The latest films aren’t flukes but the product of a talented new generation of filmmakers.

New York, 1990: An Israeli friend and I study the program for the Israel Film Festival. “What’s going on?” asks my friend. “They’re all about Holocaust survivors who move to a kibbutz and become incest victims.” We decide to see Goodfellas instead.

Berlin, 2007: When the prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival are announced, Israeli Joseph Cedar wins the Silver Bear Award for Best Director for his hard-hitting war film set in Lebanon, Beaufort.

Many Israelis are pleased, but few who are familiar with the Israeli film industry in general and Cedar’s work in particular are surprised by the award. In the last few years, Israeli movies have won top awards at major film festivals, including Cannes and Sundance, played all over the world and received glowing reviews, and lured millions of local filmgoers away from Hollywood blockbusters.

In January, Dror Shaul’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama set on a kibbutz, Sweet Mud, took home the top prize for an international feature at the Sundance Film Festival, the most prestigious festival for independent film. It also won a major prize in the youth division at the Berlin Film Festival.

Eytan Fox’s The Bubble, the story of a complicated romance between a gay Israeli and a Palestinian, also got several prizes at Berlin.

So how did we get from there to here?

Several factors have brought about an increase in the professionalism of Israeli filmmakers and a subsequent rise in the quality of Israeli-made films. First, let’s look back at the history of the Israeli film industry. In the past, there were two basic types of Israeli movies: sereti bourekas, or what might be called teen flicks, such as the Eskimo Limon series, and movies with serious aspirations of wildly varying quality.

In the early days of the state, these serious films tended to be dramas designed to stir up patriotism, such as Entebbe: Operation Thunderbolt. In later years, the serious films were more likely to be earnest looks at the political situation, made by directors whose leftist politics were better developed than their narrative technique or their desire to entertain an audience.

In each category, occasionally there were movies that were true gems, such as Ephraim Kishon’s Sallah Shabbati (1964), a charming, funny and intelligently satirical film about a Mizrahi immigrant family, and Beyond the Walls” (1984), an intense and hopeful drama about an alliance between Israeli and Palestinian prisoners who fight the corrupt prison system together. But these movies were few and far between. Not coincidentally, Beyond the Walls was the last Israeli film to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category, an award no Israeli film has ever won.

Several Israeli movies were made every year, but few were worth seeing and fewer were distributed abroad or accepted at international film festivals. A government-run film fund allocated money to filmmakers and, in some cases, paid theaters to show these films by subsidizing heating and air conditioning bills for the empty auditoriums. Throughout the 1980s, I can’t remember attending a showing of an Israeli film here with an audience of more than 10. And a growing number of movies made from the 1990s on chronicled the angst of alienated Tel Aviv residents and were especially grating and amateurish.

But dramatic change did come to Israeli cinema, and part of the credit for this is due to Lia van Leer, the founder of the country’s cinematheques in Haifa and Jerusalem in the early Eighties and helped found the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. The Israeli cinematheques (there are now several in smaller cities such as Sderot) are modeled on the famous Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. They show the finest contemporary and classic films from around the world.

Van Leer also founded international film festivals in Haifa and Jerusalem in the mid-eighties, which brought some of the world’s greatest filmmakers and actors to Israel every year. These cinematheques and festivals and the excitement they generated schooled a generation of aspiring younger filmmakers in a highly sophisticated cinema culture. These younger cineastes wanted to study moviemaking and did not necessarily want to go abroad and so film schools, notably Sam Spiegel in Jerusalem, were founded and were quickly flooded with applications.

A second change can be credited to television. The development of Channel Two and cable companies in the late Eighties and early Nineties meant that suddenly there were new opportunities for Israeli filmmakers. Now, actors and directors had years to learn their craft in television. The cable companies began to finance movies, both aimed at theatrical release and television. Eytan Fox’s Yossi & Jagger (2002), for example, a drama about a romance between two male soldiers, was originally produced for television but then was shown theatrically in Israel and around the world.

These new sources of funding revolutionized the film industry, because now the Israel Film Fund wasn’t the only game in town. Outsiders in the movie industry, such as women, recent immigrants, gays, Orthodox Jews and Arabs, as well as anyone who didn’t have connections in the Israel Film Fund, now had a much better chance to get their films made.

The final factor that pushed Israeli movies to the breakthrough they are now enjoying is the so-called Cinema Law. In 2001, in a rare moment of good judgment, the government agreed to allocate a significantly higher amount of money to the film industry.

