New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre
A Jewish Book Council In-Person Author Talk
by Olga Gershenson
Monday, September 30 at 11am at FJC
at FJC's Blanche & Joel D. Seifer Community Center, 7 Hatchville Road
Open to everyone. Advance reservations are required. General Admission is $5.
Purchase your ticket here: https://www.falmouthjewish.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=21411&action=edit
Book sales by Eight Cousins Bookshop
Falmouth Jewish Congregation opens its 2024-2025 Jewish Book Council season with an author talk by University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Olga Gershenson. Ms. Gershenson's recently-published study of Israeli horror film is timely and addresses an important and entertaining aspect of Israeli society and culture. Come learn about this phenomenon, watch clips from films covered in the book, enjoy refreshments and purchase a book, supplied by our partner, Eight Cousins Bookshop in Falmouth.
New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre
Before 2010, there were no Israeli horror films. Then distinctly Israeli serial killers, zombies, vampires, and ghosts invaded local screens. The next decade saw a blossoming of the genre by young Israeli filmmakers. New Israeli Horror is the first book to tell their story. Through in-depth analysis, engaging storytelling, and interviews with the filmmakers, Olga Gershenson explores their films from inception to reception. She shows how these films challenge traditional representations of Israel and its people, while also appealing to audiences around the world. Gershenson introduces an innovative conceptual framework of adaptation, which explains how filmmakers adapt global genre tropes to local reality. It illuminates the ways in which Israeli horror borrows and diverges from its international models. New Israeli Horror offers an exciting and original contribution to our understanding of both Israeli cinema and the horror genre.
Praise for New Israeli Horror
"This significant work charts the ways in which New Israeli Horror films offer a critique of the violence that lies at the heart of Israeli society, the damaging masculinity of the military machine, and the suppression of Palestinian trauma. The result is a hugely readable and subtly nuanced work that makes a substantive contribution to our understanding of both modern Israel and the horror genre’s ability to articulate national trauma. It’s essential reading for all with an interest in the genre and in national cinema more broadly."
Linnie Blake
Author of The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity
"This is a fantastic book that looks at the intellectual, industrial, funding, and reception contexts of Israeli horror but without bouncing between them like demented pinball. Instead what we get is an extraordinarily integrated interdisciplinary account that should operate as an exemplar for horror scholarship for decades to come!"
Mark Jancovich
Author of Horror and editor of Horror, The Film Reader
New Israeli Horror in the Media
"Richly entertaining and informative book." Haaretz pdf of the article
"Excellent new book." New Books Network podcast
"Gershenson's book is one of the most comprehensive and captivating studies on Israeli cinema." Walla [in Hebrew]
"Gershenson provides a thorough, eloquent, and brilliant analysis of the reasons behind the rise of this new genre in Israel." Maariv [in Hebrew]
"The book outlines how, in the 2010s, a group of filmmakers emerging from an underground genre film club at Tel Aviv University Film School, adapted the familiar tropes of horror for a local sensibility. Part of that conversion meant channeling the trauma of past conflicts and the masculine anxiety of a militarized society into zombie films and creature features. In this way, Israeli horror carved out a niche that might one day help the nation to process its current nightmare, though, Gershenson believes, that may be decades away." Forward
"Gershenson gives her readers enough plot and description to understand her incisive analyses, but not so much that she keeps us from slavering for more. She is a dedicated fan of horror who understands the movies’ global influences, giving us plenty of comparands to movies we know well, including zombie movies, slasher films, and serial killer flicks." Jewish Book Council
"I would suggest you have a notepad when you start reading this book because you will be adding more than a couple titles that you’re going to want to seek out." Kitley’s Krypt: Discover the Horror
About the author:
Olga Gershenson is Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and of Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Professor Gershenson earned her BA in Russia, her MA in Israel, and her PhD in the US. Her academic path is as diverse. A multi-disciplinary scholar, her interests lie at the intersection of culture, history, and film.
Her first book, Gesher: Russian Theater in Israel (2005), pioneered the study of Russian immigrant cultural production. A series of articles on Russian-Israeli cinema cemented her status as the premier expert in the field.
Professor Gershenson's book, The Phantom Holocaust (2013), reveals unknown Holocaust films from the Soviet Union. According to the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, it "will serve as a foundation for all further research and reflection on the topic."
Her latest book, New Israeli Horror (2024) is the first book to tell the story of a cycle of horror films that blossomed in Israel in 2010s. Through in-depth analysis, engaging storytelling, and interviews with the filmmakers, Gershenson explores their films from inception to reception.
Along with film, Professor Gershenson does innovative research on spaces, both sacred and otherwise. Her collection Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009) established the discipline of Toilet Studies. Her special issue of Eastern European Jewish Affairs (which she co-edited with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett) charts for the first time a map of new Jewish museums throughout post-communist Europe, examining the relationship between politics, history, and culture.
At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Professor Gershenson teaches courses on Israeli and Palestinian cinemas, on Holocaust films, on Jewish humor and popular culture. She is an editor of the “Teaching with Film and Media” column at AJS Perspectives. In addition to her home institution, she has taught internationally, including in Israel, China, India, Russia, and UAE.
Profiled in Haaretz as the rare academic who “prefers engaging the masses in culture,” she curates film series, consults for festivals, and has a lively lecture schedule at universities, conferences, and museums around the world.
Learn about New Israeli Horror and Gershenson’s other works at her website: