Jerusalem Sessions, Israel’s international television festival, runs November 17-19 at the National Library of Israel.
As one of the attractions to celebrate television’s 100th birthday, Jerusalem Sessions will be setting up a free, open-to-the-public living room at theNational Library of Israel from November 17-19, where visitors can drop in and watch whatever happens to be on, the way people did before streaming.
“The thing about television is that you watch it at home,” said Daniel Susz, the festival’s director, who admitted he was skeptical about a TV festival at first. “It’s a private medium. It’s an intimate thing. You watch it in your pajamas.” He pointed out that a festival is the opposite: “Culture is about community.”
A brief history
It all began on October 2, 1925, when, in his cramped Soho workshop, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird made a ventriloquist’s dummy named Stooky Bill, television’s first “star.” On January 26, 1926, he demonstrated his invention publicly in London.
In 1927, 21-year-old Utah farm boy Philo Farnsworth transmitted the first fully electronic image: a single straight line. After World War II, TV spread into living rooms across America and then the world.
Cable arrived in 1948 and carried network signals over the hills of Pennsylvania and Oregon. Then came HBO in 1972, CNN in 1980, and MTV in 1981. Today, streaming has erased borders. A Hebrew- and Arabic-language thriller filmed in Israel can be watched the same night in Beirut, Paris, and Seoul. TV has gone from a box in the corner to a window on the world.
From People of the Book to people of the screen
Israel was a late bloomer in the world of television. Opponents of the medium, led by David Ben-Gurion, feared that foreign values would undermine Israel’s reborn Hebrew culture. Elihu Katz, the founding director of Israel Television and later a communications scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote about the suspicion that greeted the medium: the fear that the People of the Book would become a people of TV.
TV made aliyah in March 1966 with Israeli Educational Television, funded by the Rothschild Foundation and run by the Education Ministry. Its first broadcasts were school lessons. TV for the public came two years later, on Independence Day, May 2, 1968.
According to The American Israelite, Israel Television went on the air at 9:30 a.m. with the image of a menorah, followed by the Independence Day parade in Jerusalem. Regular broadcasts began that August.
Nearly six decades later, the country that once feared TV has become one of its most surprising exporters, despite a population of about 10 million and a language few outsiders speak. Homeland, In Treatment, and Euphoria all began as Israeli shows. Fauda and Tehran turned Israel’s undercover units and the Mossad into global binge-watching.
Jerusalem takes the stage
Jerusalem Sessions, Israel’s international television festival, runs November 17-19 at the National Library of Israel. Now in its second year, it is the flagship event of the Jerusalem Media Initiative at the Jerusalem Development Authority.
It brings together Israeli and international producers, writers, executives, and buyers to talk about the future of television and build relationships. It also aims to showcase Jerusalem’s lesser-known locations and a new crop of storytellers. Last year’s event was billed as a conference; this year organizers are aiming higher.
The question hanging over this year’s festival is whether Israel’s winning streak can survive the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“Every major country with a media industry hosts an international TV festival – Berlin, London, Cannes, Lille; yet Israel doesn’t have one,” said Eyal Benbenisty, who heads the Jerusalem Media Initiative. “Jerusalem deserves a seat at the table.”
The festival opens with the world premiere of Season 3 of The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, the yes hit that also streams on Netflix. Terence Winter, creator of Boardwalk Empire and writer of The Sopranos and The Wolf of Wall Street, makes his first visit to Israel. A Paris-set episode of The Chef will premiere, followed by a dinner at Jerusalem’s Mona restaurant inspired by the episode.
International guests include two executives in charge of “scripted” programming, the industry term for written dramas and comedies: Nancy Cotton, executive vice president of television at Skydance Sports, and Liz Cohen, executive vice president of scripted series at Keshet Studios.
Also coming are director Minkie Spiro (Better Call Saul, Downton Abbey) and David Hadda, creator of the German Jewish-family drama The Zweiflers. Keshet International is the official sponsor of Jerusalem Sessions 2026; the company is also sponsoring an industry panel featuring Liz Cohen, EVP of Scripted Series at Keshet Studios.
Prof. Noa Lavie of the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo will present new research on Israel’s TV industry since Oct. 7, with what organizers promise are “surprising findings.” The session on how Israeli television reaches the world after Oct. 7 is supported by partners IZZY TV and the Israel Entertainment Fund.
There’s also a panel with a blunt title: “Made in Israel: Is the World Still Watching Us?”
We spoke with insiders who build Israeli TV and people who sell it abroad. Some see a golden age with a few dents. Others see a market that has not so quietly closed its doors.
Optimistic industry
Keren Shahar has spent 22 years at Keshet, her whole TV career. As CEO of Keshet International, she runs what she calls, based on her own “unofficial study,” the number-one exporter of Israeli IP, “especially to the US.”