It was in 2004 that the movies that filmmakers had begun planning in 2001 started to be released and it was a banner year for Israeli films. Keren Yedaya’s drama of a Tel Aviv prostitute and her daughter, Or, won the prestigious Camera d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Eran Riklis’ The Syrian Bride, co-written by Israeli Arab screenwriter Suha Arraf, the story of a Druze woman about to leave her family in Israel to marry in Syria, took the top prize at the Montreal International Film Festival and won more than 18 prizes at film festivals around the world.

Eytan Fox’s Walk on Water,” about a cynical Mossad agent assigned to shadow the gay grandson of an infamous Nazi, earned more than $7 million in the US, more than any other Israeli film ever. Turn Left at the End of the World, a comedy-drama about Indian immigrants moving to a development town in the Negev populated mainly by Moroccan Jews, directed by Avi Nesher, broke box-office records in Israel, selling more than half a million tickets. Turn Left, which also had a successful run all over Europe and particularly in France, is especially significant because in order for a film industry to truly thrive, it has to speak to a local audience as well as filmgoers abroad. Israelis have begun to flock to locally made films (and to rent and buy them on DVD), both serious dramas, broad comedies and everything in between.

Another development that became impossible to ignore by 2004 was the diversity apparent in Israeli films. In a highly competitive year, the Ophir (the Israeli Oscar) for Best Picture went to Joseph Cedar’s second film, Campfire, a look at a modern Orthodox widow and her two teenage daughters who contemplate moving to a West Bank settlement. The National Zionist sector, although it had become increasingly influential and visible in Israeli society, had been nearly invisible in movies until then. Significantly, the Ophir for Best Actor that year went to newly ultra-Orthodox actor/screenwriter Shuli Rand, who co-wrote and starred in Ushpizin, an insider’s look at ultra-Orthodox life in Jerusalem.

Arab filmmakers in Israel have also begun to play a more prominent role. Atash, a movie by Israeli Arab Tawfik Abu Wael about an isolated family dominated by an angry patriarch, shared the top prize at the 2004 Jerusalem Film Festival and took home several honors at Cannes.

From 2004 until today, Israeli movies have continued to win honors abroad and draw audiences, both locally and internationally. Movies such as Beaufort, The Bubble and Sweet Mud will soon be distributed internationally and will likely win more awards. These films are not flukes but the product of a talented new generation of Israeli filmmakers. And don’t be surprised if next January, when the Oscar nominations come out, there’s an Israeli title among the Best Foreign Language Film nominees.

The beer ‘n’ babes magazine Maxim will send photographers to Israel next week for an Israeli women photo shoot that Foreign Ministry officials hope redefines what the magazine’s hormone-charged readers think when they hear television reporters say “the situation in Israel is hot.”

“All the surveys we have done shows that the biggest hasbara problem that Israel has is with males from the age of 18-35,” said David Saranga, the consul for media and public affairs at Israel’s consulate in New York.

“Israel does not seem relevant for them, and that is bad for branding,” he said. “In order to change their perception of Israel as only a land of conflict, we want to present to them an Israel that interests them.” Which is where good-looking women in skimpy bikinis come in.

The nine-person Maxim team, including photographers, a reporter, hairstylists and make-up people, will arrive for a five-day photo-shoot on Tuesday, using Tel Aviv-Jaffa – and the old and new motif – as a backdrop for the photographs.

The glossy magazine, launched in the US in 1997, boasts a circulation of “around 2.5 million” and claims to be the “#1 men’s lifestyle magazine in both the country and the world.”

The magazine features revealing pictorials of scantily clad actresses, models, singers and the “girl next door” interspersed among articles on sports, cars, movies, booze and relationships.

The Israeli models, Saranga said, were a “Trojan horse” to present Israel as a modern country with nice beaches and pretty women. “Many Americans don’t even know we have beaches,” he said.

Saranga said that blurbs would be written about each of the seven models that would be a vehicle to show the diversity of Israeli society. “Israel is viewed as a very macho society,” Saranga said. “We want to show that we are a normal society like all others.”

Israel’s consul-general in New York, Arye Mekel, said, “I want people to think about beautiful people in beautiful places when they think of Israel, as well as see the diversity of Israeli society and culture.”

Israel, Mekel said, “is a vibrant and vivid place, and capturing this on the pages of America’s biggest male magazine helps us reaffirm our brand in an important way.”

