Tracing the trails of a white knight: A glocal perspective on the academic and public heritage of Tamar Liebes

Tamar Liebes was a groundbreaking and fearless scholar who nurtured generations of media researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Groundbreaking, because she paved new trajectories in the study of popular communication and applied pioneering qualitative research methods to media studies. Toward the end of the 1970s, when only few perceived that popular culture was a legitimate field of inquiry and even fewer believed that interpretative efforts in the spirit of the humanities were worth institutionalizing in the social sciences, it was Tamar who swam against the stream and completed a pioneering study on the reception of the American soap opera Dallas among members of different cultural communities. Her book The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas (co-authored with Elihu Katz) soon became canonic and is still being taught in introductory media studies courses around the world. Fearless, because the same road Tamar paved to establish these lines of research and, indeed, to revolutionize the field of communication, was also rife with rivalries, battles, and struggles she never hesitated to engage in. Tamar was the white knight who never feared fighting the dragons, and in some cases (though not all) she even won.