She doesn’t pretend that nothing has changed since Oct. 7. But she said the damage has been limited. “The negative effect that exists for us. … I feel it in the margin,” she said. “It’s not the majority of the territories that we work with, or the clients that we work with, or producers, or writers. It’s really the margin, the few, the very few.”
There’s even a flip side. “There were people who wanted to work with us more because we’re Israelis,” Shahar said. “So, you have this almost dual effect.” The fact that the damage stayed small despite the political backwash, she believes, “is really a testament to the relationships that we have cultivated over two plus decades.”
In a statement ahead of the festival, she put it more boldly: “Israeli content doesn’t just sell abroad. It inspires, it influences, and it leads.”
Why do Israeli shows travel? Partly because of what Israel can’t afford.
“We don’t have the budget to do these chase, high-stakes, boom bombings,” she said. “So, we do the shows that are character-driven, story-driven, and not effects-driven. And I think that’s what attracts the Americans to us.” And partly because of who we are: “Israelis are storytellers. Jews are storytellers. That’s in our DNA.”
She admitted that no one can predict what will work. “Never in my life had I thought Prisoners of War would become Homeland,” she said. “It felt so local to us.”
Hatufim (Prisoners of War) is a quiet family drama about IDF soldiers readjusting after 17 years as prisoners in Lebanon. Homeland turned it into a CIA thriller about a Marine who may have been turned by al-Qaeda.
Her takeaway: a story about families and relationships can cross any border. The espionage thrillers clients expect from Israel “will always be our forte,” Shahar said. But buyers are looking past them.
Keshet’s romantic drama Lovesick is being remade for Netflix by showrunner Sarah Treem (The Affair), with Claire Danes starring. Even comedy, long thought not to travel, is selling. “Audiences everywhere are looking for escapism,” she said. “Life is hard. Life is stressful.”
Save the Date (Bekarov Etzli) shows how far a light Israeli show can go. The Keshet 12 romantic comedy stars Adi Havshush as Dassy, a wedding planner who suddenly finds herself single.
Keshet International has sold the finished series in 13 territories and remake rights in Greece and Germany, and it is the first project under KI’s multi-year first-look deal with Sony Pictures Television for English-language remakes. Dana Fox, screenwriter of the Wicked films, is attached as showrunner of the American version.
Alan Wolk, co-founder of the New York media analysis firm TVREV, agrees that the Israeli industry “definitely punches well above its weight.”
“For a country that small, where nobody else speaks Hebrew outside of Israel, they’ve had a phenomenal impact on the world television industry,” he said. Wolk would have “bet big sums of money” against Shtisel, a drama about a haredi family in Jerusalem, ever becoming an international hit. It did.
As for politics, he said, “I don’t think that people get hung up on that as much. Other than people on X/Twitter.”
Organizers are betting on that, too. Daniel Susz, director of Jerusalem Sessions, recalls that last year’s edition came shortly after the Gaza war ended. “It was a big kind of fresh air for the Israeli industry at a very challenging time,” he said.
The city is also putting money behind the bet. Benbenisty said the Jerusalem Media Initiative offers up to NIS 2 million, or up to 30% of a series’ budget, for shows that portray Jerusalem beyond the usual images of conflict, religion and ancient stones. He said every major broadcaster, Keshet and Kan included, has applied.
“In two or three years, you will see two or three Jerusalemite TV series,” he predicted. “And hopefully they will meet audiences abroad.” At the festival, the initiative will also announce a collaboration with HollyShorts, the Los Angeles short-film festival whose awards qualify films for the Oscars.
Shifting ground?
Even Shahar added a warning. The change since Oct. 7 has been gradual, she said, “and it’s not getting better. In a way, I would say it’s getting even more challenging and difficult.”
Adam Berkowitz, a manager, producer, and former CAA television agent who now runs Lenore Entertainment Group in Los Angeles, is blunter. He was there at Fauda’s start, sending the show to two executives he knew cared about Israel: Joel Stillerman, then AMC’s programming chief, and Larry Tanz at Netflix.
“They both wanted it, and they got into a bidding war,” he recalled. Netflix won.
“But that was a long time ago,” he said. “The world’s changed a lot since then.” Fauda is still a hit, and its latest season reached number one in Lebanon. Still, he doesn’t believe a buyer would take on a similar show today. “I don’t think people would pick up a show about that conflict today.”
On boycotts, he said, “People are very nervous about Israeli-themed shows because the backlash against them on social media is so great.” Streamers want viewers, not controversy. “If there’s a lot of backlash on it, they’re not going to be risky. They’ll be risk averse.” Film has it worse than TV, he added.
The money is drying up, too. “People don’t want to fund Israeli shows now outside of Israel,” Berkowitz said. Investors aren’t sure they’ll earn their money back on the international market, “which is how they could raise the money for them.” His advice to Israeli creators is to go universal.
