August 26, 2021
Tel Aviv on Fire
A comedy about Israel-Palestine? Well, Here it is:
Salam, an inexperienced young Palestinian man, becomes a writer on a popular soap opera show after a chance meeting with an Israeli soldier. His creative career is on the rise until the soldier and the show’s financial backers disagree about how the show should end, and Salaam is caught in the middle!
Comedy, 97 minutes
Director: Sameh Zoabi
Hebrew with English subtitles
Watch it First on Amazon Prime, Youtube, Google Play
Our discussion starts at 7:30, but please join us early to chat and schmooze
Susan S. Lancer
Guest Speaker: Susan S. Lanser
Professor Emerita of English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Comparative Literature Brandeis University
Susan S. Lanser & Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
Israeli–Palestinian narratives and the politics of form: reading Side by Side
As the first foray into a larger study of conflicting Israeli and Palestinian narratives through a narratological lens, this essay focuses on a single volume, Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine (2012). With recourse to classical concepts in narrative theory, the authors compare the formal practices deployed in each history, giving particular attention to questions of narrative voice, temporality – i.e. order, duration and frequency – and addressing questions of narrative agency and character formation in a collective history. They also ask how these accounts imagine possible worlds, giving rise to bifurcations between what happened and what could have happened. Their aim is to show not only how narratology can be used in a politically charged context, but also how that context can unveil gaps and limitations in narratology. They also demonstrate that the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, read through the lens of their form, diverge and converge in ways that are less predictable than the oppositions of content might suggest.