With cinema and television placing ever more import on representation, you’d think the one genre an ethnic group would be happy not being overly featured in is war.
Yet still, whenever a Jew does pop up, it makes an impact. Not that there are many examples; the guy who gets stabbed in the heart in Saving Private Ryan, the Star of David gravestone in the same film, the translator in Band of Brothers. If not for Spielberg’s efforts highlighting that we didn’t play only one part in WWII, that’d pretty much be it apart from the underrated Biloxi Blues, where the two Jewish protagonists never get beyond the training camp.
So, in the ten-part Israeli drama Valley of Tears, when faced with an entire army of Jews, the result is surreal. It’s like a Woody Allen film transposed to the Golan Heights, everyone arguing, kvetching, then suddenly switching to shooting machine guns in fatigues. Somehow this juxtaposition grounds the action more, the shift from dissension to a common cause, survival, being an almost defining characteristic of our people.
Abruptly pushing straight into the story, how very Israeli, events kick off just before the start of 1973’s Yom Kippur War. We’re introduced to all aspects of the tribe; you’ve got geeky Jews, manly man masculine Jews, tough women soldier Jews, loving Jewish mum Jews, Mizrahi Jews, poor Jews, privileged Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, hippy Jews, beardy observant Jews, secular Jews. Each one is a possible avatar for answering the question always asked when watching this kind of thing, ‘How would I cope?’
Would I stoically, calmly and bravely face down the enemy? Would I tremble in the corner? Would I go mad from the trauma? Voyeuristically exploring the extremes of humanity under the worst duress, whilst safely ensconced on your sofa, is what makes the subject as entertainment so guiltily enticing. That it’s specifically about our particular pocket of humanity, even more so.
Developed over 10 years, bringing in famous Israeli novelists to work on the script, and costing $1 million an episode, makes this the most expensive Israeli TV show ever made, and one of the most accomplished. Acting, script, direction, effects, all put it in the A league, hence its immediate purchase by HBO in the States, although relegated to More4 here. If anything lends itself to binge watching it’s this, but alas we just have to wait patiently each week to see how the story unfolds as everything gets more dire.
Finding out more about how this near disaster unfolded is fascinating, but so to the insight into Israeli culture at the time, particularly the tensions between the more recent Mizrahi immigrant refugees, and the established Ashkenazi. I certainly had no idea one of the results was a Black Panther offshoot. As some things change, some things stay the same, with filming stopped due to fighting nearby in Syria. With a second season announced focusing instead on the Southern Front, bordering a country Israel is now at peace with, hopefully that’s an indicator that one day the only place war will exist in the region is on our screens.