In Treatment worked because what happens in a therapist’s office happens everywhere. Religious subjects are hard to sell, he said, as are stories that are too local, and the writer should be able to write in English. Shtisel, in his view, “Was a blip. You couldn’t sell a show like that today.”
Denis Leroy, who remembers the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, is leaving the global production giant Banijay to launch his own scripted consultancy. He believes Israel’s cultural reputation abroad was always tied to its image as “a strong, democratic, and positive Israel, a land of freedom and free expression.”
Since Oct. 7, he said, “One perception became blurred, rightly or wrongly, but certainly it impacted the other perception.”
He stressed that the creators haven’t changed. “His or her creativity is still intact and flourishing. And certainly it doesn’t travel the same way.” Can a contemporary Israeli story still sell? “I think it can sell ultimately, but maybe not at a high price, and it requires a lot more marketing than usual.”
Leroy also pointed to a factor that has nothing to do with politics: language. “In general, what has become difficult now is to sell non-English language series,” he said. That hits French, Italian, and Polish shows as hard as Hebrew ones. Israeli series used to be somewhat protected from that trend. “Now they’re impacted just the same as any other non-English language show.”
Ari Ingel, executive director of Creative Community for Peace (CCFP), credits recent TV wins: Netflix picked up Bad Boy, Apple TV took Unconditional, and Paramount+ is streaming the Oct. 7 series Red Alert.
“There’s business happening, and a lot of it is coming through Keshet,” he said. “We would love to see a lot more projects being picked up than we have seen.”
The bigger problem, Ingel said, is upstream. Producers he speaks with estimate that international financing for Israeli projects has fallen by 30% to 50%. Some streamers, he said, are “maybe purchasing them when they actually end up being a hit, but they’re not putting money into financing them to co-develop them like they were before Oct. 7.”
Without that money, he asked, “How can you even produce and greenlight it?”
The market itself is also consolidating. Paramount Skydance is acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, and Banijay has merged with All3Media. Shahar said that makes smaller players like Keshet International “smaller” by comparison. But she added that the tougher business isn’t “just because of the geopolitical reasons.”
‘Fauda’: Israel’s shining star, from Beirut to Abu Dhabi
The fifth season of Fauda, the first built around the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, was released on Netflix worldwide on September 8. According to the trade publication TheWrap, it gathered 2.1 million viewers in its first week, ranking fourth among non-English TV shows, the series’ best showing yet (Season 4 peaked at No. 7 in January 2023).
TheWrap also reported that the season was a Top 10 in 41 countries, mostly in Europe and Asia, and No. 1 in both Israel and Lebanon.
Surprisingly, the strongest response came from the Arab world. According to JNS, Season 5 ranked fourth in Jordan and Qatar, fifth in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, seventh in Oman, and ninth in Kuwait. Ynetnews, citing the chart tracker FlixPatrol, reported that on September 10 it also ranked fourth in Egypt, fifth in Morocco, and ninth in Saudi Arabia.
The United States is conspicuously missing. According to TheWrap, Season 5 never appeared on Netflix’s US chart, and neither did Season 4.
Part of the reason may be how Netflix reports. Non-English shows get their own global chart, but each country has a single top 10, so in the US a subtitled Israeli drama competes with the week’s biggest English-language releases. Netflix doesn’t publish country view counts, so no one knows how many Americans are watching.
Fauda’s real strength is its long-term audience. According to Netflix’s semi-annual Engagement Reports, Season 4 drew 71 million hours viewed in the first half of 2023. The earlier seasons continued to draw millions of viewing hours every six months through 2025.
Algorithms, AI, and the next 100 years
The festival program also looks forward, with Rei Solash, whose one-minute-episode micro-drama Not Over swept Instagram after film funds turned him down, and AI artist Amir Yatziv. It also looks back, with a reading of an unproduced Assi Dayan script from the Library’s archive and a tribute to the late producer Dana Eden.
Wolk, who speaks at the festival, said the bigger threat to any foreign show isn’t boycotts but the algorithm. In his view, the shared “monoculture” of the 20th century has broken into isolated fiefdoms.
“The algorithm will feed you things that it knows you won’t mind, but it will never feed you anything you might love,” he said. A show like Shtisel only finds its audience when viewers “step out of the bubble.”
He sees an opening for quality. As AI-generated and swipe-through content multiplies, he said, “TV has a real opportunity to be sort of the quality option,” with work people focus on. Can AI write the next Homeland? Wolk quoted a friend: “AI doesn’t sit and talk to its therapist about its dysfunctional relationship with its parents.”
Shahar agreed that AI is only the start. “With AI … it’s just the beginning,” she said. But her advice to writers is old-fashioned: don’t chase trends.
