Recently, Amazon Prime bought the US rights to the Israeli television series Shtisel. Set in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Geula in Jerusalem, Shtisel focuses on the lives and loves of a haredi family. Shtisel is one of several Israeli productions that have been sold to American producers in recent years, from Be-tipul, which was transformed into In Treatment on HBO, to Ḥatufim, remade as Homeland for Showtime. While Be-tipul and Ḥatufim take place almost entirely within secular circles in Israel that, at least superficially, look similar to their American counterparts, Shtisel brings its viewers into the world of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. Marta Kauffman, the American version's producer, explained that “in America, the show will be a set piece set in contemporary times. [The family] is living such a different life, it's like a different century.” One of her goals is to “make sure the stories, and the universality of those stories, is what people take in. The rest is just background.”Footnote ¹

When it comes to representations of Jewishness in Israeli culture this assertion that “the rest is just background” is startling. As Yoram Peleg argues in his new book, Directed by God, early Israeli depictions of ultra-Orthodox Judaism were patronizing and dismissive, given the strong antireligious sentiment in mainstream Zionism. Shtisel, along with other Israeli films and television programs in recent years, testifies to what Peleg calls a “slow but increasingly discernible ‘religification’” in Israel (14). To prove his point, he examines a rich variety of examples, analyzing representations of religiosity and religious characters. The book's introduction briefly discusses Zionism and Judaism, and subsequent chapters focus on films that relate to Orthodox Jews, Mizrahi religiosity, and national religious communities, with a final chapter on recent television series. Throughout, Peleg incorporates political, historical, and social developments into his discussion of visual media. The visual image, he argues, has become increasingly prominent in Israel since the 1990s, filling the cultural space formerly occupied by literature. As a result, films become “a clearer and more focused gauge of Israeli national culture” (12).

Peleg's analysis focuses on two primary issues that surface in the films: masculinity and questions of morality. Drawing on Daniel Boyarin's discussion of masculinity and Jewishness, Peleg examines a series of transformations over the course of several decades. The first chapter traces the evolution of representations of ultra-Orthodox men from the amasculine, ridiculed yeshiva student of Kuni Lemel in Tel Aviv (1976) to the physically attractive, metrosexual ultra-Orthodox men in the gay drama Eyes Wide Open (2009), arguing that religiosity comes to be seen as a “legitimate, and even a neutral frame of reference” (51). Chapter 2, which focuses on Mizrahi religiosity, similarly moves from the well-known stereotype of Sallah Shabbati as a primitive, religious Arab Jew to the powerful and aggressive Mizrahi masculinity in God's Neighbors (2012). While both chapters sketch versions of the same trajectory, the difference is in the details; Peleg analyzes a series of other films in each chapter that demonstrate the growing complexity of cinematic portraits of ultra-Orthodox men in the Ashkenazi case, and the gradual decoupling of religion and ethnicity in the Mizrahi case.

The second issue, what Peleg calls morality, is simultaneously omnipresent and diffuse throughout the book. In his analysis of films, Peleg seeks to “understand what has changed in the way Israeli society views religion and religious practices over the years, determine how these changes came about, and identify the values assigned to these changes” (11). The book charts two primary trends in representations of Jewish religion on screen, universal and critical portrayals. Visual media like Shuroo (1990), Ḥasamba dor shlishi (2010–13), and Shtisel show that religiosity is no longer a political flashpoint, but rather cinematic background for universal values and relatable dramas. Peleg argues that this reveals two simultaneous processes underway, what he calls the “Israelification” of Orthodox life and the “religification” of hegemonic Zionism. In contrast to the universalist nature of many of these examples, Peleg also discusses several films, such as Kadosh (1999), Joseph Cedar's Time of Favor (2000), and Campfire (2004), and series like ’Urim ve-tumim (2011), that immerse their viewers in a religious world in order to expose the moral and political dangers that lurk within it. Yet Peleg's assessment of “the fanatical image that emerges from the combination of Jewish religiosity and aggressive masculinity” (97) in the chapter on religious Zionists relies almost entirely on the work of Joseph Cedar. In fact, references to Cedar's films appear throughout the book, overshadowing other representations of religious figures. For Peleg, religiosity functions both as a broad conceptual category and a feature of exemplary characters, which at times glosses over considerable differences between the subgroups that are discussed in the different chapters. While Peleg gives a detailed account of the emergence and evolution of religious Zionism, for example, little attention is given to the category of Orthodox Judaism, described in various instances as haredi, hasidic, and ultra-Orthodox.

The book's fourth chapter weaves together many of the different strands that emerged in earlier chapters, from ultra-Orthodox communities to Mizrahi characters to religious Zionists, in its analysis of several television series from 2007 to the present. Peleg argues that these series show the extent to which religion has been decoupled from explicit politics and become part of a wider politics of representation. Less clear is how these television shows are fundamentally different from the films discussed throughout the book. In the introduction, Peleg emphasizes the significance of visual culture in contemporary Israel and suggests that television programs “can be considered a more genuine reflection of cultural trends” than films because of commercial concerns (13). The fine analysis of these series pays little attention to what, if anything, is specific to television. More attention to audience, whether viewers or reviewers, to generic differences like serialization, and to the unique aspects of visual media would have sharpened important distinctions between film and television and between visual and literary cultures.

Directed by God concludes with a brief reflection on popular media and events leading up to Israel's 2014 war in Gaza. This contemporary focus, bolstered by Peleg's expertise in Israeli culture from the past three decades, is one the book's strengths. With its lucid prose and keen readings of film and television, this book is a welcome contribution to scholarship on Israeli culture.