The Unstable Stereotype in Boaz Davidson’s Bourekas Trilogy
The Unstable Stereotype in Boaz Davidson’s Bourekas Trilogy

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the use of stereotypes in Boaz Davidson’s Bourekas trilogy (Charlie and a Half, Snooker, and The Tzanaani Family) and argues that these films employ what I term the “unstable stereotype.” While Bourekas films have often been dismissed as relying on simplistic and degrading ethnic caricatures, I argue that Davidson’s films complicate the conventional function of stereotype by oscillating between cognitive familiarity and estranging excess and incongruence. Drawing on the conflicting interpretations of Bourekas cinema offered by scholars such as Judd Ne’eman, Ella Shohat, and Rami Kimchi, I suggest that Davidson’s stereotypes simultaneously facilitate recognition while undermining the viewer’s confidence in those very schematic constructions. I identify two central mechanisms through which this instability is produced: excess and incongruence. Excess emerges when stereotypical depictions become exaggerated to the point of intellectual or affective disturbance, often through grotesque corporeality, stylistic overstatement, or eruptions of violence that disrupt the films’ comedic register. Incongruence appears through details that resist assimilation into the stereotype itself, such as contradictory character traits, unexpected details, or abrupt tonal shifts. Through close readings of key scenes across the trilogy, I demonstrate how Davidson repeatedly moves viewers between immersion and Brechtian distance. Situating Davidson’s trilogy within broader traditions of cinematic Modernism, I argue that the unstable stereotype functions as a distinctly Modernist device, an insight that enables me to trace the legacy of this device in the work of contemporary Israeli auteurs such as Amos Gitai, Nadav Lapid, and Eran Kolirin, whose films similarly employ stereotypes as tools of estrangement and aesthetic disruption.

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