This American Life?
Last week, This American Life shared their predictions for the year 2010. Along with discussing psychics, economic forecasts, and parents anxiously awaiting the birth of a new children, there was this segment, “Nostra-mom-us,” five minutes of Etgar Keret talking with his mother about the mideast. I’m not quite sure what it is about Keret’s segment that has to do with America; yes, we get a certain glee from hearing Dermot Mulroney mangle Hebrew when reading this Keret story, but “Nostra-mom-us” is just five minutes of Keret talking to his mom about what to expect in Israel–not exactly a look at what it means to be the number 1 party school in America. (Yes, I’m spending too much time in the TAL archives. Blame thelazyscholar.)
Whatever the reason, there’s a long tradition of Americans projecting American tropes and values onto narratives of Israel. Deborah Dash Moore writes in her work on Miami and LA:
This drama of Israel’s creation paralleled the American experience. It combined elements of the American revolution against the British with frontier settlement and the fight against Indians. Reduced to melodrama, this reading of postwar Jewish politics ignored the reality of bitter, fratricidal struggles among Zionist parties….Its themes were liberation and redemption, reenactment in secular terms of a religious message…The consensus adopted by the movies simplified the historical reality, giving it a single trajectory, idealizing its participants, and emphasizing its American resonance.
American popular narratives of Israeli independence came to resemble the American revolutionary war. Even the trailer for Exodus brings up the Minutemen at Concord.
The film is advertised as an American epic. The trailer invokes Gone with the Wind, and not-so-subtly uses the phrase “birth of a nation,” reminding us of the notorious epic. The movie is sold as American experience, and its story structured around resonances to America.
You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is paradigmatic of this phenomenon. Zohan renounces violence and comes to America where he falls in love with a beautiful Palestinian woman, the [SPOILER ALERT] sister of his arch nemesis. The nemesis tracks him down to the states, but they are able to put their problems aside and team-up to confront the real villain, the American capitalist intent on destroying the ethnic neighborhood.
The movie celebrates American values, American multiculturalism, the melting pot. Only in America can these people put their problems aside and live together–not just side by side. The movie’s fabula and content are in this sense superficially Israeli; everything is refracted through the American point of view.
