and the public and private spheres are inscribed into and negotiated in sex scenes, especially in light of the historical events that marked these decades. This study thus pushes away from the traditional academic perception of Israeli film and opens up new ways of understanding how it has developed in recent decades. It draws on a growing international body of academic literature on the cinematic representation of sex in order to illuminate the particularities of the Israeli context in the 1960s and 1970s. Apart from film scholars and scholars of Israeli film, this study also addresses readers interested in Israeli cultural history more broadly.

Download or read book The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema written by Raz Yosef and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last decade has marked the growing visibility and worldwide interest in Israeli cinema. Films such as Walk on Water, Or, My Treasure, Beaufort and Waltz with Bashir have been commercially and critically successful both in Europe and the United States and have won a number of prestigious international awards. This book examines for the first time the new ideological and aesthetic trends in contemporary Israeli cinema. More specifically, it critically explores the complex and crucial role of Israeli cinema in remembering and restaging traumas and losses that were denied entry into the shared national past. One of the most striking phenomena in contemporary Israeli cinema is the number and scope of films dealing with past traumatic events – events that were repressed or insufficiently mourned, such as the memory of the Holocaust, traumas from wars and terrorist attacks, and the losses entailed by the experience of immigration. Current Israeli cinema exposes and highlights a radical discontinuity between history and memory. Traumatic events from Israeli society’s past are represented as the private memory of distinct social groups – soldiers, immigrants, women, queers – and not as collective memory, as a lived and practiced tradition that conditions Israeli society. This detachment from national collective memory pulls the films into a world marked by a persistent blurring of the historical context and by private and subjective impressions – a timeless world of dreams, hallucinations and myths. These groups feel duty-bound to remember the past, recasting repressed memories through the cinema in order to return and to give meaning to their identity.

Download or read book Jewish Women written by Katharina Galor and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency examines the concepts of gender and sexuality through the primary lens of visual and material culture from antiquity through to the present day. The backbone of this transhistorical and transcontextual study is the question of Jewish women’s agency in four different geographical, chronological, and methodological contexts, beginning with women’s dress codes in Roman-Byzantine Syro-Palestine, continuing with rituals of purity in medieval Ashkenaz, worship in papal Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, and ending with marriage and divorce in Israeli film. Each of these explorations is interested in creating a dialogue between the patriarchal legacy of the traditional texts and the chronologically corresponding visual and material culture. The author challenges traditional approaches to the study of Jewish culture by employing tools from art history, archaeology, and film and media studies. In each of these different contexts, there is ample evidence that women—despite persistent overall structural discrimination—have found ways to challenge male constructs of gender norms. Ultimately, these examples from past and present times highlight women’s eminence in shaping Jewish history and culture. Bringing a new interdisciplinary lens to the study of the history of gender and sexuality, the book will be of interest to students and researchers of Jewish history and culture, art history, archaeology, and film studies.

Download or read book Toward an Anthropology of Nation Building and Unbuilding in Israel written by Fran Markowitz and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toward an Anthropology of Nation Building and Unbuilding in Israel presents twenty-two original essays offering a critical survey of the anthropology of Israel inspired by Alex Weingrod, emeritus professor and pioneering scholar of Israeli anthropology. In the late 1950s Weingrod’s groundbreaking ethnographic research of Israel’s underpopulated south complicated the dominant social science discourse and government policy of the day by focusing on the ironies inherent in the project of Israeli nation building and on the process of migration prompted by social change. Drawing from Weingrod’s perspective, this collection considers the gaps, ruptures, and juxtapositions in Israeli society and the cultural categories undergirding and subverting these divisions. Organized into four parts, the volume examines our understanding of Israel as a place of difference, the disruptions and integrations of diaspora, the various permutations of Judaism, and the role of symbol in the national landscape and in Middle Eastern studies considered from a comparative perspective. These essays illuminate the key issues pervading, motivating, and frustrating Israel’s complex ethnoscape.

