Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel

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Introduction The preliminary work for this study began in January 2004 when I met with the library and archive staff of the Jerusalem Film Center (Jerusalem Cinematheque) to discuss my research needs. At the end of my first day there, I was introduced to Lia van Leer, founder of the Film Center and its director at the time, who, four months later, was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement for her contribution to Israeli cinema. Van Leer inquired about my research project, initially titled “The Absence of Power and the Power of Absence: Women, Sephardim [Mizrahim],1 and Arabs in Israeli Cinema,” and assured me that her staff would gladly make the Cinematheque resources available to me. She commented that the study of women and Palestinians/Arabs in Israeli cinema is timely and merits much attention. But then I was taken aback when van Leer dismissively remarked that the Sephardi ethnic issue was passé and went on to sustain her claim. More than six years later, in one of my last interviews for this work, Dorit Inbar, general manager of the New Fund, whose mandate is to support Israeli films,2 conveyed almost identical sentiments regarding the importance of attending to social tensions that mar Israeli society. But she too deemed frivolous the attempts to reengage the Mizrahi dilemma.3 Over time, however, I learned that when these and some other members of the Israeli film milieu (as well as media professionals and laypeople) say the Sephardi/Mizrahi issue is passé, they do not necessarily deny that this ethnic group has been subjected to discrimination and displacement. Rather, it is their way of expressing one or more of four positions. First, that public and critical discourse regarding this issue in the last few Page 2 →decades has been exhaustive to the point that any additional study seems redundant. Second, that Israel has succeeded in forming a pluralistic society where ethnic demarcations have lost any significance. This position is informed by the belief that ethnic characteristics amount to no more than “symbolic ethnicity,”4 namely, adornments to the country's societal blend, and that the Israeli melting pot has facilitated the emergence of the new Israeli Jew who is neither Ashkenazi (those who originate from the medieval Jewish communities along the Rhine in Germany) nor Mizrahi. Third, that Israel has managed to form a truly multicultural society that is tolerant of and even nourishes sociocultural differences. In contrast to the melting pot model, this position accentuates the “mixed salad” feature of Israeli society where ethnic differences, while recognized, are a part of the celebratory sociocultural tapestry. And, fourth, that Israel's social disparities are anchored in status and class, or in immigrants’ seniority (i.e., newcomers versus veterans), rather than in ethnicity. Advocates of this last view argue that while in the past the Mizrahi predicament was particular and merited its own scholarly work and remedies, these days, and mostly due to the neoliberal right-wing economic policies, the ethnic issue is subsumed within the broader social dilemma pertaining to the working class (which includes, inter alia, Palestinian and foreign laborers).5 Congruent with these four positions is the sense—shared, as we shall see, by some prominent Israeli scholars, media professionals, and filmmakers—that broaching the ethnic issue in present-day Israel smacks of undue “whining” and is a symptom of a Mizrahi culture of complaint.6 My personal background as a son of Iraqi-Jewish parents, coupled with my academic training in Israel and the United States, have made me fully aware of the importance and relevance of the Mizrahi issue to understanding Israel's past and present. Yet when I decided in 2004 to focus on the Mizrahi dilemma (and hence to retitle my study Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel), the primary motivation for this change was not so much to counter the claim that the Mizrahi problem is no longer relevant but to inquire why Israelis so eagerly resort to this conviction and to challenge that reductionist stance in which a complex and variegated discourse about Mizrahiness is becoming, in the view of many, merely a synonym for excessive and even unbecomingly obsessive engagement with discrimination and victimization. Conversely, my film analysis involves gleaning difference, alterity, and marginality precisely against that widespread dismissal of ethnic divisions informed by the dominant precept of societal pastiche. Page 3 →

Mizrahi Cinema: Definition and Parameters “Mizrahim,” “Mizraiyim,” “adot ha-Mizra,”7 “Sephardim,” “Oriental Jews,” “Arab-Jews,”8 and “Jews of the

Muslim and Arab world” are some of the most common appellations to mark the group on which this study focuses. As we shall see, the specific term chosen to designate this identity often betrays sociopolitical and ideological stands toward Israeli society in general and the ethnic dilemma in particular. It is in this context that I will explain my choice of the term “Mizrahi.” Interestingly, despite the plethora of terms referring to this one collective, its counterpart is often called by a single name: Ashkenazi. “Sephardi Jews,” which literally translates as “Spaniard Jews,” was until recently the most common term in reference to the ethnic community of this study. However, as a contradistinction to “Ashkenazim, ” the term is problematic since it also references Jewish communities that are indigenous to the Middle East (e.g., the Iraqi- or Persian-Jewish communities) and thereby can't be traced to Sepharad/Spain. Furthermore, presently, this term is often a marker for a religious identification that distinguishes between all those who follow the Sephardi liturgy and the religious legal system as coded in Rabbi Yosef Karo's sixteenth-century compendium Shulan ‘Arukh and their Ashkenazi counterparts who have their distinct liturgical traditions and follow the subsequent religious code of Rabbi Moseh Isserlis's ha-Mapa. The Sephardi liturgy is based musically on Middle Eastern melodic modes (maqams), which give it a character entirely different from that of the Ashkenazi prayers with their European-based musical features. The official term “adot ha-Mizra,” coined decades ago by the hegemonic Ashkenazi group, is problematic on at least three grounds: (1) this nominal plural form and the term itself connote a scattered and underdeveloped community; (2) it marks the Mizrahi group, whereas the Ashkenazi group, to which “adot” is never attributed, remains unmarked (the norm);9 and (3), related to this marking, “adot ha-Mizra” has clearly placed the Mizrahi as an other, albeit differentiated from the Arab/Palestinian ultimate other.10 In this sense, the Mizrahi, who occupies a liminal Jewish-national space, is like the colonial subject—the “subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite”11 (Homi Bhabha 1994c: 86). In various degrees of distance from the Ashkenazi center, this space is shared with “good Arabs,” such as the Druse12 and the Lebanese Christian Phalangists, groups that also won the appellation “adot” in the past.13 The critical work of Israeli sociologist Shlomo Swirski in the 1980s was Page 4 →among the first to question the official term “adot ha-Mizra.” In Israel: The Oriental Majority (1989), Swirski employs “Mizrahim”—an appellation, as Sami Shalom Chetrit (2010: 17–23) suggests, that was meant to challenge the putatively dispersed or underdeveloped state of Mizrahi communities. This new designation, therefore, attempted to accentuate commonality, unity, and consciousness. In the last few decades, Ella Shohat, and then Sami Shalom Chetrit, Yehouda Shenhav, and a few other scholars, have at times opted for the more radical term “Arab-Jews” to supplant or coexist with “Mizrahim.” As Shohat (1988, 1999a, 1999b, 2001a, 2001b) has made clear in her elaborate work on the “Arab-Jew,” this coinage is a deliberate attack on the Manichean Zionist articulation where “Arab” and “Jew” are deemed antonyms. The adoption of “Arab-Jews,” therefore, suggests not only that the term (and by implication, the culture and traditions to which it refers) is as legitimate as “European-Jews” or “American-Jews,” but that it should be flaunted and disburdened of any oxymoronic or negative connotations. Although this term provides a succinct identity marker for a wide range of Jewish Oriental communities and accentuates a critical sociopolitical consciousness, in a strict sense, geographically and culturally, it excludes nonArab Mizrahim, such as Iranian, Turkish, and Kurdish Jews.14 In the Israeli media and public sphere over the last few decades “Mizrahi” has become by far the most common term referencing the collective that is the subject of my study. (One has to bear in mind, though, that “Mizrahim” is actually based on a misnomer. As Daniel Elazar [1989: 24] maintains, over the course of Jewish history, large Mizrahi [literally, Easterners] or Sephardic communities lived west of their Ashkenazi counterparts.) Although today “Mizrahi” often references all that which is not “Ashkenazi” (including then the Jews of Central Asia, for example), the bulk of the film analysis in this study pertains to Jews who immigrated to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa. For the most part, my choice to focus on these communities, which constitute the overwhelming majority of all Jewish “non-Ashkenazi” ethnic groups, is in consideration of the territorial contiguity of the Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities and, more important, of the experiences and traditions these communities have largely shared. The majority of Jewish immigrants from these places arrived in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s and suffered similar hardships and discrimination. For most, Arabic was

their mother tongue. The employment of the term “Mizrahim” as discussed here is meant to avoid categories relying exclusively on genealogy; the definition and the following analyses intimate that Page 5 →geographical, historical, cultural, and linguistic commonalities all play a role in the formation of a Mizrahi group identity.15 Although the filmmakers’ ethnic origins will be broached in various discussions, “Mizrahi cinema” in this work is defined by the films’ subject matter, characters, cast, language, locations, music, and the like. As we shall later see, it would be imprudent to have a predetermined inventory of criteria to decide what renders a single work a Mizrahi film. Therefore, this study is interested primarily in looking at the corpus of films in which, to a lesser or greater extent, the Mizrahi—as a theme, role, locale, etc.—is present and, conversely, in identifying and analyzing works where the Mizrahi dilemma should have been addressed but has instead been elided. This study of Mizrahi cinema focuses on films produced since the early 1990s.16 I have identified over one hundred Mizrahi films—fiction, documentaries, and shorts—from the last two decades. Some will find a pivotal place in my discussions; others will have only a brief mention. The rationale for setting this period of contemporary cinema apart from its predecessors is the drastic changes in the Israeli media-space as well as sociopolitical developments that have taken place since the early 1990s. The introduction of cable and multichannel television systems some two decades ago17 has had ramifications in the film industry's infrastructure and has facilitated the emergence of new cinematic and televisual genres, augmented employment opportunities for filmmakers, and provided more screen time to their works. Thematically, whereas the films of the 1980s often revolved around the Arab-Israeli conflict, the films of the last two decades are marked by a tendency to address questions about Israeli identity head-on, thereby providing an inward and reflective look into the Israeli self. Topics that had previously been deemed too frivolous (due to the urgency of “national unity”), deviant, or controversial, and were therefore left mostly untreated, have gained center stage since the 1990s.18 Films dealing with domestic violence, familial conflicts, organized crime, emigration from Israel, homosexuality, Jewish religious schisms, and corruption are mainstream now. Similarly, as Yosefa Loshitzky suggests in the introduction to her book Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (2001), there has been a shift in the mind-set of the Israeli public from a politics of ideas (e.g., discourses about Zionism and national goals) to a politics of identity—a phenomenon most conspicuous in the works of women, Palestinian, and Mizrahi filmmakers as well as in films made by recent immigrant filmmakers from the former Soviet Union (FSU). All these features that Page 6 →set the cinematic period since the early 1990s apart are congruent with sweeping political changes in the electoral system, privatization initiatives, accelerated economic neoconservative policies, the globalization of the Israeli economy, and with the rise of post-Zionist and Israeli New Historicist scholarship, which stands out in its political critique of the Zionist establishment.19 As implied, this study includes films of all genres and lengths. In the prolonged debate about possible aesthetic and epistemic boundaries between fiction and nonfiction films (or narrative and nonnarrative), I side with Michael Renov (1993, Introduction; 2004, chapter 2) and his cohorts about the futility of articulating clear demarcations.20 Therefore, although I often introduce a film by referring to it as a documentary or as fiction/narrative, I deem the designation of distinct spaces and discussions to only one or the other to be unproductive. Documentaries constitute the majority of all films about the topic at hand. The main reason, though, for including documentaries and shorts (fiction or nonfiction) in this study is didactic rather than pragmatic; my premise is that the nonfiction film, due to relatively low costs, considerable operational agility (e.g., having smaller crews), and immediacy, as well as the intimate experience it offers, provides precisely the space necessary for Mizrahi cinema to breathe and endure. To support this claim, I will adumbrate aspects of the Israeli film infrastructure and the funding system (a topic to which I will return in more detail in chapter 3). The cost of Israeli feature films usually ranges from $600,000 to $1,500,000; most documentaries and shorts are produced at a fraction of that cost. Most fiction features in Israel rely heavily on public and government funds, which, if granted, normally cover close to 50 percent of the budget. When, as we shall later see, the large majority of fund directors and lectors, and nearly all major media owners and broadcasters in Israel, have been of Ashkenazi origin, it is no wonder that the cultural capital Mizrahi filmmakers have is undervalued and that their political agendas, mainly of the radical breed, may alienate those who allocate the funds. Although documentaries

