Transnational activism, new and old media: The case of Israeli adoptees from Brazil

This is a case study of transnational activism across media genres and platforms, focusing on young Israeli adoptees from Brazil, struggling to trace their biological origins, recover (to some extent) their culture of birth and make their plight known. Theoretically speaking, this study is based on the notion of hybridity, understood as a strategy used by individuals to elaborate new social identities (Israeli adoptees organized as online support group, moving to activism, recovering their culture of origin through media and travelling), by media producers to elaborate texts relevant to complex audiences (dramatized documentary, transnational ‘docu-telenovela’, Brazilian prime-time entertainment programme used to expose social problems), and more generally, as a characteristic of the media system that constantly (re)combines technologies, genres and actors. Hybridity, however, should not be confused with equality. Relations between system components are mostly asymmetrical, but are constantly evolving, often unpredictably, offering some manoeuvrability even for weaker actors.