Asking the Wrong Questions

In the last decade the Israeli film industry has experienced a dramatic renaissance.  More films are being made; more tickets are being sold; and, internationally, Israeli films have been acclaimed at prestigious festivals and in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars.  I have to confess that I've let most of this new wave pass me by, mainly because so few of these films piqued my interest with their premise or subject matter.  Israeli filmmaking often seems to be cleanly divided between family dramas and examinations of the Arab-Israeli conflict in its many forms, to the extent that the recent film Rabies billed itself--quite correctly, from what I've gathered--as the first Israeli horror film.  What excited me about Footnote , Joseph Cedar's follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Beaufort , when I first heard about it, was that it seemed like such a departure from this narrow range of subjects, and the film itself has more than lived up to that expectatio...

My review of the essay collection With Both Feet in the Clouds , edited by Hagar Yanai and Danielle Gurevitch, has been nominated for the 2010 BSFA award in the best non-fiction category.  It joins a ballot made up of two blogging projects (Paul Kincaid's four - part discussion of the 2010 Hugo nominees at the group blog Big Other and Adam Roberts's epic review cycle of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time ), Francis Spufford's Red Plenty , a work of creative nonfiction (which Farah Mendlesohn and Niall Harrison insist is actually a novel), and Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan's Coode Street Podcast .  A slightly crazy and mismatched set, which I think is about right, as it gets at the way that the science fiction community has been using the internet, in its various guises, to proliferate opinions and criticism, while leaving space for traditional publishing.  I don't expect to win, nor do I think that I should--as pleased as I am by how the Clouds revi...

As I may have mentioned here in the past, I've been involved with the planning of ICon TLV, the Israeli science fiction and fantasy convention that will be held at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque over Sukkot week, 25-30 September.  It's been a fun and somewhat exhausting experience, and I've ended up with some interesting events.  If you're in the neighborhood, consider stopping by. All links go to the official ICon website .  All events are in Hebrew unless otherwise noted. Interview with author Lavie Tidhar Sunday, September 26th, 15:00-15:30, at the Tzomet Sfarim booth Jewish Fantasy : A Panel Discussion Based on the internet brouhaha of last winter, an Israeli perspective. Participants: Prof. Ortzion Bartana, Dr. Hagay Dagan, Rabbi Adi Cohen, Shimon Adaf, Abigail Nussbaum (moderator) Sunday, September 26th, 17:00-19:00, at the Cinematheque veranda tent A Guide to Biblical Monsters Paired lectures by Dr. Hagay Dagan and Asaf Asheri, introduced by Abigail Nuss...

This isn't something that I think about very often, but I live half my life in a foreign language.  It's the language I'm writing in right now.  My actual, physical life, is lived in Hebrew.  It's the language I work in, the one I shop and bank and commute in, the one I use with friends and acquaintances and people on the street.  But it's not the language I write in, because it's not the language I read in.  I'm not sure when exactly it happened, but somewhere around the point that I transitioned from children's books to adult fiction, I stopped reading Israeli writers, for reasons that I suspect will be familiar to many Israeli genre fans--because the books that caught my fancy, the Asimovs and Tolkiens and Pratchetts, were foreign.  Unlike many of my fellow fans, I had the command of English that allowed me, eventually, to read free of the mediation of Israeli translators and publishers.  So from a very early age I learned to gravitate to the Englis...

Michael Weingrad's "Why There Is No Jewish Narnia" has been the gift that keeps on giving for the genre/Jewish blogosphere for the last month.  Counting just those posts that have linked back to my response to the essay, there have been dozens of discussions sparked by it, reaching as far as blogs at The New York Times , The Atlantic , and The National Review .  Here are a couple of later additions which, I think, have really broadened the conversation. coffeeandink's "Religion != Christiany" is more a discussion of the discussion of Weingrad's article, and touches on subjects that she's talked on with some passion before (some of which were also brought up in the 2009 iteration of RaceFail).  Specifically, the tendency to forget the privilege of being Christian in historically Christian countries, and the different levels of privilege that other, non-Christian religions enjoy (as Micole points out, Judaism currently enjoys a signific...

Farah Mendlesohn pours out her wrath on Michael Weingrad's article "Why There is No Jewish Narnia" in the inaugural issue of Jewish Review of Books , and its assertion that Weingard "cannot think of a single major fantasy writer who is Jewish, and there are only a handful of minor ones of any note. To no other field of modern literature have Jews contributed so little."  Allegedly a review of Lev Grossman's The Magicians and Hagar Yanai's HaMaim SheBeyn HaOlamot ( The Water Between the Worlds ), the second volume in an Israeli YA fantasy trilogy, Weingard treats only briefly with his two subjects and mostly uses them as a backdrop to his theory of Judaism being a far less hospitable environment than Christianity for the development of a fantastic tradition, of "all the elements necessary for classic fantasy—magic, myth, dualism, demonic forces, strange worlds, and so forth."  Farah responds by listing a dozen Jewish fantasy authors off the ...

This post was inspired by Matt, who in the comments to my post about why I wouldn't be watching Quentin Tarantino's Holocaust action film, Inglourious Basterds , wondered what the Israeli critical and popular response to the film would be.  Which struck me as an interesting question, and hence this post.  All quotes are my translation from the Hebrew originals, and all links go to Hebrew sites. The Tel Aviv weekly entertainment guide Achbar HaIr ( City Mouse ) publishes the Reviewers' Table, which ranks all films screening in the city according to the average star rating they received from nine different sources, including the three Hebrew language daily papers ( Yediot Acharonot , Maariv , and Haaretz ), the two Tel Aviv guides ( Achbar HaIr and Time Out Tel Aviv ), the two national TV and film guides ( Pnai Plus and Rating ), the free daily paper Israel Today and the military radio station Galei Tzahal.  English and Russian daily papers are not represented (thoug...

This evening at 20:50, channel 8 will air Meni Philip's "Let There Be Darkness, Let There Be Light", an autobiographical documentary about his departure from the ultra-orthodox community in which he was raised, a decision in which he was ultimately followed by five of his ten brothers and sisters. I know Meni from Kiriat Ono's Reform congregation (brand new website here ), where he has for years acted as our talented and hardworking cantor. I've therefore had the privilege of seeing "Let There Be Darkness, Let There Be Light" twice already--once, in its embryonic form, when it was screened for congregation members, and another time only a few weeks ago, when the final version was screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival--and I recommend it highly. Meni and the new family he's formed with his secular siblings were also the subject of an article in Ha'aretz this week, which you can find here (unfortunately, there does not seem to be an English tr...

Spotted at the Dizzengoff 101 Steimatzki's: Odyssey Publication's Hebrew translation of Little, Big , with, admittedly, a front cover so ugly that it even makes my Fantasy Masterworks edition look good by comparison. But it's the inside that counts, and a brief examination yielded no translation malfunctions. So, if you're Israeli and prefer reading fiction in Hebrew, or if you have friends who read exclusively in Hebrew, get thee (and them) to a bookstore and spread the word. This is one of the finest, loveliest, most haunting novels I've ever read, especially if you're interested in unconventional fantasy. Oh, and ISFFA members: this year's Geffen award is taken. I just wanted to be clear on that point.