and shorts also depend on public funding and broadcasting sponsorship, they operate within a more flexible framework. For example, a significant number of the most prominent shorts and documentaries have been made by film students whose primary obligation was to their schools and have thereby been relatively spared from the broader cultural, societal, and institutional constraints that bind feature filmmakers. I would therefore suggest that fresh cinematic trends (e.g., the frequent Page 7 →inclusion of Judeo-Arabic), innovative aesthetics and themes, and iconoclastic discourses are very likely to develop in the cinematic margins—the nonfiction Mizrahi films—which, in turn, may affect mainstream cinema. As will be evident in this work, Mizrahi shorts and documentaries approximate most successfully what Gilles Deleuze (1989: 207–15) terms “modern political cinema” (the equivalent of Franz Kafka's “minor literatures”); these films often point to the absence and marginalization of the Mizrahim to imply “the people no longer exist, or not yet…the people are missing” (208), they facilitate the invention of a collective and call a people into becoming (209), and they are best poised to destroy the boundaries between the private and the political (209–10).

Notes on Methodology and Theoretical Frameworks Clearly, the features of the colonial praxis and of postcolonial critique are rather heterogeneous and, thereby, need to be historicized. The ascription of the former to Zionism and the application of the latter to the study of ethnic relations in Israel as, broadly speaking, this work approaches Mizrahi ethnicity in cinema call for some cautionary notes. Although we should be cognizant of the problematics involved in exceptionalist claims about Zionism and Israel,21 early Zionism certainly cannot be written off as a typical imperialist or colonial movement that aspires to expand into contiguous or faraway territories;22 territorial and political Zionism was envisioned as the solution for the diasporic condition of a “people without land.” In broad strokes, early Zionism can be characterized as a spatial movement from various metropoles to one region, indeed, a contraction rather than a colonial expansion from one metropole to different regions.23 In “Zionism, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism” (2003), Derek Penslar offers an insightful analysis of the dilemmas involved in situating Zionism unambiguously as a colonial movement. He contends that in order to fully articulate early Zionism as a colonial movement, one ought also to attend to early Zionism as an anticolonial movement (“Zionism as an act of resistance by a colonized people” [85]) and a postcolonial movement (“the Zionist project as akin to state-building projects throughout twentiethcentury Asia and Africa” [85]).24 Not only colonialism is multifaceted; Zionism has encompassed diverse positions and conflicting discourses vis-à-vis the indigenous Palestinian/Arab population and the Mizrahi immigrant. Tuvia Friling's (2003b)25 argument about different historiographies Page 8 →of the Zionist movement already in the pre-1948 era and Moshe Lissak's (2003)26 discussion of conflicting ideologies and strategies that characterized the movement from its inception challenge a monolithic view of Zionism. Yet, although “Zionist discourses” may historically be more accurate than its single form, based on numerous references to the Zionist endeavor in this work, I would defend the position that we can discern a dominant colonial agenda within the Zionist movement. Hence, while my usage of “hegemonic Zionist discourse,” with its colonial connotations, is somewhat procrustean, it is certainly not misleading. Along these lines, we should consider the difficulty in applying some ethnic/minority theoretical models to the study of the Mizrahim. As will be patent in various discussions in this work, the rapid demographic, cultural, and political changes that Israel has witnessed since its creation complicate facile articulations of stable power disparities or simple applications of postcolonial and subaltern theories. Around the time of the first immigration wave from Europe (1881/82–1903), Ashkenazim in Palestine started to outnumber the Sephardim27 of the old local Jewish community.28 Later, around 1970, Mizrahim became the majority group in Israel's population (the year 1984 was the first time Mizrahim became the majority of voting-age citizens).29 Waves of immigration from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s tipped the balance again, and today Ashkenazim make up a slight majority—55 percent—of the Jewish Israeli population.30 This high percentage rate of the Mizrahi population clearly challenges simple comparisons with the presence, status, and clout of small minorities elsewhere, but, more important, the Mizrahi dilemma was never a civil rights issue. For this work to embark on the study of Mizrahim in Israeli cinema, it needs to be vigilant in its use of the aforementioned theories by way of assessing them from within the local Israeli context. To wit, even as I unabashedly use unequivocal terms to depict the repression of the Mizrahi, the reader should bear in mind the nuances to which this work attends in historicizing

ethnic relations in Israel in its analysis of Mizrahi cinema. Informed by the contribution of postcolonial theory to literary and film studies, I am interested in representations as the loci of power relations and in their utility in the inscription of collective identities. Oftentimes, stereotypes are the flashpoint of film criticism regarding the representation of minority groups, and in this work, and particularly in the next chapter, I will adumbrate certain demeaning and pernicious representations of the Mizrahi in Israeli film. Although the critic's zeal to point to “distorted” representations is understandable, we should also Page 9 →heed Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's (1994) cautionary note against a critical fixation and overemphasis on representation, a practice that may inadvertently lead to essentialist positions where the multilayered features of representation become reductive and are limited to a set of formulaic constructions (199). Similarly, they maintain that “an obsession with ‘realism’ [the verisimilitude of representations] casts the question [of representation] simply as one of ‘errors’ and ‘distortions,’ as if the ‘truth’ of a community were unproblematic, transparent, and easily accessible, and ‘lies’ about the community easily unmasked” (178). Instead of challenging specific stereotypical representations of the Mizrahi in Israeli cinema, in my analysis I am more interested in their hermeneutical potential, namely, in the notion that “stereotypes reveal nothing about the stereotyped and everything about the stereotyper” (Charles Ramírez Berg 2002: 30).31 Hence, in line with Homi Bhabha's (1996) postcolonial and poststructuralist formulations, in this work I opt to shift the focus away from the “identification of images as positive or negative,” to an understanding of the “processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse” (88). Finally, since this work engages in textual analysis, it is necessary to explicate my guiding principles and to situate the reading of Mizrahi films within the broader theoretical positions about the interpretation of filmic texts. We may start by inquiring what sets the cinematic text apart from other art forms. The combination of sound (itself a multilayered element) and moving picture (from simple visuals and epistolary features to special effects), coupled with the nonlinear rendering of time and space, make cinema a complex and distinctive medium. The cinematic picture itself entails “mimetic surplus” and, therefore, it “suffers” from excess and irreducibility to a larger extent than other performing or visual arts. Simply put, the camera captures more than is needed to tell a story or present a character. For Stephen Heath (1975), the film embodies a constant tension between narrative and discourse as these two elements refuse to be implicated by each other and are, therefore, mutually subversive. Put differently, a film is not only a heterogenic text but also a site of contestation between vying discourses, voices, and ideologies. Significantly, it is precisely the excess, redundancy, and seeming openness of the filmic text that allow us to identify the conspicuous structuring absences. Accordingly, the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma (Editors 1970/1994) asked that the critic make the films say what they have to say within what they leave unsaid, to reveal their constituent lacks; these are neither faults in the work…nor a deception Page 10 →on the part of the author…; they are structuring absences, always displaced…. In short, to use Althusser's expression—“the internal shadows of exclusion.” (496) In his late writing, Christian Metz, whose theory became increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan's work, modified his earlier position and posited a new set of questions about the relations of language and cinema, text, and subjectivity. In The Imaginary Signifier (1982), one of Metz's interventions is the concept of absence-presence of the cinematic image—“I must perceive the photographed object as absent, its photograph as present, and the presence of this absence as signifying” (57). Stated differently, the presence of the image is subtended by absence and displacement, a mechanism that yields signification.32 Arguably, the absence-presence that Metz expounds, the structuring absences that literary critique points to, Slavoj Žižek's rendering of “surplus,” and the fetish /stereotype in psychoanalytical and postcolonial articulations all attest to the same mechanism whereby even as “presencing” is designed to reveal, it also insists on alluding to absence. In my film analyses in this work, I will be as interested in identifying the discursive strains embedded in a film as in what the film seemingly “says”; indeed, inspired by the scholarship discussed in this section, I would argue that the textual fissures, tensions, and absences are what the film “says.” Aside from those theoretical frameworks, this study incorporates ethnographic methods in the exploration of

Mizrahi cinema. I conducted approximately fifty nonscripted interviews with filmmakers, fund directors, film program directors, broadcasters, and Israeli scholars in the fields of media and ethnicity.33 My motivation for assigning considerable importance to the interviews, and specifically those with Mizrahi filmmakers, is threefold: (1) I deem it necessary in a study about the disempowered Mizrahi group to let its people (or people with Mizrahi consciousness) be heard by conveying their thoughts, attitudes, and critiques regarding their own and others’ works. In this sense, as my discussions will demonstrate, the inclusion of the filmmakers’ reflections is meant to allow the subaltern to speak (to use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's terminology) and to speak out. This is most pertinent to interviews with young filmmakers from Israel's geographical and cultural periphery. (2) In a work that deals with the “Orient” but relies greatly on Western scholarship, it is all too important to counterbalance this lopsided imposition by incorporating “local” voices into the film analysis. (In turn, this also explains my elaborate use of Hebrew sources and Israeli scholarship.) (3) Most Page 11 →filmmakers I interviewed are highly cognizant of the various discourses about Mizrahiness in Israel. To an extent, then, their films can be read as a space where they situate their positions vis-à-vis public discourses about the Mizrahi dilemma. These filmic negotiations with either hegemonic or subversive discourses became patent in our interviews. Finally, during my research stays in Israel I attended conferences, lectures, and symposia pertaining to Israeli media, society, and culture. In particular, I found the meetings, workshops, and symposia organized by the nonprofit organization the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow34 (Hakeshet Hademokratit Hamizrahit) most insightful, and the debates that took place in those gatherings echo in this work.

