Speaker Series Event! Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict

Speaker Series Event! Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict

When: Thursday, April 6, 4:30 PM

Where: 73 Tremont Street, Sawyer Library Poetry Center 

The Women & Gender Studies Program and The Sawyer Library Speaker Series present a book talk by Professor Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber.
Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict examines bias within the state of Israel and the media at large, through the lens of the news coverage of the Yemenite Babies Affair. The Yemenite Babies Affair is the emotionally laden, yet still unresolved, story of the alleged kidnapping of hundreds of Yemenite babies upon their arrival to Israel during the 1950s. In analyzing fifty years of public narratives, Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber argues that the media played a major role in the concurrent framing and silencing of this story. This eye-opening study exposes the clash between the European Zionist ideology of unity and the reality of Israel’s diverse society, where at least half of the Jewish population is of Arab descent.

“Few books today raise more profoundly disturbing questions about identity, internal orientalism, modes of unofficial censorship, and the government of Israel than this brave and important book.”—Steven C. Caton, Professor of Contemporary Arab Society and Director, Center for Middle East Studies, Harvard University

“This brilliantly written and meticulously researched book explores one of the darkest chapters of those oppressive relations…This book belongs on your bookshelf in the small but ever-growing library of Mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jewish) independent and alternative writing on the history of the Jews in modern times”—Sami Shalom Chetrit, Israeli poet and scholar, Queens College, CUNY

Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media at Suffolk University in Boston. She was born and raised in Israel to parents of Yemeni descent. She has worked as a freelance journalist in Israel for several newspapers; her book Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict: the Yemenite Babies Affair was published by Palgrave Macmillan (2009/2014).