Aliyah to The Movies: Russian and Israeli Cinema
May 3, 2011 by Olga Gershenson
Some years ago, when applying for my US passport, I took the naturalisation paperwork to the post office. It stated: ‘Place of birth: Russia. Place of residence: Israel’. Confused, the clerk asked, ‘Is Israel part of Russia?’ ‘No’, I told her, ‘but you have a point.’ Twenty years earlier, the clerk’s mistake would not have made sense. But once Russian Jews became the largest wave of Jewish migration into Israel— today one out of every six Israelis speaks Russian—the country has, in a way, become part of Russia. And Russia has in some ways become a part of Israel.
In a world that is increasingly globalised, decentralised, and diasporic, traditional national boundaries are blurred. Post-Soviet immigrants, known in Israeli parlance as ‘Russians’ are a case in point. These immigrants, who often maintain multiple passports, homes, and languages, make us re-think the meaning of homeland and exile: they are part of a traditional Jewish diaspora and of a new Russian diaspora.This mass migration affected both Israeli and Russian cultures. One site where these changes can be clearly identified is cinema: Russian immigrants and their homeland are becoming common in Israeli films and Israel is beginning to appear in Russian cinema. What do these films, made in both Israel and Russia, tell us about the changes in the cultural landscapes in both countries?