The Structure of the Study The historical and critical contexts pertaining to my analysis of Mizrahi cinema in Israel are the focus of chapter 1. The cinematic discourses and aesthetic strategies employed in constructing the Mizrahi character on the screen are chapter 2's main topic. This chapter challenges the usefulness of adopting the essentialist/constructionist dyad model as a critical or hermeneutic tool for the analysis of ethnic identities. Culture epitomizes the concurrence of stability and change, genealogical origins and invented collective selves, that characterizes any ethnic, racial, or national collectives. Indeed, chapter 2's emphasis on the role culture plays in the construction of Mizrahi identity, particularly in the case of the hyphenated Arab-Jewish designation, renders the essentialist/constructionist either /or approach untenable. The chapter then suggests that, unable to adequately identify Mizrahi culture in their surroundings, filmmakers often resort to the reconstruction of the past in an attempt to glean a somewhat “authentic” Mizrahi/Sephardi self, unmarred by the alien culture that the Mizrahim were often coerced into adopting. One strategy filmmakers employ in this mode of “salvage cinema” and in evoking Mizrahi identity is to underscore the geographical proximity and cultural affinity between the Mizrahim, whose origins are mostly in the Arab and Muslim Middle East, and their Arab neighbors and fellow citizens of the past. Postmodern sensibilities in the rendering of space that filmmakers deploy in their efforts to situate, or, actually, to “dis-place” Mizrahi identity are the point of departure for my film analysis in chapter 3. A close reading of the films’ texts will reveal that, even as those sensibilities permeate some Mizrahi films, the performative play35 of space and identity Page 12 →does not take place in a societal limbo, and, oftentimes, the postmodern fluidity implodes into the redrawing of rather rigid ethnic boundaries. In attending to the Mizrahi place, the chapter examines how in Israeli films the geographical and the societal-psychic periphery—the space inhabited mostly by Mizrahim—is set against the center. The discussion, guided by Edward Said's (1978) articulation of topos and geography, proposes that the periphery is not defined by its “objective” distance from a metropolitan area but by ideologically motivated reasoning and perceptions. These queries regarding the representation of Mizrahi space prod us to address the place of the Mizrahi in nondiegetic filmic registers, namely, in the realms of distribution, marketing, and reception. Consequently, a key question this chapter poses—to shift the terms of the critical analysis from Spivak's “can the subaltern speak?” (1988)—is “who listens when the subaltern speaks?” This dilemma comes into sharp focus in consideration of a Mizrahi niche cinema—a space designated mostly for Mizrahi filmmakers and audiences. Chapter 4 problematizes one-dimensional and monolithic “top-down” approaches that overlook power dynamics and subversion. It identifies several models or areas where the seemingly cinematic absence or marginalization of the Mizrahi other turns, in a dialectical fashion, into a motivating force that grants this group the power it has

otherwise been lacking, to represent and be represented. Accordingly, in conceptualizing Mizrahi protest cinema and its different registers that I explore here—“Attenuated Protest,” “Corrective Histories,” and “Protest Films”—instead of dismissing Mizrahi victimhood as a symptom of a “culture of complaint” as many would have it, the chapter relates victimhood to agency and indeed maintains that, in the context of the Mizrahi shared experiences, the latter cannot be understood without the former. Finally, I suggest that agency rendered in Mizrahi protest (within cinema and without) leaves its impact not only on the subaltern group but also on the hegemonic group that is now compelled to define itself. If all previous chapters resort to articulations of the Mizrahim as a relatively unitary collective, the final chapter attends to intra- and intergroup relations. Initially, the chapter examines the intersectionality (convergence) of gender and ethnicity in the films’ construction of the Mizrahi woman. My discussion here inquires whether, overall, Mizrahi feminist cinema offers the nourishing conflation of gender and ethnicity in portraying the experiences of Mizrahi women. Intersectionality also calls for an inquiry into the relations between ethnicity and class. As mentioned above, a widespread social stand in Israel today is to let Page 13 →go of the ethnic issue and, instead, to focus on socioeconomic problems that have plagued Israel. If the documentary The King of Ratings (2001) portrays ethnicity and class in two mostly nonconvergent tracks, White Gold/Black Labor (2004) provides a case study for how, despite the film's attempt to stifle ethnicity in favor of a broader social commentary, ethnicity nevertheless lurks from within the “internal shadows of exclusion.”36 Another juncture—the ethnoreligious relations—in Israeli films has virtually been absent in scholarly works on Mizrahi cinema. I suggest in my discussion that this juncture may gain prominence in Mizrahi cinema and that, in turn, it requires scholars of Israeli cinema to address the Mizrahi-religious connections more attentively. The chapter's final section explores the commonalities and alliances between the Mizrahi group and other others, most noticeably the Palestinians. By way of concluding, the Afterword assesses what is Mizrahi in Mizrahi cinema (after Stuart Hall's inquisitive title “What Is ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” [1995]). Although unequivocal demarcations between Mizrahi and non-Mizrahi cinema do not obtain, this final discussion relies on my findings in the body of this work to delineate thematic, discursive, and aesthetic trends in contemporary Mizrahi cinema and propose that even if never a part of the dominant culture, this cinema, whether emergent or residual (à la Raymond Williams),37 will certainly leave its mark on the Israeli screen in the coming years.

NOTES 1. For now, I use the term “Sephardi” synonymously with “Mizrahim” and “Oriental Jews.” The next section of the introduction elaborates on these and other related terms. The ending “im” is a Hebrew marker of the plural form. 2. See chapter 3 for a discussion of the New Fund and other public film funds. 3. Interview, September 26, 2010. 4. For a critical analysis of “symbolic ethnicity,” see Sammy Smooha's “Jewish Ethnicity in Israel” (2004: 48, 54–65) and my discussion in chapter 5. 5. Yoram Peri's (2004) preference for “southerner” over “Mizrahi” as a common cultural attribute is a variant of this trend that seeks to compromise ethnicity by having it subsumed within other registers. In his taxonomy of “southern” versus “northern” (a common slang word for Israel's privileged class), Peri lists the features that typify the former (but, again, not necessarily the Mizrahim): “‘Southerners’ have more positive attitudes toward religious tradition,” they “promote their ethnic tradition,” “the majority of them vote for the Likud,” they reside in Israel's sociogeographical periphery, and they share various characteristics of cultural consumption and cuisine (280–81). Peri's motivation for this coinage is that, in his view (based on Elihu Katz's studies of leisure culture in Israel), a substantial number of the Jews from Page 14 →the Middle East and North Africa do not consider themselves Mizrahim and, likewise, they do not want Israel to have a Mizrahi culture. (Clearly, the more interesting and important question is why this is the case. As we shall see, proponents of the Mizrahi cause would suggest that it is precisely the marginalization and stigmatization of the Mizrahi that alienated the Mizrahim from their own identity and culture.) A similar variant of this scholarly trend whereby Mizrahiness as a sociocultural entity gives way to related cultural registers can be found in “Mediterraneanism” (Yam Tikhoniyut). Whereas the focus of Alexandra Nocke's

The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity (2009) is the centrality of Mediterranean culture in Israeli identity today, the author makes it clear that, according to Mizrahi activists, “Mediterraneanism” is a designed euphemism to soften the harsh or negative connotations of “Mizrahiness” and, according to this critique, its use is in line with the hegemonic groups’ stratagem to circumvent the ethnic problem (167–69). 6. The sentiments and positions I outlined here are implied in an article with contributions from Israeli artists and media professionals that was published in the weekly Ha'ir (Omri Dolev, “Ashkenazim from the Bunker,” September 25, 1998, 34–49). The article sets out to explore the extent to which Ashkenazi Jews feel threatened by the putatively gradual omnipresence of Mizrahi culture. 7. The modern Hebrew usage of “adot” has no exact equivalent in English; a close translation would be “ethnic communities.” 8. Drawing upon Hamid Naficy's articulation of hyphenated identities in cinema (2001), I will later elaborate on “Arab-Jew”; it is sufficient at this point to indicate that the recent employment of “Arab-Jew” (even when, morphologically, the hyphen is absent) among some Mizrahi scholars is meant precisely to allude to the connection rather than schism between the two terms. 9. For Roland Barthes (1957/1972: 137–42), the unmarked (ex-nominated) is a social function or praxis that creates a myth of “naturalness”; whereby the colonizer or the hegemonic group (as the “self”) is often deemed normative and unmarked, the other is marked, e.g., constructed as “black,” “ethnic,” etc. See also John Fiske (1996: 42) and Patricia Williams's Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1998) and, specifically, the chapter “The Emperor's New Clothes.” 10. For a discussion of the problematics of “adot ha-Mizra” within the context of ethnicity in Israel, see Eliezer Ben-Rafael (1982: chapter 3), Virginia Domínguez (1989: chapter 6), Ella Shohat (2001b: 66), and Sami Shalom Chetrit (2010: 17–18). 11. Unless indicated otherwise, all emphases in quotes are in the original texts. 12. The Druse are Arabs who splintered from Islam in the eleventh century to develop their own clandestine religion. The Israeli Druse, unlike their Muslim Arab counterparts, usually serve in the Israeli military and enjoy a better status in the eyes of most Israelis. 13. For a discussion of how in Israeli discourse some non-Jewish groups are designated “eda” (singular of “ adot”), see Virginia Domínguez (1989: 178–88). 14. For a detailed historical analysis of “Arab-Jews,” see Lital Levy's “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq” (2008) and Emily Benichou Gottreich's “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib” (2008). 15. For a further discussion of the various terms that designate the Mizrahi community, see Shohat's “Rupture and Return” (2001b: 64–69).Page 15 → 16. This work also makes several references to television programs that generated public interest. 17. Until the early 1990s, Israel had only one television channel shared by two public broadcasters. For the infrastructure and developments in the Israeli media-space, see Dan Caspi and Yehiel Limor (1999), Gideon Doron (1998), Ruby Ginel (1997), Yuval Elizur (1995), and Amit Schejter (2009). 18. See “Introduction” in Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg's edited volume Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion (2011). 19. There is no agreed-upon definition of “post-Zionism,” but, broadly speaking, the term alludes to academic literature that emerged in the 1980s and meant to challenge the hegemonic Zionist narrative, mainly vis-à-vis its historiography of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The advent of the scholarly work of Israeli New Historians and post-Zionists—including Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, and Benny Morris—has been attributed, to a large extent, to the Israeli government's concession in the mid-1980s to gradually allow public access to confidential state documents. In Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas (2008b), Peleg focuses on post-Zionist literature and popular media to illustrate the decline of the regnant Zionist discourse in the years leading to the end of the millennium. For Peleg, post-Zionism was mostly a “hiatus” before the return of the public to more traditional Zionist views mainly due to what has been perceived as the failure of the July 2000 Camp David Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and to the ensuing breakout of the second intifada later that year. For more on post-Zionism and the critique to which it was subjected, see the following anthologies: The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent (Carey and Shainin 2002), Israel and the PostZionists: A Nation at Risk (Sharan 2003), The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Israeli Fundamentalist Politics (Nimni 2003), and An Answer to a Post-Zionist Colleague (Friling 2003a).

