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 .

The emergence of the Yiddish and Hebrew press in the United States was one of the great cultural enterprises of the Jewish immigrants from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in the last third of the nineteenth century, and its influence on the lives of individuals and communities was enormous. From the Cellar to the Top Floor traces the journey of the Hebrew Alphabet press across the Atlantic following the Jewish mass migration. Against the background of the American press, the book discusses the development of the Hebrew and Yiddish press from an economic, cultural and political point of view. It traces the ongoing negotiations between the Jewish immigrant society and the American majority society at the end of the nineteenth century. Based on personal correspondence, legal documents, archival evidence, and contemporary press materials ,the book offers the first comprehensive analysis in Hebrew of the formative decades in the emergence of one of the leading cultural institutions in modern Jewish society.

In recent years, information technology has become a significant factor in public policy, whether as an area in which to pursue policy, as a tool for implementing policy, or as a reflection on the social environment in which policy is shaped. The aim of this edited collection of articles is to present to the academic and general public a vivid updated picture of the relationship between the spread of the use of various information technologies and the design and operation of public policy. This is the first book in Hebrew to shed light on the changes taking place in public policy in the 21st century as a result of new techno-social processes. The collection includes articles written by researchers from various fields of knowledge: communications, law, education, political science, and public policy. The diversity of knowledge bases, theoretical frameworks, and research methods allows for a comprehensive and complex discussion of the relationships between information technology and public policy. These relationships raise several key issues discussed in the articles included in the edited collection. The first issue is that information technologies are a new area of public policy, and as such, these technologies and their distribution create multiple challenges for the state as designer and regulator of its citizens' living environment. A second issue concerns the penetration of information technologies into the field of civic participation in policymaking and policy implementation. The wide distribution of social networks, as well as the assembly and analysis of big data are being used to reshape the civil participation environment. A third issue relates to the fact that information technologies are resources in their own right in democratic processes in general, and in policy design in particular. For example, significant parts of the public debate on a variety of policy topics take place through social networks, which are privately owned by Internet platforms. Additionally, access to social networks and advanced technological capabilities can be seen as an important resource for influencing policymaking processes.

Imagine 100 high school-aged teens – boys and girls, city and suburb dwellers, “heavy smartphone users” and regular users – disconnecting from their smartphones for one whole week. It may sound fictional, but this exactly is what occurred as part of a fascinating experiment that we recently conducted, which serves as the basis of this book. For a long and challenging week, these teenagers documented their experiences in personal diaries, and described them in personal and group interviews. They described their physical and psychological feelings about life without their devices, the effect that disconnecting from their devices had on their social life, their family life, and their management of time and routine tasks. The participants described how their lives looked without a smartphone in school and during their free time, how they missed their device and felt its absence upon waking in the morning and in the moments before falling asleep, and how they even felt it in their dreams, which were filled with longing for the digital friend that had been taken from them. This book provides deep insights into the role of the smartphone in the daily lives of teenagers, and the culture of “cellphones natives,” members of Gen Z. The book offers a new point of view on questions occupying researchers, parents, educators, and professionals: how and why did the smartphone become the dominant medium of communication in the lives and culture of teenagers? How does it shape and influence their daily lives? Can the relationship with the smartphone really be characterized as dependence and perhaps even as an addiction, as many claim, or is it relationship of a completely different nature? In a world full of technology, the aspiration to better understand teenagers and even ourselves requires acknowledging the ways in which these technologies are woven into every moment of our daily lives, for good and for bad.

According to its Declaration of Independence, the State of Israel "will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex". However, the equality between men and women in Israel was not de facto. What did Israeli women have to say about that? The book presents views and opinions of Israeli women in the 1950s and the early 1960s about their roles and duties in the public and the domestic spheres, based on contemporary women's sections in the press and women's magazines. It shows what women said about women in the Israeli parliament (Knesset) and about Golda Meir; women's service in the Israeli Defense Force and the exclusion of women from the public sphere; motherhood and parenthood, woman's right to choose to have an abortion and women's struggle for peace; women's duties as housewives and the discrimination of women as employees. The book also uncovers a forgotten feminist journal, sheds light on a famous adoption story of a Yemenite baby and discusses a protest of female cadets in the Israeli Air Force flight course that was ignored and silenced for many years. The book unveils Israeli women's voices from the past, which show that in an era of many fateful decisions, Israeli women also made choices that affected their status in society. Readers might find these decisions relevant vis-à-vis women's status in Israeli society nowadays.

The public discourse in Israel relates to girls mainly in connection to their body and associates their body with appearance, sexuality, vulnerability and victimization. The book Girls and their Bodies calls attention to the social construction of girls' bodies in Israel which tend to disavow, disregard, objectify and expose them simultaneously. This is the first time a book about the developing field of Girlhood Studies is published in Hebrew. The book chapters, written by a group of researchers and professionals who work with girls and are interested in advancing the understanding and support of girls, create a fascinating interdisciplinary mosaic regarding girls' bodies in Israel. They investigate from a critical gendered perspective, how the body is present, active, confined and silenced within cultural, educational, social, health and legal arenas. This collection illustrates a possible roadmap for future research in this field that will enrich the academic discourse and professional knowledge about girlhood, and in this way facilitate social action with and for girls.

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.

When the speaker has "no words" she may utilize silence to communicate (opposed to stillness, pauses, the unsaid, empty-speech or silencing). Such silence speaks alongside words composing language structures. Our book studies (eloquent) silence: its functions and forms, as it emerges in Hebrew texts and genres aural and written (from the Bible, literary works, commercials, psychotherapy discourse, personal and public).

This book represents a first attempt to examine in a systematic manner televised humor in Israel. It focuses on the Israeli “comic canon” – a bunch of sketches, characters and programs that were produced between the early 1970’s and late 1990’s. In the course of the years, these texts have accuiraed a unique status and became part of the cultural DNA of many Israelies. The analysis investigates the interrelationship between humor and six prominent social cleavages in Israeli society: national, ethnic, class, political, religious and gender. A close reading of the texts shows that “a joke is never just a joke” – the social, political and economic dramatic transformations that Israel has undergone in the last three decades are capsulated in televised humor. Moreover, humor has served as a sensitive seismograph, capturing processes in early formative stages and sometimes even functioned as an actor in socio-political transformations. The book uncovers the polysemic, or multi-meaning, qualities of popular televised humor, which make it unifying and dividing, conservative and subversive. These qualities enable the “comic canon” to contain the set of paradoxes underlying the Israeli society without resolving them. This polysemity also allows the comic texts to serve as a “cultural core” – shared by different, opposing groups, each of which interprets the texts according to its own needs and perspective.