Television has taken part in articulation of cultural and national identity all over the globe. How is a sense of “the local” changing as media grows increasingly mobile and new global television forms dominate world-wide programming? In Israel, a debate about television’s birth escalated to a national argument over occupation of Palestinian territories, relations with Arab neighbors, and it’s internal, conflicting visions of shared culture and identity.

The selection of a design for the Berlin Memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews was a contentious one. After September 11th, the memorial for those who died in the World Trade Center was compared by some to holocaust memorials before it, and by one reporter specifically to the Berlin Memorial. How did it come to pass that the memorial at Ground Zero would evoke Berlin’s Memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews?

A visitor to the last standing Jewish day-school in Syria, the Maimonides Madrasah, will notice the logo of the Syrian Arab Republic’s Ministry of Education proudly chiseled above the entrance. The secular state stakes out an overt presence in many other Jewish sites in Damascus. The very centerpiece of the Syrian National Museum is a historical reconstruction of a 3rd century Jewish synagogue.