20. For example, Michael Renov (1993: 10) claims, “It is not that the documentary consists of the structures of filmic fiction (and is, thus, parasitic of its cinematic ‘other’) as it is that ‘fictive’ elements insist in documentary as in all film forms.” For more on the debate about the dilemma of distinguishing between fictive and nonfictive films see David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, Post-Theory (1996: chapter 13). 21. An exceptionalist discourse vis-à-vis the Palestinian predicament underscores the extraordinary history of the Jewish people (e.g., the Holocaust) in order to deflect comparisons of Israel to apartheid regimes or Zionism to European colonial powers. A critique of this discourse is found in John Collins's Global Palestine (2011: 9, 20). 22. My focus in this reference is on the pre-state era. The equation of Zionism with a colonial movement clearly has more traction in consideration of the 1967 War and its aftermath. As Derek J. Penslar (2003: 97) claims, “Only after the 1967 War did Israel's relationship with the Arab minority change to a genuine form of colonialism: the demographic balance between occupier and occupied tilted increasingly towards the latter, Israel gained substantial economic profit from the occupation, and its military and security forces brutally combated Palestinian nationalism in a fashion similar to French rule in pre-independence Algeria.” 23. See Shohat's (2004) discussion of this issue and, in particular, Zionism's lack of a “mother country.”Page 16 → 24. Penslar delineates his stratagem for attending to the colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial features of Zionism early in the essay: “By claiming Zionism to be a form of postcolonialism, that is, placing Zionism in Asia, I will be re-placing Zionism in Europe, a continent distinguished by not only the great overseas empires of the West but also a sizeable body of colonized, stateless peoples, including Jews” (2003: 85). Also, see Tuvia Friling (2003b, mainly 43–45) and Moshe Lissak (2003: 99) for additional discussions about the shortcomings of theorizations that apply the colonial model to the Zionist movement. It is noteworthy that Tuvia Friling's and Moshe Lissak's views are diametrically opposite those of prominent anticolonial and postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said; in his comprehensive essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” (1979), Said critiques Zionism on the grounds of its unequivocal colonial /imperialist positions. 25. See Friling (2003b), in particular 31. 26. See Lissak (2003), in particular 93–95. 27. Daniel Elazar (1989: 28). 28. In Hebrew, this old Jewish community in Palestine is referred to as “ha-Yishuv ha-yashan” (“the old settlement”). The Sephardim constituted a relatively well-off patrician community of Jews who settled in Palestine hundreds of years prior to the emergence of Zionism at the end of the nineteenth century and are known as ST (Samekh Tet)—an acronym for “Pure Spaniard.” 29. Figures cannot be definite because the Israeli census does not employ the categories of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi; the closest categories are, respectively, Asian- and African-born Jews and their descendants, and European- and American-born Jews and their descendants. 30. See Smooha (2004: 49). 31. Charles Ramírez Berg's (2002) analysis here of the motivations for stereotypical representation is guided by Robin Wood's and Sander Gilman's conceptualizations of cultural and psychic otherization. 32. This dialectic is congruent with the Symbolic in Jacques Lacan's theory, and particularly with his articulation that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (or “what the psychoanalytical experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language”; 1970: 103); both are predicated on Roman Jakobson's appellations of substitution/condensation (metaphor; paradigmatic relations). Conversely, the Imaginary is characterized by displacement (metonymy; syntagmatic relations). The confluence between the unconscious and the language/langage of cinema is furthered by Metz's assertion that “film is like a mirror.” Similar to Lacan's mirror, the screen is the source of (mis)identification (the actor as me/not me, the self as other), fetishism (the characters as displaced and fetishized objects), voyeurism (the people on the screen cannot see the viewer gazing at them), and disavowal (one knows it is fiction and yet does not disengage). See Lacan's “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious” for a discussion of identification, metaphor, and metonymy and, specifically, for his rendition of Jakobson's literary figures of style (1970: 114–15, 119–20). 33. It should be noted here that long before I embarked on this study, I had been acquainted with a substantial number of the interviewees from my film studies at Tel Aviv University and from my film and

television work after graduation. 34. For a detailed account of the creation of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, the Page 17 →range of sociopolitical dilemmas it has debated, and its accomplishments, see Moshe Karif, Hamizrahit: The Story of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow and the Social Struggle in Israel, 1995–2005 (2005), and Rainbow of Opinions: A Mizrahi Agenda for Israel (Yossi Yonah, Yonit Naaman, and David Machlev 2007). The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow is mostly defunct now. For more, see http://www.ha-keshet.org.il /english_index.html. 35. Judith Butler's (1993) pivotal conceptualization of performativity purports to supplant modernist formulations of cohesive and pre-given identities. I will elaborate on this topic in the following chapters. 36. Louis Althusser, quoted in Cahiers du Cinéma (Editors 1970/1994: 496). 37. In Raymond Williams's (Marxism and Literature, 1977) usage, “the residual…has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present” (122). Emergent culture, which “is continually being created” (123), impinges on the dominant culture much more directly than the residual one does and is meant to offer an alternative to mainstream cultural values and practices. See discussion in Marxism and Literature's chapter 8: “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent.”

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ONE Mizrahi Ethnicity and Israeli Cinema The Mizrahi Dilemma: A Critical Overview Following the first Zionist Congress of 1897, the formation of modern Zionism marked a new era in the lives of millions of Jews worldwide. From the turn of the last century onward, the Zionist national movement accrued momentum in terms of ideology, practice, and clout, and it eventually called for a homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people, a goal accomplished in 1948. Early Zionism was a modernist national project predicated largely on socialist, egalitarian, and democratic creeds. The imbrication of national aspirations with a secular socialist doctrine—specifically, the love of the land and the decrees against exploitative economic relations—is evident in the slogans, such as dat ha-avoda (“religion of labor”), avoda ivrit (“Hebrew labor”), and avoda atzmit (“nonhired labor”), that were a mainstay among the pioneers of the second and third waves of immigration (1904–14; 1919–23). Zionist thinkers and leaders attributed the predicament of the Diaspora Jew to the condition of a nation without land, of a people who had been the eternal wanderers. The remedy for “a people without land” was a “land without (a) people”—Palestine—a solution clearly based on an immense nescience regarding Palestine's native inhabitants, mostly Arab, but also Jewish. For Zionist leaders such as Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, the soon-to-be-state was imagined as an island of an enlightened society at the heart of a premodern world, hence his vision of Israel as the “Switzerland of the Middle East.” Alongside this dominant creed, some Zionist Page 19 →pioneers, mostly those of the first wave of immigration of 1882–1903, welcomed the first contact with the “Orient” and mimicked its tropes.1 However, regardless of the different ideologies in the early Zionist era, historic events in the Middle East and Europe put them all to the test. The crystallization of Arab-Palestinian nationalism since the 1920s turned Palestine into a flashpoint, a land that two peoples now claim as home. For many Zionists, the horrors of the Holocaust registered as a warning—“Never again!”—and a strong Jewish state was sought as the only assurance against such future atrocities. As Amos Elon (1971) suggests in The Israelis: Founders and Sons, the aftermath of the Holocaust, coupled with the intensification of the Arab-Israeli conflict, nourished a new breed of young Israelis. This new generation often eschewed some of early Zionism's utopian ideals in favor of pragmatism, which translated into the creation of a formidable Israeli who would fight to the end. The flood of Mizrahi immigrants and European Jews (many of whom were impoverished Holocaust refugees)2 to the nascent state brought the Israeli economy to the brink of collapse, and, to find housing solutions for these newcomers, the government settled many of them in what had been, prior to the 1948 War, Arab villages and towns. But a harsher view of the Zionist enterprise, strongly advanced by the works of some Israeli New Historians, postZionists, and the “new Mizrahim”3—scholars, intellectuals, and activists who have been advocating the Mizrahi cause—dismisses the aforementioned relations in which “circumstances” purport to explain the changes the Zionist movement has undergone, and instead sets out to expose the inveterate racial and colonial underpinnings of this national movement. The key argument behind this critique is that, from the outset, Zionism's lofty ideology merely obfuscated its pernicious agenda and practice, and that its very modernist project was predicated on and made possible by labor exploitation, discrimination, and oppression. Some point to the Eurocentric stand early political Zionism had taken already at the turn of the previous century. In his deliberations on whether Palestine or Argentina should be the preferred place for a Jewish state, Theodor Herzl, the visionary figure of the Zionist movement, opted for the former: “We should there form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost [rampart] of civilization against barbarism” (quoted in Arthur Hertzberg's The Zionist Idea [1997: 222]). Importantly, Herzl's vision and plan were meant only for Ashkenazi Jews and those Sephardi Jews who had European citizenship, such as French Jews in Algeria.4 Since this critique accentuates structural rather than circumstantial or episodic features of Zionist ideology Page 20 →and praxis, it relates past wrongs to present subjugation; indeed, it amounts to a sweeping condemnation of Zionism, a minority Ashkenazi elite movement, for its colonization of all “Orientals”—Mizrahim and Palestinians alike—a view according to which, in the

