[Commlist] New book: Reimagining the Promised Land: Israel and America in Post-war Hollywood Cinema

*/Reimagining the Promised Land: Israel and America in Post-war 
Hollywood Cinema/***(Bloomsbury)

Rodney Wallis (University of New South Wales)

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/reimagining-the-promised-land-9781501350832/ 
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/reimagining-the-promised-land-9781501350832/>

While Israel has seemingly been a minor presence in Hollywood cinema, 
/Reimagining the Promised Land/ argues that there is a long history of 
Hollywood deploying images of Israel as a means of articulating an 
idealized notion of American national identity. This argument is 
developed through readings of /The Ten Commandments/ (Cecil B. DeMille, 
1956), /Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ/ (William Wyler, 1959), /Exodus 
/(Otto Preminger, 1960), /Cast a Giant Shadow/ (Melville Shavelson, 
1966), /Black Sunday/(John Frankenheimer, 1977), /The Delta 
Force/ (Menahem Golan, 1986), and /Munich/ (Steven Spielberg, 2005). The 
mobilization of Israel that pervades this eclectic group of films 
effectively demonstrates one of the more surreptitious ways in which 
Hollywood has historically constructed and circulated dominant notions 
of American national identity. Moreover, in examining the most notable 
Hollywood representations of the Jewish state, the book offers an 
informed historical overview of the cultural forces that have 
contributed to popular understandings within the United States of the 
state of Israel, Israel's Arab neighbours, and also the Arab-Israeli 
conflict.

**
_Table of Contents_Introduction: The United States and Israel: Parallel 
Promised Lands
1. "God's Chosen People": America as Israel in the Fifties Cold War Epic
2. A New Frontier: The Birth of Israel as a Frontier Myth in /Exodus /(1960)
3. The Age of Interventionism: American Heroism in /Cast a Giant Shadow 
/(1966)
4. Rise and Fall: Israel and America in Counterterrorist Cinema, 1977-1986
5. The "War on Terror" in /Munich/ (2005)
Conclusion

**
“In this original and insightful analysis, Rodney Wallis suggests that a 
series of Hollywood films on Israel-some of them epics and others 
less-may tell us more about American identity than about Israel itself. 
By inverting our understanding of the “special 
relationship,”/ Reimagining the Promised Land/ makes an important 
contribution to film studies, cultural history, and the symbiotic 
relationship between self-proclaimed “chosen peoples.”” – Walter L. 
Hixson, author of Israel's Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First 
Generation of the Palestine Conflict (2019)

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