Download or read book Lexicon of Global Melodrama written by Heike Paul and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new go-to reference book for global melodrama assembles contributions by experts from a wide range of disciplines, including cultural studies, film and media studies, gender and queer studies, political science, and postcolonial studies. The melodramas covered in this volume range from early 20th century silent movies to contemporary films, from independent ›arthouse‹ productions to Hollywood blockbusters. The comprehensive overview of global melodramatic film in the Lexicon constitutes a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners of film, teachers, film critics, and anyone who is interested in the past and present of melodramatic film on a global scale. The Lexicon of Global Melodrama includes essays on All That Heaven Allows, Bombay, Casablanca, Die Büchse der Pandora, In the Mood for Love, Nosotros los Pobres, Terra Sonâmbula, and Tokyo Story.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Muslim Jewish Relations written by Josef Meri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Muslim-Jewish Relations invites readers to deepen their understanding of the historical, social, cultural, and political themes that impact modern-day perceptions of interfaith dialogue. The volume is designed to illuminate positive encounters between Muslims and Jews, as well as points of conflict, within a historical framework. Among other goals, the volume seeks to correct common misperceptions about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations by complicating familiar political narratives to include dynamics such as the cross-influence of literary and intellectual traditions. Reflecting unique and original collaborations between internationally-renowned contributors, the book is intended to spark further collaborative and constructive conversation and scholarship in the academy and beyond.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema written by Terri Ginsberg and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To a substantial degree cinema has served to define the perceived character of the peoples and nations of the Middle East. This book covers the production and exhibition of the cinema of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabi, Yemen, Kuwait, and Bahrain, as well as the non-Arab states of Turkey and Iran, and the Jewish state of Israel. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on individual films, filmmakers, actors, significant historical figures, events, and concepts, and the countries themselves. It also covers the range of cinematic modes from documentary to fiction, representational to animation, generic to experimental, mainstream to avant-garde, and entertainment to propaganda. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Middle Eastern cinema.

Download or read book Russian Israelis written by Larissa Remennick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Israelis with a Russian accent have been part of Israel's social, cultural and economic landscape for over 20 years. They are found in all walks of life: as controversial politicians, senior physicians and scientists, kibbutz members and religious settlers. Despite lacking personal assets and below-average income, many of them managed to enter Israeli middle class, and some even became part of local elites – an achievement not to be taken for granted for the first-generation immigrants. This collection offers a multi-faceted portrait of the 'Great Russian Aliyah' of the 1990s with the emphasis on socio-political and cultural aspects of its insertion in Israel – based on social research conducted by the scholars most of whom are former-Soviet immigrants themselves. The issues covered include the exploration of Israel as an extension of the post-soviet space; the evolving political culture of Russian Israelis; the prospects for the ethnic media and Russian language continuity; visual tokens of 'domestication' of a major Israeli city by its 'Russian' residents, and mutual influences between Israeli and Russian cinematic traditions. Written in a lively and non-technical manner, most contributions will spark interest among both social scientists and broad readership interested in modern-day Israel and post-Soviet societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Israel Affairs.

Download or read book Food Cultures of Israel written by Michael Ashkenazi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores cuisine in Israel, including the country's food culture history, important dishes, current food issues, and more. The evolution of Israeli food has been dependent on three major variables: the geography and climate of Israel, its ethnic mix and ethnic history (including religious influences, non-Jewish communities, and heavy immigration from around the world), and technical innovation that has enabled Israel to become a leader in agricultural technology. This book provides a comprehensive picture of Israeli food culture in the twenty-first century, examined on the basis of the various influences that created this particular culture. Such influences include the lengthy food history that can be traced to prehistory, including data from the Bible and Koran and archaeological evidence; as well as contemporary food practices that have emerged as a mix of influences from different ethnic groups. Modern Israeli food practices are the result of the sway of European, Middle Eastern, and other cultures, creating a cuisine that is marked by its blends. Main topics are accompanied by easy-to-follow recipes. The book serves as an introduction to daily life in Israel as well as the evolution of food practices in a relatively new country.

Download or read book Essential Israel written by Arnon Golan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An excellent tool in Middle Eastern politics classes [and] an intellectual resource for experts who want to learn more about the complexities of Israel.”—Reading Religion Americans debate constantly about Israel, its place in the Middle East, and its relations with the United States. Essential Israel examines a wide variety of complex issues and current concerns in historical and contemporary contexts to provide readers with an intimate sense of the dynamic society and culture that is Israel today, providing a broader and deeper understanding to inform the conversation. The expert contributors to this volume address the Arab-Israeli conflict, the state of diplomatic efforts to bring about peace, Zionism and the impact of the Holocaust, the status of the Jewish state and Israeli democracy, foreign relations, immigration and Israeli identity, as well as literature, film, and the other arts. This unique and innovative volume provides solid grounding to understandings of Israel’s history, politics, culture, and possibilities for the future.

Download or read book Companion Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African Film written by Oliver Leaman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique volume illuminates a fascinating area of cinema. Each chapter covers the history and major issues of film within that area, as well as providing bibliographies of the leading films, directors and actors.