Israeli Television: Global Contexts, Local Visions

The essays in this anthology study Israeli television, its different forms of representation, audiences and production processes, past and present, examining Israeli television in both its local, cultural dynamics, and global interfaces.

The book looks at Israeli television as a creator, negotiator, guardian and warden of collective Israeli memory, examining instances of Israeli original television exported and circulated to the US and the global markets, as well as instances of American, British, and global TV formats, adapted and translated to the Israeli scene and screen. The trajectory of this volume is to shed light on major themes and issues Israeli television negotiates: history and memory, war and trauma, Zionism and national disillusionment, place and home, ethnicity in its unique local variations of Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians, gender in its unique Israeli formations, specifically masculinity as shaped by the military and constant violent conflict, femininity in this same context as well as within a complex Jewish oriented society, religion, and secularism.

Providing multifaceted portraits of Israeli television and culture in its Middle Eastern political and local context, this book will be a key resource to readers interested in media and television studies, cultural studies, Israel, and the Middle East.

Miri Talmon is a scholar of media culture, cinema, and television, who specializes in the research and teaching of comparative approaches to the Israeli and American film and television cultures. She teaches at The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel-Aviv University. Talmon is the author of Israeli Graffiti: Nostalgia, Groups and Collective Identity in Israeli Cinema (2001, Hebrew) and the editor, with Yaron Peleg, of the anthology Israeli Cinema--Identities in Motion (2011).

Yael Levy holds a PhD from the Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, where she teaches courses in film, television, race, and feminist theories. She has published articles regarding gender, race, sexuality, and textuality in film and television, and her works have appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Lexington Books, and more.