Aside from brief appearances at film festivals and art houses, Israeli films are seldom seen in the U.S. The recent book Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion (published by University of Texas Press) gives a good sense for what we\'ve been missing. Edited by Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg, Israeli Cinema is a collection of scholarly essays covering the earliest World War I-era documentaries by Zionist settlers in Palestine through recent films steeped in the relativism of postmodern thought. Along the way we also encounter many movies from the formative years of the State of Israel, in which the construction of identity was conducted with great certainty of purpose. Regardless of the unstable status quo of Israeli politics, recent films such as Beaufort show disillusion with “romantic nationalistic attitudes” and even “doubts regarding concepts of heroism.”
