Jenifer Bar Lev

Born in Washington, D.C., 1948
Lives and works in Tel Aviv

Jenifer Bar Lev's works engage with female figures culled from different cultures and historical periods, from her personal life and from the public sphere, and have enriched the Israeli art world with a feminist agenda and sources of inspiration rooted in American culture.


Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy is the protagonist of the American TV series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," whose seven seasons, broadcast in 1997-2003, garnered much international success. Buffy Anne Summers, a 15-year-old girl, is the last in a long line of young women known as "slayers." Like her predecessors, Buffy was fated to fight vampires, ghosts, and other dark forces. She performs this role with mixed feelings, relying on her super-natural powers and a little help from her friends. In contrast to the tough image of a slayer, Buffy's charged emotional world includes her tormented love for a vampire named Angel. The journal Slayage, which was first published in the United States in 2001, is devoted to studies of Buffy. In 2010, it received the subtitle The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association (Joss Whedon is the creator of Buffy and of other series and films). The association organizes bi-annual conferences, and Jenifer Bar Lev gave a lecture at the 2010 conference held at a university in Florida. This lecture, in which she explained the Israeli-Palestinian conflict using Buffy's terminology, ended with the following conclusion: "The Israeli-Palestinian territory is a very complicated, confusing and hard place to live. When people ask me: 'If it's so hard to live there, why do you?' My answer is, in the words of Spike [one of the series' protagonists]: 'I want to see how it ends.'"