present, Ashkenazim subordinate a population more than three times their size.5 In their analyses of the Mizrahi dilemma, scholars such as Sami Shalom Chetrit (2004a, 2010), Yehouda Shenhav (2003, 2006), Aharon Yitzhaki (2003: 49–52), and G. N. Giladi (1990: 67–102) maintain that the predicament of Mizrahi Jews can be traced back to a systematic, deliberate, and cynical exploitation of these people in their respective communities in the Middle East and North Africa even before their arrival in Palestine/Israel. In these reproving views, the immigration of Yemenite Jews in 1882 (coinciding with what is known as aliya rishona— the first Zionist wave of immigration from Eastern Europe) and then again in 1910 was a windfall for the proponents of the Zionist movement in Palestine—they seized the opportunity to exploit these Yemenite immigrants in farming the land, thus freeing the new Ashkenazi landowners from their dependency on Arab laborers.6 Shenhav (2003, 2006) addresses the means Zionist leaders deployed to instigate the Jewish population in Iraq against their Arab neighbors in order to spur them to immigrate to Israel, which needed them for its nationbuilding project.7 In short, for these critics, the Mizrahi Jews constituted what Marx terms the “reserve army of labor”—an expendable and manipulable workforce—subservient to the Ashkenazi elite. A Malthusian-like policy was enacted when a large number of immigrants started arriving in Israel from North Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. The selection process, where cultural and economic criteria were employed by Zionist agents to determine who would be permitted to immigrate,8 reveals Zionism's cynical abuse of its own ethos of “Hebrew labor.” The selection process was meant to preserve the Ashkenazi hegemony while it also alleviated the workforce crises.9 Shlomo Swirski's (1989) critique attempts to unmask the fallacy of the modernity/co-optation/assimilationism model in Israeli social studies, which suggests that an established modern Ashkenazi society was faced with the premodern Mizrahim and that, in accordance with the Zionist decrees of am ead (one people) and kibbutz galuyot (“The Ingathering of Exiles”), the Mizrahim had to be co-opted and goaded into an era of enlightenment.10 Swirski maintains that the reality in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Palestine/Israel was that the population there was by all measures still in a premodern stage. “Modernity,” then, was possible precisely Page 21 →because of the exploitation of Mizrahi Jews; it was not a pre-given condition in Palestine that the Mizrahim could adopt. Furthermore, various studies, including those by Shlomo Swirski (1989) and Ella Shohat (1988), maintain that, if anything, Mizrahi immigrants (mostly from Iraq, Egypt, and Iran) were, to a large extent, doing well economically in their countries of residence and were professionally more advanced upon their arrival in Israel than their Ashkenazi counterparts and, therefore, unlike the classical paradigm where immigration is linked to a desire for individual, familial and community improvement, in Israel this process, for Sephardim, was largely reversed. What for Ashkenazi immigrants from Russia or Poland was a social aliya (literally “ascent”) was for Sephardi immigrants from Iraq or Egypt a yerida (a “descent”). (Shohat 20) And yet, as I noted earlier, the Mizrahim were hired as unskilled labor, whereas many professionally unskilled Ashkenazim came to occupy high administrative positions. On one level then, we find a discrepancy between the Zionist socially oriented public rhetoric and the actual practice; the discrimination against Mizrahim in housing policies, employment, and education coupled with the thwarting of any Mizrahi efforts to organize and protest furthered the Mizrahi cultural displacement and political subjugation.11 On another level, the contradictions and tensions are to be found within the Zionist rhetoric itself— am ead and kibbutz galuyot coincide problematically with expressed fears and anxieties about the “Levantization” of Israel by the increasing size of its Sephardi/Mizrahi immigrant population.12 What could Zionism offer the Mizrahi when, to use Chetrit's (2004b) pithy phrasing, it wanted to swallow and regurgitate its Mizrahi immigrants at the same time? Over the years, the Zionist movement resorted to a practice attesting to the need to ensure that the Mizrahi, while not an equal member of Israeli society, is nevertheless not utterly rejected as the Arab enemy is.13 In his book The Arab-Jews: Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (2003; in English, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity, 2006), Shenhav develops a daring thesis claiming

that the Zionist movement's leaders and emissaries resorted to a “religionization” (hadata) of the Mizrahi. In practice, this involved the ascription to this community of strong religious features in order to attest to one property—being Jewish—that the dominant group shares with these Page 22 →Arab-Jews whose cultural and historical affinity to the “ultimate other”—the Arab—was otherwise markedly firmer. It is no wonder then that Israeli prime minister Ben-Gurion could unabashedly call in the Israeli parliament in 1951 for turning Yemenite immigrants from Yemenites to Jews.14 As Shenhav proposes, this religionization was fraught with double irony. First, Zionism, like other national movements, was propagating a secular socialist agenda, but it then resorted to religion in the desperate desire to be able to “swallow” or co-opt the Mizrahi other. Clearly this is not meant to suggest that Ashkenazi Zionism was interested in adopting strict religious practices for itself; only that, based on religion, it could mark the Mizrahi as a Jew. Second, most Mizrahi Jews, specifically the Yemenites, were traditionally observant of Jewish law and, therefore, did not need the “savior's” (mostly secular) extended hand to become Jews. If religion could provide a common denominator for the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi/Mizrahi, culture could not; Zionism involved an effort by the leadership to “elevate” the Mizrahi into the putatively progressive habitus (praxis) of the Ashkenazi. To distinguish them from the Arab enemy and make this Mizrahi community worthy of the Zionist enterprise, the community was coerced to eradicate its cultural Arab/Middle Eastern past. Gradually, many of the immigrants realized that the promised land of their forefathers had turned out to be, culturally speaking, a new exile. It is in this context that American scholar Nancy Berg titles her book on Israeli writers from Iraq Exile from Exile (1996),15 and Ella Shohat (2000b) concludes her article “Ruptured Identities” with the disillusionment of Iraqi immigrants to Israel: “By the rivers of Zion, there we sat and wept when we remembered Babylon” (21)—an intended inversion of the biblical verse in Psalms 137: 1 where Zion is the object of longing for the Jewish exiles in Babylon. At the risk of overgeneralizing, we can suggest that the Mizrahi immigration was a move inside one geographical space (the Middle East and North Africa) to a new cultural space, whereas the Ashkenazim moved into a new geographical space but brought and attempted to maintain and even impose the culture of a different space—Europe.16 However, as is often pointed out, did the Ashkenazim not suffer upon their arrival in Palestine/Israel as much as their Mizrahi counterparts did? Were the Ashkenazi immigrants not subjected to a similar coercive force to shed their putatively diasporic traits and procure the features of the independent, assertive, strong, intrepid, healthy sabra—a native-born Israeli who was the paragon of the Zionist desire? Indeed, the formation of Israeli culture that has evolved over the years has little in common with the heritage those European immigrants were accustomed to Page 23 →in their countries of origin. Is not the emerging hybrid Israeli identity then alien to both Mizrahi and Ashkenazi habitus? To expound these queries, we first need to qualify the notion that the implied hybridity in the Israeli context truly entails equality—a process in which all groups participate in an open cultural exchange to form a genuine multicultural society. Three aspects of Israeli putative hybridity deserve our attention here. (1) Once in Israel /Palestine, the Mizrahim joined the “melting pot” society from a position of economic and social inferiority. As for culture, the regnant Zionist discourse deemed the Mizrahi culture insufficient and its people as those “having fallen into an historical coma.”17 In practice then, as Chetrit (2004b) proposes, “‘the cultural melting pot’ [in this Israeli context] is a process in which those with the cultural reign liquefy those who are culturally subordinated and mold them anew according to the changing needs of the hegemony.” (2) The Mizrahi propinquity to the Arab had a price those immigrants had to pay, whereas the Ashkenazim did not have to shoulder this burden. The demand that the Mizrahim eradicate their past is but one element in the socialization process. In order not to be suspected as Arab enemy allies, the Mizrahim had to proclaim their loyalty to the Zionist cause by being Arabhaters, which, for the Arab-Jews, has transpired in self-denial, if not self-hatred. Therefore, a distinction needs to be drawn between those who enter/internalize multiculturalism or hybridity by coercion and those who join it voluntarily. It is not enough, then—in fact, it is even misleading—to point out, as a number of media studies have done, that most Mizrahim now prefer a Western over an Oriental-Mizrahi culture.18 One needs to search for the reasons leading to this preference and, thereby, to contextualize this trend. (3) Even if Ashkenazim had to make cultural adjustments upon their immigration, these were minuscule in comparison to the cultural sacrifices made

by Mizrahim, considering that, from the outset, Zionism promoted a fierce Western orientation. Furthermore, in Rami Kimchi's (2008) work on Mizrahi/Ashkenazi representations in the ethnic film comedies of the 1960s and 1970s (known as “Bourekas”), the main argument is that Israeliness never existed within the films or without; rather, it was the Ashkenazi Yiddish culture masqueraded as a new Israeli habitus. It is not surprising therefore that, unlike “Mizrahi,” “Ashkenazi” renders the unmarked (normative) Israeliness. This is most conspicuous when we consider that the sabra, despite the term's supposed reference to any native Israeli, is depicted in literature and the performing arts as a young, light-skinned male of Ashkenazi, not Mizrahi, descent.19 Page 24 → The discussion thus far has focused on the Mizrahi predicament in past years. Since my study centers on contemporary Mizrahi cinema, it is necessary to address the questions posed in the introduction—to what extent is the Mizrahi issue passé, and how relevant is the past to the fast-changing Israeli society? I will limit my overview here to aspects of contemporary Israeli society and culture that directly pertain to the films explored here. For the most part, Israeli social scholarship up to the late 1970s affirmed the existence of economic, educational, and occupational disparities between the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi in favor of the former but did not attempt to identify an ideological or institutional design. An increasing number of scholars in the late 1970s and 1980s who studied Israeli society concurred that the unrelenting thrust of the Zionist narrative and the power imbalance embedded in it had dire consequences for nonhegemonic groups, mainly Mizrahim and Israeli Palestinians and women.20 However, some of these studies, especially the earlier ones, often projected a process in which the second and third generation of Mizrahi immigrants would live in a society where, even if social gaps persisted, they would not be along ethnic lines.21 But then, more recent studies in the fields of sociology, criminology, political science, media, cultural studies, and education have questioned this premise and sought to reveal the links between past wrongdoing and present ethnic displacement and social maladies. Shenhav (2003, 2006) and Chetrit (2004a, 2010, in reference to studies by Yinon Cohen and Yoav Peled) reveal that ethnic gaps in contemporary Israel have not been narrowed.22 A troubling aspect of these findings is that while the first generation of Mizrahi immigrants now witnesses some improvement in the economic disparity between themselves and their Ashkenazi counterparts, the hope that these immigrants’ children and grandchildren will not be subjected to the same socioeconomic disparities of years past has been shattered. Indeed, at least in some areas, the gaps between the second and third generations of Mizrahi immigrants and their Ashkenazi peers have widened compared to the gaps from which the first generation of Mizrahi immigrants suffered. For example, Mizrahi immigrants made up a proportionally larger section of the college student body than their children do,23 and Mizrahim are still heavily underrepresented in nonelected positions, such as executives and judges, and in media ownership, but they constitute an overwhelming majority of the Jewish prison population.24 The expectation for narrowing the gap often revolved around the notion that, in a melting-pot society, intermarriage Page 25 →rates would increase over time. However, once again, the 20 to 25 percent marriage rate between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim has been mostly unchanged for several decades, and some scholars even find that this rate has decreased recently.25 Swirski (1989) is interested in investigating the structural mechanisms that perpetuate the ethnosocial disparity, and, accordingly, his challenge to the position that the ethnic gaps are closing is couched in Marxist analysis. This view ignores the fact that the very processes that created the ethnic division of labour in the fifties and sixties also created mechanisms of reproduction which have been maintaining that division of labour—obviously, with variations—to this day, and are presently operating to reproduce it in the foreseeable future as well. (21)26 For Swirski, the consignment in the past of large numbers of Mizrahim to Israel's geographical periphery—the socalled development towns—and the dependence of these development towns’ residents in many cases on a single source of employment, usually a textile or food-processing factory, have had deleterious effects. Development towns are notorious for the scarcity of occupations that require highly skilled employees, and, therefore, they offer

