The Tel Aviv Review

An Activist’s Notebook

Israeli-American lawyer, philanthropist, and disability rights advocate Jay Ruderman argues that lasting change isn’t about shouting the loudest. It’s about knowing when to provoke, when to persuade, and how to build unlikely alliances.

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Beyond Anne Frank: The Jew in Dutch Cinema

Dr. Eyal Boers takes us on a fascinating journey through more than a century of Dutch cinema, showing how films have reflected—and shaped—the Netherlands’ evolving relationship with its Jewish community, the Holocaust, national identity, and Israel.

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Losing Our Story?

Etgar Keret joins us to discuss his favorite literary form, the impact of AI on storytelling and the power of literature post-Oct 7.

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The Arab King and the American Republic

In his most recent book, Aaron Magid explores the fascinating story of Jordan’s King Abdullah II: a monarch shaped by American culture, dependent on American support, yet ruling one of the region’s most fragile and strategically vital countries.

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A Nightmare on Herzl Street

A generation raised on VHS, torrents, and global cinema reinvented horror in Israel—turning familiar tropes into sharp, funny, and deeply local cultural critique. As Prof. Olga Gershenson explains, Israeli horror is anything but escapist—it’s subversive, original, and long overdue.

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The Dialectics of a Special Relationship

Prof. Oz Frankel takes us inside a pivotal — and surprisingly complex — moment in Israeli history: the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Israel didn’t simply “become American”… it collided with America.

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Early Zionism’s Arabists

Historian Dr. Mostafa Hussein explores how Jewish scholars in late Ottoman and British Palestine didn’t just study the region around them — they actively engaged with Arabic language, Islamic traditions, and broader Middle Eastern culture in shaping modern Jewish thought.

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Bubbe-Meises for the Masses: A Gendered Reading of the US Yiddish Press

At the turn of the 20th century, the Yiddish press in America didn’t just report the news; they offered advice, shaped politics, and helped newcomers navigate a bewildering new society.

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When Everybody Is LGBT, Nobody Is

Amir Naaman and Dr Ran Heilbrunn, Israeli writers based in Germany, discuss the next steps for queer theory after the impressive gains made by gay rights activism over the last few decades.

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The Beginning of the End of Israeli Democracy

For Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s most prominent human rights lawyers, the government’s anti-democratic proposals, collectively known as the “judicial overhaul”, are a culmination of the decades-long occupation of the Palestinians

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