“The best material and the material that tends to come to fruition is when a writer wants to say something. And it’s burning inside,” she said.
For first-time creators, Keshet often pairs the writer with a more experienced writer, script editor, or producer. “Ultimately, it starts from the material.”
Leroy offered one more route in: start with a book. Book adaptations make up about 25% of scripted projects worldwide, he said, and a published novel reassures partners. “Building your pitch based on the book is somehow an advantage.”
He said the Israeli creators he meets inspire him more than colleagues back home “where everybody’s whining about having minus 5% on budget.” That’s why he keeps coming back. “I’ve always found a series that could be adapted, a feature that could be inspiring for a reboot or remake.”
This month, Jerusalem is where the next big television hit may be discovered.
The writer holds a degree in film production and media. She worked in field publicity at Paramount Pictures and in audience research at HBO, and was part of the team that launched the Lifetime cable network. She recently completed Accidental Soldiers, a bilingual limited dramedy series for television. She writes about Israeli culture and society for The Jerusalem Post.
Shut out of the festivals: Creative Community for Peace tracks a quiet boycott of Israeli films
Israeli television is still finding buyers. Israeli film is having a harder time finding screens.
That’s the finding of Creative Community for Peace (CCFP), a Los Angeles-based nonprofit founded in 2012 by music executives David Renzer and Steve Schnur to counter the cultural boycott of Israel. In September 2025, more than 1,200 industry professionals signed its open letter against the Film Workers for Palestine pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions.
“Israeli films are still finding it difficult to be accepted unless the film is disparaging of Israel,” said Ari Ingel, CCFP’s executive director. “They are being made. They are just not being accepted.” Before October 7, he noted, four or five Israeli films would regularly screen at each of these festivals.
Ingel sees two causes. Some programmers “hold anti-Israel bias,” he said. “Other times, it’s more of a silent boycott that sets in, where they do not want to deal with the boycott pressure.”
He cites TIFF’s documentary section. Over the past two years, he said, it screened seven documentaries that disparaged Israel and only one that didn’t: The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, about retired IDF general Noam Tibon, who drove into the October 7 attack zone to save his family.
The festival pulled it from the 2025 lineup, then reinstated it after a public outcry. CCFP directly engaged members of the festival’s board of directors in several conversations and released an open letter. The film went on to win the festival’s People’s Choice Award for documentary. “It shows you that audiences clearly like these films,” Ingel said.
This month, CCFP will host leaders of Israel’s documentary filmmakers’ guild in Los Angeles for a panel with Hollywood executives. The goal, Ingel said, is to help close the financing gap and “make sure that they get back to where they were before October 7.”
“The film and television industry from Israel was one of the greatest success stories out of the country in the last number of decades,” he said. “That is something that we should all want to support.”
– J.S.
Who is who in the world of television
Hollywood’s job titles can confuse even people with a degree in film arts (like me). Adam Berkowitz walked us through the cast of characters.
The showrunner: In American television, the showrunner is the executive producer and the boss. “They’re in charge of production. They’re in charge of dealing with the network. They deal with the actors,” Berkowitz explained. “In features, that would be the director. In TV, that’s the showrunner.” Or, more simply: “TV is a writer’s medium, and film is a director’s medium.”
The agent: Agents work at volume. Berkowitz said that he had about 100 clients at CAA, more than 100 calls and 500 emails a day. An agent’s main job is the deal: packaging a show by attaching writers, directors, and stars, and getting clients hired on the best terms.
The manager: Managers have fewer clients and closer relationships. “Managers basically have a lot less volume, and they have more intimate relationships with their clients,” said Berkowitz. Unlike agents, managers can also produce their clients’ projects.
“Neither one’s better than the other,” he added. “The primary difference is the time … and the re
The producer and the studio: Producers find the money, the partners, and the platform. In Israel, a show almost always needs a local broadcaster, such as Keshet, Kan, Reshet, or yes, before it moves forward.
The distributor and the format seller: This is where Israel shines. A distributor sells a finished series abroad, subtitled or dubbed (a “tape” sale). A format seller licenses the idea to be remade. That’s how Hatufim (Prisoners of War) became Homeland.
The IP scout: Executives like Denis Leroy, who spent about a decade running scripted development across Banijay’s companies, hunt for “IP” (intellectual property): the rights to a novel, article, or an existing TV show that can be adapted elsewhere. A successful Israeli series is valuable twice. It can be sold as is, and its story can be sold for a remake.
“I ended up finding myself more and more specialized in finding the right paths between stories,” he said.
Berkowitz cautioned that a deal is just the beginning. A headline about a US remake “Could just be an option payment. It doesn’t mean anything.” Going from an option to a series on the air “Could be years. You have to find the right writer. They have to write a great script. You have to sell it.”
– J.S.
