Adapting Masculinities

The discussion proposed in this article on the Israeli television series Haborer (The Arbitrator, 2007-2014) focuses on the blending of three major genres that characterize and define it: the "masculine" American gangster film, the "feminine" soap opera, and the popular Israeli bourekas movie. I claim that the hybridization of these diverse and contradictory genres allows the series to propose a new and complex representation of Mizrahi masculinity. While the bourekas genre depicted Ashkenazi masculinity as the polar opposite of Mizrahi masculinity, the Mizrahi masculinity offered in Haborer adopts and contains bourekas Ashkenazi masculinity.