extremely limited opportunities for social mobility.27 The educational system has been a significant force in maintaining this division of labor. In development towns and slums (in Hebrew, shkhunot metzuka, literally, “neighborhoods in distress”), populated mostly by Mizrahim, there have often been only the poorly regarded vocational schools at the high school level, a reality that impedes aspiring young students from pursuing professional or academic careers where a college degree is required. Eli Avraham's work on contemporary Israeli media (primarily the press) reveals that they are plagued by a systematically biased, stereotypical, and offensive treatment of the periphery and its mostly Mizrahi populations.28 In The Media in Israel (1993/2000), Avraham identifies the following thematic characteristics and foci in the portrayal of the periphery in the press: (1) violence, crime, and social unrest; (2) neglect and filth; (3) people's lack of control over their future; (4) decontextualization and lack of specificity, and yet, the likelihood that the story covered will indicate the ethnic identity of criminals if they are Mizrahim; (5) casting doubts as to whether the people of the periphery can be like “us”; and (6) primitivism (32). One should be skeptical about the “fairness” of this coverage (for example, Page 26 →as Avraham [1993/2000] points out, considering the crime rates in the periphery and the center, the former will be covered in disproportionately higher frequency regarding this topic than the latter), but the alarming aspects of this treatment of the communities in Israel's periphery go well beyond that. Avraham provides various examples where the media's portrayal of crime, neglect, lack of education, or poverty is framed by certain preconceived notions about the periphery. Even when the media tell a success story, the reporter may begin with a clause such as, “X, known as a high-crime town, far from sight and mind…is….”29 Accordingly, when “disorder news” pertains to the periphery, it tends to suggest a paradigmatic quality, whereas similar stories about the center allude to the particularistic nature of the incident. Avraham (1993/2000: 152) cites Shanto Iyengar to propose that the failure of Israeli media to provide the broader socioeconomic context in their stories results in “episodic news” where blame is deflected from government officials and others in centers of power to the subjects about which the negative stories are told. The framing of the stories betrays a slanted perspective and ideological bent whereby media coverage in Israel reinscribes negative stereotypes about the Mizrahi while it also perpetuates the center's hegemony. Power relations are marked not only by the gross imbalance between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim and the subjugation of the former by the latter, but, as implied earlier, also by the hegemonic group's ambivalent construction of the Mizrahim as both an other (being part of the Orient) and the self (being Jewish). The mimicry of the Mizrahi other (e.g., the deliberate but unnatural occasional use of the Hebrew guttural sounds and (ayin) that are characteristic of the Sephardi accent), the exoticization of Mizrahi culture in Israeli folklore, and the cannibalization of Mizrahi culinary and musical traditions in the last few decades (ironically, often by Mizrahim themselves) attest to the limited and lopsided cultural exchange between the two Israeli ethnic groups and to the duality of fear and desire in the treatment of the Mizrahi other—folklore (dubbed as “tradition”) is acceptable, even warranted, but “real culture” is not.30 Thus far, this section has focused on the process by which the Ashkenazi establishment has managed to maintain its hegemonic power by social and cultural impositions and on the expediency by which it has striven to propagate a Western way of life among its “Eastern” population. It may seem as though the Mizrahi has been an empty vessel into which the hegemonic group has been instilling its values and ideas. Furthermore, ostensibly, the Zionist ideology and practice have successfully Page 27 →accomplished the Ashkenazi goals—as indicated above, most Mizrahim prefer non-Mizrahi culture, and the phenomenon of Mizrahi ethnic self-hatred, namely, the internalization of their putative inferiority, has been well documented in Israeli literature and scholarship. However, this work (particularly chapters 4 and 5) is most interested in the articulations of counterdiscourses, in films that subvert hegemonic creeds, and in works that attest to the dynamic nature of power relations, political struggles, and social interactions.

The Mizrahi on the Israeli Screen: Historical Context The following section will address the main trends in Israeli cinema through the early 1990s and the theoretical

and critical frameworks employed by scholars and film reviewers in their analyses of Israeli cinema. Although the emphasis will be on genres and trends pertaining directly to the Mizrahi issue, references to other trends will point to the exclusions and oversights in the treatment of the ethnic issue in Israeli cinema; indeed, the most striking feature regarding the Mizrahim in early Israeli cinema is their absence and marginalization. In the few films in which Mizrahim were present, their characterization was demeaning, and their roles were designed mostly to constitute the counterfigures of the Ashkenazim. For example, in Dan Quixote and Sa'adia Panza (Dan Kishot uSa'adia Panza, 1956), the main Mizrahi character—an unsophisticated dimwit—is in the service of the Ashkenazi master.31 In line with the common practice of “speaking for” the subaltern group, Ashkenazi actors, including Haim Topol, Gila Almagor, and Shaike Ofir, oftentimes played the roles of Mizrahi characters, and in the films made through the 1980s few filmmakers were of Mizrahi origin. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the rise and demise of two competing genres/cycles32 in Israeli cinema—Bourekas and the New Sensibility Cinema/Personal Cinema.33 Bourekas Cinema, consisting primarily of comedies or social (melo)dramas, foregrounds mostly Mizrahi characters. In a substantial number of Bourekas films, such as Katz and Karaso (Katz ve-Karaso, 1971), the comedic effect derives from placing at the center of the narrative two incompatible characters—a Mizrahi and an Ashkenazi. The term “Bourekas” was coined in the mid-1970s and derived from the popular and inexpensive Middle Eastern/Balkan fluffy pastry (known in those regions as bureka, borek, spanakopita, and by similar variations), a mainstay in Mizrahi/Sephardi households and eateries in Israel. Accordingly, “Bourekas” has been used mostly as a derogatory term to signify Page 28 →lowbudget productions and garish, recycled narratives aimed at the lowest common denominator of audiences, and it was mapped out by film critics then as “low” culture. By contrast, the New Sensibility Cinema was marked as an exquisite “high culture.” The incorporation by films of this genre of new cinematic trends in Europe (especially the French New Wave) and in Brazil (Cinema Novo) at that time and the Israeli critics’ championing of the auteur theory augmented the New Sensibility Cinema's prestige as “high culture.”34 This genre employs narratives characterized by minor story lines and subtle undertones, and it often addresses universal rather than local Israeli themes. In their discourse about Israeli cinema, film critics, as well as film professors of the time, reaffirmed the binary opposition between Bourekas and the New Sensibility Cinema and, as will be shown here, facilitated the construction of the binary categories of Ashkenazi (associated with “high culture”) versus Mizrahi (associated with “low culture”) in the extrafilmic realities of Israel then. The Mizrahi man in Bourekas Cinema is often portrayed as uncouth, irrational, emotional, oversexed, traditional, premodern, chauvinistic, patriarchal, and manipulative. The language skills of the Mizrahim in Bourekas Cinema are limited, and their pronunciation is grotesque.35 Page 29 →Sallah's (Sallah Shabbati, Ephraim Kishon, 1964) titular character is a manipulative, lazy, primitive, rude, and sexist Mizrahi immigrant. He aspires to leave his residence in the ma abara (immigrants’ transient camp, consisting mostly of tents or tin dwellings) for permanent housing in the shikkun (a cheaply built and undistinguishable apartment complex), but he is unwilling to work, due to laziness, or to let his son earn an income, due to his reluctance to compromise the family hierarchical structure and to challenge traditional codes. The cinematic association of the Mizrahi with “low culture” is rather blatant in Sallah's use of music; in contrast to the classical music an Ashkenazi couple listens to quietly, Sallah's Arab-like music is boisterous and participatory; in the ma abara, he visits a local café, and with a bottle of arak (a Middle Eastern liquor) in his hand he climbs a table and starts singing and dancing and rouses the audience there.36 Despite genre-related differences, the 1973 musical Casablan (fashioned largely after Robbins and Wise's West Side Story) resorts to a cluster of stereotypes similar to those deployed in Sallah. Like Sallah, Casa, the hero of the film's title, is traditional, brutish, physical, and emotive. He lives in the old Arab city of Jaffa in a mixed neighborhood of immigrants from various countries of origin (but, strangely, with no Arabs). Casa leads a (quite benign) gang of young men, and, in accordance with genre conventions, they sing and dance but never seem to work. In the same vein, Charlie of the comedy Charlie and a Half (Charlie va-etzi, 1974) is a petty criminal who lives in a slum. He is vulgar and shrewd and does not hesitate to recruit a young neighborhood boy as his “apprentice.”

