Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel

In Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel, Yaron Shemer articulates the modalities through which Mizrahi (Oriental-Jewish or Arab-Jewish) films employ narratives, characters, and space to glean ethnic identities and, often, to redraw ethnic boundaries. The book makes the argument that for decades after the establishment of the State, Israeli films mostly acquiesced with Zionism’s dominant discourse whereby the Mizrahi was deemed an inferior other whose Levantine culture was believed to pose a threat to the Western-oriented Zionist enterprise.

Shemer examines this continuous marginalisation of the Mizrahi in Israeli cinema and the challenges some Mizrahi films offer to the subjugation of this ethnic group. Beyond its analysis of the diegetic filmic materials, he investigates the role cultural policies and institutional power in Israel have recently played in shaping Mizrahi cinema, and the creation of a Mizrahi niche in cinema-a space that defines and contains contesting voices more than it nourishes them.