MIZRAHI

Only because I had lurking bronchitis and reading made my eyes hurt and I’d run out of DVDs — only then did I flick on the TV to watch Israel’s first Big Brother. Only after noting my bad luck in having to witness the reality TV phenomenon take hold twice over and in two languages did I wonder if there’d be any manifestations of ethnic tension in this programme. It took around five minutes to surface. Forgive the lack of names and the paraphrasing, but basically the Ashkenazi-origin young woman was upset over the abrupt manners of a Mizrahi housemate, which were interpreted as rude and which were not apologized for so much as explained away, as the Mizrahi contestant said something like: ‘This is what you get, it’s what I am — I can’t be European.’ Bingo.

Reality-TV aficionados know that the format is predicated on the sort of psychological profiling that is designed to create precisely such tensions. But that doesn’t mitigate the point that ethnic tensions clearly do still exist in Israel. The Big Brother incident — variations of which repeat on a daily basis in real life, some harmless and some serious — is proof of the one thing that so many Israelis believe is no longer the case: that ethnic origin is at all relevant or a source of disharmony within the Jewish state. Read more