To more fully assess the formulaic representation of the Mizrahi in Bourekas Cinema and in films where this genre left its mark, we should attend to the contrasting positioning of the Mizrahi in relation to his or her (Ashkenazi) sabra counterpart and, relatedly, expound the feminization of the Mizrahi man in many of those films. To contextualize my discussion, it bears noting that, oftentimes, postcolonial works point to the problematic gendering of national discourse; women and men are assigned different, if not opposite, roles in the formation of nationhood.37 As Lesley Hazleton (1977) suggests, in Zionist discourse, the language employed to depict the settling of the Land of Israel is suffused with sexual or gender-specific terms and imagery (e.g., impregnating or conquering the [barren/virgin] land).38 Arguably, the masculine sabra epitomizes the male-oriented Zionist tale, which is prescribed by telos and a linear progression toward fulfillment/climax with statehood as its zenith. All the Jewish groups that are considered outside the core of the Page 30 →Zionist enterprise or whose collective characteristics differ from those of the sabra, including Mizrahim, are “doomed” to be emplaced in the domain of the feminine, where home (the private sphere), passivity (the lack of telos), or emotiveness take precedence, and not in the public/national sphere where the sabra exhibits valor, determination, and cool.39 Tania Modleski's (1986) analysis of soap operas, where she intimates a correlation between the so-called high culture/mass culture opposites and the masculine/feminine binary categories, helps us conceptualize a paradigm in which the Mizrahi/body/feminine/low culture construct stands in contrast to the Ashkenazi-sabra/intellect /masculine/high culture compound. The ethnic and cultural discursive demarcations in Israel largely concurred with traditional gender dichotomies where “woman” relates to body and nature (e.g., birth and motherhood) and “man” to mind, abstraction, and civilization.40 In Bourekas Cinema and even in some later films that reference this genre, the Mizrahi has repeatedly been portrayed as overtly irrational and emotive (Sallah; The Quarry [1990]; Turn Left at the End of the World [2004]); shown in the context of the private sphere (Sallah; Bread [1986]; Lovesick on Nana Street [1995]; James’ Journey to Jerusalem [2003]; Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi [2003]); and has been marked by dependency (at times, on the Ashkenazi savior) and lack of agency, all of which are feminine ascriptions.41 To the extent that the Mizrahi man does act, it is plainly for his own or his family's parasitical benefit; never in those films does agency relate to the broader Zionist cause—when Sallah is granted agency, it is oftentimes related to “anti-Zionist” mischievous maneuvers, as when he disrupts the planting of trees for the Jewish National Fund. I will return to this theme in the following chapters, but for now it suffices to argue that, regardless of accentuated masculine physique and swagger some Mizrahi male characters possess in the annals of Israeli cinema, the paradigmatic feminization of the Mizrahi men of all generations in Bourekas Cinema and in films that followed amounts to endowing them with features antithetical to or disruptive of the Zionist ethos and master narrative. In turn, this rendering of Mizrahi men points to their displacement in the context of the Zionist enterprise and casts them as unworthy of that endeavor.42 Bourekas Cinema marvels at a utopian world where the Mizrahim are co-opted into mainstream modern-day society by denouncing their past. Paradoxically, the genre's focus on ethnicity and the playful rendition of Ashkenazi-Mizrahi relations amount to an elision of the ethnic problem. The formulaic narrative of Bourekas Cinema's social comedy calls for a happy ending not by offering the Mizrahi a cathartic new understanding Page 31 →but by demanding oblivion. Narratively, Sallah, Casa, and Charlie might have missed the train of modernity, but the younger generation is eager to be co-opted into the putatively progressive Israeli society. Since Sallah's son and daughter are marrying Ashkenazim, and the baby whom Casa godfathers is born to an Ashkenazi father and a Mizrahi mother, the world of enlightenment is awaiting these “Ashkenized” younger people. The films’ seemingly benign discourse clearly suggests that the social, economic, and political power disparity is not structural and, therefore, is bound to disappear in the next generation. The Bourekas narrative where Mizrahi children (acculturated and educated) are often pitted against their parents (premodern and diasporic) further vitiates the contentious problem of the ethnic gap by turning it into a generational issue. In conclusion, the Bourekas films do not attempt to construct ethnic differences along class lines. It is precisely the confluence of class and ethnicity that could have alluded to the shortcoming of the Zionist enterprise and to prolonged and deeply embedded disparities. Bourekas Cinema's stereotypical representation of the Mizrahi fails to explore the broader sociopolitical contexts that might explain its characters’ predicament. Bourekas Cinema is reactionary not only in turning a grave sociopolitical reality into a risible matter, but also in its affirmation of the social status quo. The Ashkenazi film establishment had, therefore, the advantage of propagating images of itself

and of the Mizrahi other in order to solidify and justify this power imbalance.43 The false sense of democratization that Bourekas comedies, perhaps all comedies, evoke is instrumental in maintaining the power disparity and in providing a safety valve by “letting the steam out.” This aspect of Bourekas Cinema manifests Paul de Man's (1979) formulation about the dissonance between the text's “message” and how the message is played out, or the disassociation between its “constative” and “performative” dimensions—“It seems that as soon as a text knows what it states, it can only act deceptively” (270). Arguably, it is precisely this seemingly innocuous, carnivalesque façade that equips the Bourekas film with its pernicious discursive power. Whereas in Bourekas Cinema the Mizrahi predicament is extant (e.g., the films accentuate poverty and crime) but the genre offers escapist solutions, the New Sensibility Cinema retreats into the lives of individual Ashkenazi (anti-) heroes to ponder their private distress, and thus the genre elides Israel's broader socioeconomic settings. On balance, though, the elision of the Mizrahi in the New Sensibility Cinema does not entail indifference to the Mizrahi in the extradiegetic reality. Conversely, Page 32 →the sensitive and withdrawn individuals of the New Sensibility Cinema abhor what they deem the vulgarization of Israeli society, and, often of their own volition, they become social deviants. Arguably, the characters’ need, and by implication, the filmmakers’ design, to distinguish themselves from the “masses” may be seen as a reaction to what was perceived as the increased visibility and clout of the Mizrahi community. As indicated earlier, in 1970 Mizrahim for the first time outnumbered their Ashkenazi fellows, and following the 1967 War, the Mizrahim enjoyed a limited, yet promising social mobility by virtue of the postwar economic boom and the employment of Palestinian laborers in menial jobs Mizrahim had previously occupied. The possibility of co-opting the Mizrahi community into “first Israel” was alarming to many who possessed greater cultural and economic capital.44 Furthermore, the Likud's victory in the 1977 elections—the first time a right-wing party in Israel seized power—has been attributed to a shift in the Mizrahi vote. Israeli filmmakers, who like their fellow writers and intellectuals have traditionally been supporters of centrist or leftist parties, despaired at this development and felt displaced and threatened by the “levantization” of Israel.45 The New Sensibility Cinema's above-mentioned reliance on prestigious European cinemas attests to its Western orientation. It is in this context that the highbrow/lowbrow and Ashkenazi/Mizrahi categories are conflated with yet another binary paradigm of West versus East. Some of the prominent directors of the New Sensibility Cinema took part in the emergence of a new trend—the Political Cinema/Palestinian Wave of the 1980s. The 1982 Lebanon War, which some dubbed the Vietnam War of Israel,46 and the Palestinian uprising (intifada) of 1987 forced the Palestinian issue into the world's political consciousness and made it blatantly clear that the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict lies not in a state of belligerency between Israel and its Arab neighbors but in the rising tensions between Israel and the Palestinians. The filmmakers of the 1980s responded then to this reality by making films that were critical of the right-wing Israeli government's handling of the political situation. With the emergence of Political Cinema, these new films, while lamenting the situation then, also actively promoted a peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis. Arguably, this political consciousness may also imply a growing social sensitivity, mainly in regard to the Mizrahi. Indeed, in films such as Beyond the Walls (me'aore ha-Soragim, 1984), Night Movie (Seret laila, 1986), The Smile of the Lamb (iyukh ha-gdi, 1985), and Cup Final (Gmar gaviya, 1991), it is the Mizrahi character who establishes the bond with the Palestinian, Page 33 →be it an innocent boy, a political prisoner (“terrorist”), an illegal juvenile worker, an old hermit who lives in a cave, or a PLO fighter. However, this seemingly enlightened leftist-humanistic stand is just as problematic in its treatment of the Mizrahi. Shohat (1989) has already pointed to these films’ failure to fully contextualize the relations between the Palestinian and the Mizrahi condition in what, in her view, amounts to a “structuring absence”: “this discourse compartmentalizes one problem as ‘political’ and ‘foreign’ and the other as ‘social’ and ‘internal’; that the two issues are implicated in each other is rarely acknowledged” (267). I will further this argument by suggesting that in the above-mentioned films, the Mizrahi overture toward the Palestinian is not based on the Mizrahi character's heightened political consciousness; rather, these films assume propinquity between the two people that is predicated on random shared customs (Arabic language is not one of them!) or simply on happenstance. The emphasis then on emotions, music, food, and the traditions of the Mizrahim, and not on their mental capabilities or moral and political convictions, reverberates

back from the Bourekas era. 1980s, the study of cinema in Israel engaged mostly in issues pertaining to authorship and aesthetics. By and large, Israeli publications such as Kolnowa and Close-Up featured the idols of European and American art cinema. Indeed, some of the filmmakers then were also film critics and film professors, creating an impervious system that left little room for competing critical and theoretical trends. Shohat's (1989) seminal work Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation marked a watershed in the academic discourse about Israeli films as she set out to investigate the relations between ideology and representation. In her book, Shohat posited that a parallel can be drawn between Ashkenazi-Mizrahi and Jewish-Arab divisions, where the latter in each pair is stereotyped, victimized, and marginalized both in cinematic discourses and without. The book was considered rather radical in Israel and stirred controversy even among intellectuals who identified with the political Left.47 This shift in Israeli film criticism to a focus on how aesthetics relates to ideology, discourse, and power has been Shohat's legacy in the field of Israeli film studies. I would argue though that whereas scholarship on Mizrahi literature and music, and to an extent, the large corpus of studies in sociology, political science, and history about ethnic divisions in Israel resulted in the formation of a Mizrahi ethnicity subfield within the respective disciplines,48 the study of Mizrahi cinema has not yet developed into a subfield in the study of Israeli film.49 THROUGH THE LATE

