Since the early 2000s, Israeli television drama has become a highly sought-after product in the global TV market. Israel is indeed an intense and dynamic place that offers drama creators a wealth of diverse and compelling stories. In 1971, three years after the establishment of Israeli television, the first drama series in Hebrew Hedva and Shlomik aired—still in black and white—based on the literary novel by Aharon Megged (1953). The evolution of television drama in Israeli television from its inception has not been thoroughly documented until now. This book aims to fill that gap and provide readers with tools for watching, interpreting, and understanding television series in general, and Israeli ones in particular . The story of Israeli television drama in this book is set within broad socio-political and cultural contexts. Drama consistently engages with reality and responds to it in various ways, even if not always overtly. It also addresses the foundational myths of Israeli identity—sometimes reinforcing them, other times questioning or subverting them. Like other popular cultures, it often fulfills desires or offers imagined solutions to the contradictions underlying these myths . Through the prism of Israeli television drama, this book reveals a self-portrait of the people and society—both as they were and as they might've like to be seen .

It has been said: " No two people have ever read the same book." This is true for literature where the reader has to imagine a world presented by words. It doesn't seem appropriate for cinema which presents a world ready-made to be seen and heard. But films, almost since their early beginnings, and especially in the recent decades, have been capable not to present, not to show, but to allude to off-screen events and images. One could say about most of the movies discussed in this book: " No two people have ever watched the same film ".

Bearing Witness to the Witness examines the different methods of testimony given by trauma victims and the ways in which these can enrich or undermine the ability of the reader to witness them. Years of listening to both direct and indirect testimonies on trauma have lead Dana Amir to identify four modes of witnessing trauma: The “metaphoric mode”, the “metonymic mode,” the “excessive mode”, and the “Muselmann mode.” The author thus demonstrates the importance of testimony in understanding the nature of trauma, and therefore how to respond to trauma more generally in a clinical psychoanalytic setting. In order to follow these four modes of interaction with the traumatic memory, the various chapters of the book present a close reading of three genres of traumatic witnessing: Literary accounts by Holocaust survivors, memoirs (situated between autobiographic recollection and fiction) and ‘raw’ testimonies given by Holocaust survivors. Since every traumatic testimonial narrative contains a combination of all four modes with various shifts between them, it is of crucial importance to identify the singular combination of modes that characterize each traumatic narrative, focusing on the specific areas within which a shift occurs from one mode to another. Such a focus is extremely important, as illustrated and analysed throughout this book, to the rehabilitation of the psychic metabolic system which conditions the digestion of traumatic materials, allowing a metaphoric working through of traumatic zones that were so far only accessible to repetition and evacuation.

Cinema is the most democratic form of art, dependent on the taste of millions of viewers. Within the cinematic historical genre in Arab cinema one finds a rich intellectual discourse, in a constant dialogue with state, censorship and audience. The book Back to the Past: Filmed History in Arab Cinema invites the readers to know the Arab cinema industry, mainly the Egyptian one, through the historical genre, and "medieval" films as its core. In films taking place in Middle Ages , the viewers meet warriors and poets, besides the leaders and founders of Islam. These films present also the images of Mongol and Crusaders invaders, slaves and concubines, Mamluks, Christians and Jews. The book surveys also the transition from a situation of Egyptian cinema exported to the Arab world, into the creation of Pan-Arab historical discourse within the satellite channels.

The interconnections among music and the visual arts have been a source of inspiration in Western culture for hundreds of years. The medium difference caused artists and theoreticians to investigate analogies, connections and mutual influences among them in diverse artistic and historical contexts. Modernism and technology saw the birth of new ways in combining music, sound and image and open new horizons in the age of multimedia and internet. The interconnections among music and picture are the subject of an extensive research at the last two decades in Israel and abroad. The discourse calls for a wide variety of disciplines, among them the history of art, musicology, philosophy, technology, and cognition, and creates fruitful and updated collaborations. The anthology Ear Sees, Eye Hears: On the Interconnections among Sound and Picture in Art – the first book in Hebrew dedicated to that field – is an example of such a discourse. It contains nine articles, written by expert scholars from Israel and abroad, and four shorter essays written by artists who describe their own creative process. Thus, the book gives a panoramic view of the cutting-age research and combines theory and practice. The book concentrates on Modernism, avant-garde and contemporary art, on the background of wider historical and theoretical contexts, and offers answers as well as questions regarding painting, music, performance art, voice art, cinema, animation, visual music, and multimedia. It is written for scholars, students, teachers, artists of different media and art lovers, and opens a door for additional learning.

Why did the Israeli cinema disregard the Holocaust for many years? Why did it represent the Holocaust survivors as a homogeneous group of passive, detached and problematic people and ignored their enormous contribution to the prosperity of Israel? Was there any change in these representations from the late 40's until the present time? These questions are the center of the book Two Faces in the Mirror , that depicts the representation of the Holocaust, the Holocaust survivors and their rehabilitation in Israeli fiction and documentary cinema during 1945-2009. It is well known that films do not reflect reality, however they reflect cultural and social atmosphere – influence it and are influenced by it. The analysis of Israeli fiction and documentary cinema reveal two different paths of memory, two faces in the mirror: A society that ranges between shallowness and in-depth views, between strengthening superficial stereotypes and shattering them, between implanting distorted narratives and multi-cultural openness towards the "other".

This book deals with intellectual capacity and the diversity in cinema since the Lumiere brothers in the late nineteenth century and Murray Rosenberg at the beginning of the twentieth century, through international masterpieces (Hitchcock, Welles, Godard, etc.) and the best Israeli films ('Sallah Shabati', 'Metzitzim', 'Bikur Ha-Tizmoret', and 'Waltz with Bashir'). This book was awarded the BAHAT PRIZE, 2007. The BAHAT PRIZE is awarded annually in memory of Professor Yaacov Bahat