The photo spread is scheduled to appear in the magazine’s June edition, with an article on tourism in Israel scheduled to appear the following month. The project is being carried out with the help of the Foreign Ministry, the American-Israel Friendship League and ISRAEL21c, a non-profit news agency focusing on Israel beyond the headlines.

David Brinn, the editorial director of ISRAEL21c, said the idea behind the project was to “open up another lens” so that people can view Israel through a lens that is not militaristic, religious or historic – the lens through which, he said, “99 percent of Americans view Israel.”

We need to start understanding the desires and needs of the consumer and the marketplace.People in Israel and around the world understand that the future of every society depends upon identifying and focusing on its relative advantages.



It is recognized that one of the strongest relative advantages of Israel is the innovative power of its academia and industry. However, an important element of innovation is the ability to focus, which by itself is sometimes a controversial subject between academia and industry.



This week we will have the opportunity to discuss this issue when academia, industry and government research bodies meet in Haifa at the Israel Innovation Summit 2007



The summit offers a look into the future in selected high tech and Life Sciences topics, and acts as a forum where Israeli breakthrough technology will be introduced and discussed by top experts. It’s the second year that we’ve been able to bring together talent both from this country and from abroad to discuss the innovation challenges that face us all.



I believe that today – and even more so tomorrow – making advanced technology available at a reduced cost to the general public, and not just the defense industry or very sophisticated labs or hospitals, is one of our greatest opportunities. Therefore, the next step for innovation coming out of Israel must be to understand the desires and needs of the consumer and the marketplace.



Israel’s advanced academic research will continue, and the Technion and other universities will achieve recognition and more Nobel prizes. Defense research centers like Rafael will carry on responding to the needs of the defense market, and biotechnology gene research will continue to develop because of available talent. But it’s all contingent upon our ability to adequately support research and educate the students who will be tomorrow’s researchers.



The key to Israel’s future economy will be to find innovative means to shorten the time that currently exists between successful research and the final product that is brought to mass consumer use.



It is essential that we become more innovative in identifying consumer needs even in markets like China and India, and focus on R&D to meet these needs.



We get many innovative ideas, but unfortunately too many are driven only by a more advanced technology instead of the consumer’s real desires.



One of the initial drivers of innovation is personal creativity, but this same creativity driven later by the ego of the innovator becomes the major cause for failure.



Adequate management must better determine when it’s the right time for a startup company to remain independent, and when it becomes essential to merge. The innovators’ ego must be overcome in order for the company to reach the major global markets and for the entrepreneur to continue to “dream” of the further innovations that will enable us to keep our relative advantage. Let us remember we do not have a relative advantage in the size of the local market!



Now, I must confess my own bias because of my dreams, but also surely because of real need. We are strong in IT, medical and genomic research, but we are very weak in clinical research. It takes far too long for the patient to benefit from the wonderful achievements of our academic research.



This deficiency can be remedied by creating the tools for the physician in his clinic to use the latest research applicable to his patients.



In my opinion, the only way to shorten the time and create the adequate tools is to adopt a very innovative business model, a subject for a long symposium by itself.



I have no doubt that the lectures that are going to be given this week at the Israel Innovation Summit will send the message all over the world that Israeli innovation is stronger today then it was before.



There are more opportunities than ever to take advantage of the scientific research here and translate it into successful industrial applications. It’s up to us to take advantage of those opportunities – for the benefit of all mankind.

Watch ISRAEL21c’s Executive Vice President Larry Weinberg at the Herzliya Conference talk with Jerusalem Online about pro-Israel communications and the ‘Branding Process’ which has been initiated by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Click here.

Baseball will succeed in Israel because it’s the greatest game in the world.It’s a long season, and you gotta trust it. I’ve tried them all, I really have. And the only shul that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the shul of baseball.
– with apologies to Annie Savoy







“What do you miss most?”



That’s the question immigrants to Israel get asked more than any other. Sometimes it elicits serious answers, sometimes personal ones. Of course everyone misses their family and friends left behind, that’s a given. And sometimes what we miss most is a simple food we crave, or some product that is impossible to find in Israel, but which would make our daily lives easier.



Me, I always give the same answer.



Baseball.



Sure, I miss my family and friends, and pizza here is never going to be as good as it is in New York. And though I may not see my family and friends as much as I’d like, phone calls and emails keep us well connected.



