Hope is a Thing for Children: National Identity in "Madrasa"

• In Event: Children’s Culture and Ideological Formation

Abstract

In 2023, the popular Israeli author and TV writer Sayed Kashua debuted a new show, but unlike his other television work, this series, titled “Madrasa” (Arabic for “school”), was made for Kan Chinuchit (Kan Educational), the children’s channel of the Israeli public broadcasting network. Madrasa follows a group of Israeli teenagers, both Arab and Jewish, who attend a bilingual and bicultural school in Jerusalem, modeled on the real-life Hand-in-Hand schools, which Kashua’s children attended. While delving into the lives and experiences of students, teachers, and their families, it primarily follows the developing romance between one of the Jewish students, Shira, and an Arab student, Khaled. Like Kashua’s other shows, “Madrasa” uses humor as well as the lens of family and local community to explore often ignored issues in Israel society, including anti-Arab racism, the social limits of left-wing politics, and the everyday violence engendered by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unlike his other shows, “Madrasa” does so using the perspective of teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, and thus full citizenship (including military service), as its lens. Scholarship on children’s television has noted the ways in which the “innocence” of childhood is used to safeguard the innocence of the wider community, a pattern which is reflected in the show when teachers and parents despair, and children offer hope. At the same time, Debbie Olson has noted that “television programs for children…play an important role in the construction of a citizen-identity” (3). This paper will examine the way that “Madrasa”’s setting in a community of children – a school – and its focus on children as its subjects allows for a mode of constructing the ideal Israeli citizen that is an alternative to the Zionist ideal, making use of innocent, “childish” hope to imagine a different type of Israeli collective.

Debbie Olson, “Introduction: the child in international television: new perspectives.” In Children, Youth and International Television (New York: Routledge, 2022).

Author

• Melissa Weininger, California State University Northridge