Exploring Israel Through Film, Part I:
The Ancestral Sin: Documentary and talk with Erez Tzfadia on Mizrahi Immigration to Israel
Description
The story of Israel’s “development towns” in a chilling documentary, as never told before: Testimonials and previously sealed transcripts reveal the method, ideology and practice of law enforcement and decision makers behind the “population dispersal” policies in the first two decades of independence. The director's family, like others, was taken to Yeruham, a development town in the Negev desert. Their personal stories recount of the price immigrant-families pay and the price still paid by Israeli society, unwilling to deal head-on with those early years and forgotten towns. (Watch the trailer here)
Erez Tzfadia is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Sapir College, Israel, where he also served as the head of the department. Tzfadia received his PhD from Ben Gurion University of the Negav in 2002, held a Lady Davis Postdoctoral position at Hebrew University, and was an Israel Institute Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University. His studies focus on spatial policy in Israel. He is the co-author of Rethinking Israeli Space (Routledge, 2011); Israel since 1980 (Cambridge, 2008); and was co-editor of Abandoning State—Surveillancing State: Social Policy in Israel, 1985–2008 (Sapir and Resling, 2010). Tzfadia serves on the board of directors of BIMKOM – Planners for Planning Rights (NGO).