But baseball is different. Baseball, for serious fans, takes on a relationship more akin to that of a husband and wife. Spouses communicate every day, even from a distance, even if only for a few minutes. The definition of that relationship – a relationship based on passion – demands no less.



So too in baseball. Baseball, like marriage, is nothing without intimacy. Sure, I can read what my favorite Yankees did over the last two weeks, how many games they won or lost, and see highlights on the Internet. But that is just passive knowledge and information, crucial though it is, and videos only highlight how far away I am. It never satisfies the emotional need, never quenches the thirst of passion. For that you need a constant, daily narrative that you can see, hear and smell.



Now we’ll have it.



On June 24, the first-ever professional baseball game in Israel will be played at Kibbutz Gezer, between the Petah Tikva Pioneers and the Modi’in Miracle. The six-team league also includes the Bet Shemesh Blue Sox, Netanya Tigers, Ra’anana Express and Tel Aviv Lightning. Each club will play 45 regular-season games, a schedule comparable to that of the low minor leagues.



The games will be played at three sites: Tel Aviv and Netanya teams will play at Sportek in Tel Aviv. Ra’anana and Petah Tikvah will share a field at the Yarkon Sports Complex, while Kibbutz Gezer will host the Modi’in and Bet Shemesh teams.



Eighty players have already been signed, from eight countries including the Dominican Republic, Australia, Venezuela, and the United States. A trio of retired Jewish major leaguers will manage three of the teams – former pitcher Ken Holtzman, outfielder Art Shamsky and baseball’s first designated hitter, Ron Blomberg. The league’s first commissioner is Daniel Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Israel, and Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig is on the board of advisors.



Even with that pedigree, the detractors are already lining up to scoff, confident in their criticism that declares the venture – the brainstorm of one Larry Baras, Boston businessman and visionary extraordinaire – this century’s version of Fulton’s Folly. How can it succeed, they laugh, in a country already saturated with soccer and basketball? Who’s gonna care enough to come to a game, besides a few dozen Anglos? And how can a home run compete with the excitement of a goal or a basket for an Israeli?



For those who follow baseball, who understand baseball, such doubters are to be pitied. While it is easy to understand their lack of faith in a Baras, or a Dan Duquette – the man in charge of player development – it is difficult to fathom their lack of faith in the very game itself.



That baseball was never, heretofore, an integral part of the fabric of Israeli culture is hardly a reflection on the sport itself. Baseball will succeed here, first and foremost, because it’s the greatest game in the world. But it will also succeed because Israelis, like Americans, are great sports fans, as passionate about athletics as they are about everything that has meaning in their lives. In due time, Israelis too will come to understand the game, the rich nuances and subtleties that make it so compelling to millions of Americans.



Yes, of course building baseball in Israel is a long-term project. Duquette understands that better than anyone. Having once been in charge of player development for the Montreal Expos, Duquette took on a similar challenge going up against Canada’s national religion, hockey. And from the ground up, he built an infrastructure and a system that was able to discover, recruit, and further develop Canadian baseball players.



It took a while, but then it happened: On March 8, 2006, Team Canada beat the powerhouse Team USA, 8-6, in the World Baseball Classic. Canadian baseball was on the map. To say that Israelis are less athletically inclined, incapable of playing and eventually competing on that level, is an insult, and simply foolish. A dozen Israelis have already been signed to the league, a number that is sure to grow as the country is more exposed to the sport.



One other thing: Everyone understands that ballplayers on the major league level are supremely talented, and a joy to watch. True enough. But for those who think minor league baseball is not that good, not the real thing, know this: those players underneath the Major Leagues at the AAA, AA, and A level are no less talented then the big boys. There is, in fact, only one difference between those in Single-A and those in the Major Leagues: consistency.



I spent the summer of 1983 covering minor league baseball, the Utica Blue Sox, in the New York-Penn League. They weren’t just a single-A team, they were an independent team, which meant that no other ballclub had wanted any of the players. Castoffs, you say? Let me tell you, they weren’t just good, they were great. I saw guys make plays that today would be on SportsCenter every night. The raw talent was breathtaking.



And now that’s coming here. Baseball in Israel. I will get to see professional players up close, watch them show off that incredible talent, and follow their stories for 10 weeks, right here in my backyard. I’ll still follow the Yankees, of course, but now I can follow a local team as well – the Blue Sox again, this time in Bet Shemesh. And my immigration will have become complete.