A Shtetl in Disguise: Israeli Bourekas Films and their Origins in Classical Yiddish Literature.

Abstract

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.