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Critiquing Mizrahi Representation in Israeli Films The “burden of representation” has been a common scholarly pursuit in reflecting on the art created by members of subaltern groups.50 This section seeks to shift the focus from the “burden of representation” to the closely related “burden of critiquing,” a metacritique that attends to the problematics of writing about and articulating Mizrahi ethnic cinema. My point of departure here is that critiquing is a form of representation/re-presentation; film reviews, public debates, and erudite scholarly critiques meld with the film text so that they are all implicated in what a film “says.” The connection between critiquing and representations is unmistakable (and clearly so in the chummy Israeli film milieu) if we adopt Stuart Hall's (1980) encoding/decoding media model. Circulation and reception are, indeed, “moments” of the production process in television and are reincorporated, via a number of skewed and structured “feedbacks,” into the production process itself. The consumption or reception of the television message is thus also itself a “moment” of the production process in its larger sense. (130)51 The interrelations between the modes of representing and critiquing come into sharp relief if we consider that Israeli filmmakers, mainly of the older generation, are commonly also film professors and critics. Further support for this claim about the relations between critiquing and representing is offered by the Bakhtinian speech act that articulates that the speaker (filmmaker in our case) assumes the language (e.g., discourses) of the interlocutor (the critic or the viewer) in “the process of…coming to know one's own horizon within someone else's horizon” (Mikhail Bakhtin 1981: 365).52 We may thereby think of the filmmaker not only as a “doer” whose camera passively registers the realities in front of it, but, just as important, as a conscious person whose mimetic work is also predicated on an epistemic distance from that which he or she creates—the distance of a critic. To wit, representing is a form of critiquing, often a reflection and commentary on the realities that engulf the filmmaker. The imbrication of the two burdens will guide my film analysis in the following chapters, but the specifics of the burden of critiquing need further elaboration. away from conceptualizations of the American New Criticism ilk, which maintain that the text alone is sufficient for the interpretive act. Still, to what extent should our reading of a Mizrahi film Page 35 →be informed by the filmmaker's ethnic origin and his or her extratextual position (as expressed in interviews, social activism, etc.) toward the Mizrahi-Ashkenazi issue? Without a doubt, this extrafilmic knowledge about the filmmaker did color my interviewees’ assessment of various Mizrahi films. At times this was puzzling; some of the films that were made by Mizrahi filmmakers with strong Mizrahi consciousness and that were highly praised THIS WORK STEERS

by my interviewees and in the press (e.g., Desperado Square by filmmaker Beni Torati) appear to reinforce negative representations of Mizrahim. When I broached this dilemma to some who have trumpeted the film, it became clear from their responses that, at least to an extent, their assessment would have been different, indeed critical, had the filmmaker been a non-Mizrahi who was indifferent to the “Mizrahi agenda.” (At times, film critics deflect a critique of a film representation, such as in Desperado Square, by stating that only a Mizrahi who is so intimately familiar with life in the periphery is capable of making such a film, which would render moot the question “What if a non-Mizrahi would have made this film.”) It is understandable that critics who promote the “Mizrahi agenda” would find an embedded value in the practice where members of the subaltern group (mainly highly socially conscious ones) engage in self-representation, but, as for assessing specific filmic representations, the dilemma of allowing our knowledge about a filmmaker's provenance and views to motivate what we claim the text says remains unresolved and is largely embedded in the act of critiquing. In writing about Mizrahi cinema, one clearly has to discern the characters’ ethnic belonging (or, alternatively, to point to certain ambiguities where ethnic distinctions no longer obtain). As we shall see, at times identifications of the characters’ ethnicity are tainted by one's stand on the Mizrahi dilemma. In numerous films, most noticeably in the popular Bourekas comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, the genre's paradigmatic conventions are constituted on the Ashkenazi/Mizrahi ethnic dyad and, therefore, these films easily betray the characters’ ethnic identities. Even with the absence of direct mentions, in most Bourekas films, an affluent, arrogant, restrained, and cerebral character signifies Ashkenazi, while a poor, uncouth, and emotive character is recognized as Mizrahi. The difficult task of identifying a Mizrahi character emerges when neither the genre nor the film narrative offers us this knowledge. In light of migration patterns of Jews in the past 2,600 years, and of intermarriages between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim today, it is often a futile effort to identify characters as Mizrahim when one applies criteria based on appearances and physiognomy. As for accent, with the exception of the Page 36 →elder Mizrahim, most Israeli Jews, regardless of origin, do not use the emphatic guttural consonants, which in the past used to mark a significant distinction between the Sephardi/Mizrahi and the Ashkenazi pronunciations. At one time, a person's last name would have been a viable indication of his or her origins. However, again, due to intermarriage (considering that a woman often takes her husband's last name) and the common practice among many Mizrahi and Ashkenazi new immigrants of Hebraizing their last names, people's names are hardly a measure we can rely on to identify Mizrahi characters on the screen. This problem of writing about ethnic belonging is compounded when consideration is given to cast. How should we treat an actor of one ethnic group (Ashkenazi) in the role of a character belonging to a different group (Mizrahi)? Failing to read a character's ethnic identity from the film diegesis, we may opt to rely on the actor's origins for our discussion of ethnic representation. By resorting to this option, we fall into the trap to which Shohat (1995) points in her discussion of racial/ethnic representations. Her criticism of casting choices that are based on “blood” definition53 rather than “look” may just as well apply to a critique that engages in the same practice. Indeed, an ethnic identification of a character that is based solely on the actor's provenance betrays a problematic essentialist stand. On the other end of the dilemmas associated with critiquing Mizrahi cinema are films that flaunt (rather than blur or elide) Mizrahi characterizations by making ethnic belonging explicit and, specifically, by playfully redeploying hackneyed stereotypes. Expectedly, the Bourekas provides a wellspring of stereotypical representations these contemporary films employ. In her discussion of the Bourekas, Dorit Naaman (2001) suggests that the genre's carnivalesque nature (à la Bakhtin), for example, the Mizrahi/Ashkenazi passing in casting, amounts to the Brechtian defamiliarization, and, thereby, the films are poised to invite a critique of existing views (43–46).54 This interpretive dilemma is even more confounding in regard to contemporary “post-Bourekas” films55 like Lovesick on Nana Street and James’ Journey to Jerusalem, where while the referencing of the Bourekas offers a hermeneutic framework, it is precisely the films’ play with well-known stereotypes that defies monosemic readings and facile articulations regarding the representation of the Mizrahi in contemporary Israeli films of this ilk.56 I will discuss Lovesick in great detail in chapters 2 and 3; in the following, I employ James’ Journey as a case study for the dilemmas of critiquing a film that renders hackneyed Mizrahi stereotypes playfully. Page 37 → In James’ Journey to Jerusalem (Mas ot James be-eretz ha-kodesh, Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, 2003), Israeli

society and, more specifically, the film's Mizrahi characters are revealed through the eyes of the “ultimate other”—James, a devout young Christian whose African community sends him on a pilgrimage mission to the Holy Land. Upon his arrival at the airport, he is mistaken for an illegal laborer seeking employment in Israel and is hauled off to jail. In a shady deal between the jailer and Shimi, a Mizrahi businessman who hires out illegal foreign workers, James is bailed out. But James is now at the mercy of Shimi, who keeps his passport; James has no choice but to join the herd of other laborers exploited by Shimi. One day James is sent to work at the house of Shimi's father—Sallah—and the two form such a close friendship that, to Shimi's chagrin, he finds it difficult to separate and manage the two men; consequently, Shimi reassigns James back to other clients. Sallah teaches James all the ins and outs of the Israeli version of “how to beat the system.” James, now more composed and pragmatic, successfully applies the lessons Sallah has taught him and turns out to be a successful and manipulative subcontractor who hires out his fellow immigrants illegally. James’ Journey is replete with citational references to the Bourekas’ Page 38 →formative film and its exemplar Sallah. Like the titular character of the latter, Sallah of James’ Journey is a scheming, dishonest, dependent, and lazy Mizrahi. For both Sallahs, their love of backgammon has its financial incentives and rewards as they beat and bankrupt their fellow players, often neighbors and friends. (Interestingly, whereas the “old” Sallah relies simply on his good luck to win the game, the present Sallah has to trust James’ [black?] magic throw to bring him, time and again, the best possible dice combination.) However, it is blatantly clear that the film is not meant to simply comply with the generic codes of the Bourekas but, in a jujitsu-like fashion, to use the genre against itself. As filmmaker Ra'anan Alexandrowicz put it,57 his Sallah becomes the lone figure who can point to Israel's social maladies. The film, thereby, becomes a stage to critically revisit those (and other) ailments—substandard work ethics, the exploitation of laborers, and widespread racism. Following this interpretive line, arguably, if Zionist ideology elevates work to the sphere of the sublime (e.g., “the religion of labor” and Max Nordau's “Jewry of Muscle”)58 and spurns hired labor, then in James’ Journey, the labor presented is one that engages Israelis’ exploitation of needy and desperate illegal laborers. The film accentuates Sallah's anti-Zionist features (just as Sallah treats its titular character) when in an exchange with James he tells him, “You should make the money and [let] other people do the work.” Sallah then personalizes the disparaged luftgeschäft59 moneymaker that Zionism associated with the diasporic Jew, whereas the black African James stands (at least initially) for the Zionist pioneer—Sallah says of him, “All he thinks about is Bible and work. He's a real Zionist. Like in the good old days.” Likewise, while one of Zionism's most prominent missions was the blossoming of the desert (allusions to which are found in Sallah), Sallah makes his own small desert /deserted yard bloom, but only by coercing James to steal flowers from a neighboring garden and plant them in his yard. Finally, if in Sallah the shikkun is the desired way of living for the ma abara residents and for people in the extrafilmic reality of that time, Alexandrowicz's Sallah resides in what resembles a ma abara—a term some of the film's characters actually use in reference to his place—and he refuses to move to a high-rise apartment complex (a modern-day shikkun). His love of his lot—a small oasis surrounded by these high-rise buildings—is construed in James’ Journey as a challenge to Israel's tasteless craze for urban life. Sallah's insistence on staying is all the more significant, considering the handsome compensation he would have received had he agreed to move out. Alexandrowicz conceives of this filmic play with the Bourekas ethnic Page 39 →characterizations as an artistic liberty that the passing of time affords him.60 According to Alexandrowicz, in this filmic fable he is not interested in the issue of empowered versus subaltern groups, or the ethnic dilemma per se. Instead, his film is a mockery of Zionism as a whole. Similarly, in his reference to casting choices, he ventures that filmmakers are now privileged for not having to be terribly concerned with “ethnic matching” (e.g., Palestinian Salim Daw plays the role of the Mizrahi Sallah).61 Returning then to our main inquiry in this section, we may wonder what to make of that filmic “freedom” where what initially and primarily seems to be a commentary on ethnicity becomes secondary to a performative play, as the case is in films such as James’ Journey, Lovesick on Nana Street, and Bayit. Are we then to censure the filmmakers for exploiting and, possibly, reinscribing ethnic stereotypes, or, alternatively, should we commend them for the liberty they take in revisiting trite stereotypes and charging them with new, even subversive, values? To wit, does the playful (re)enactment of stereotypical representations attest to acquiescence or subversion? For now, it is sufficient to mention that in chapter 3 I will lay in great detail the shortcomings of

the performative play as a subversive discourse in Mizrahi films and will point to its ultimate implosion precisely in those films that initially render ethnic identities and spaces porous, conjectural, and indeterminate. It is possible that not all sympathetic and even positive representations of the subaltern Mizrahi are called for. But can we also argue that not all unsympathetic representations/stereotypes of the Mizrahi should be avoided? Put differently, should critics who are sensitive to the ethnic dilemma in Israel unequivocally eschew any negative representation of the Mizrahi, a position, it seems, Iris Mizrahi (2004) takes in her analysis of contemporary Israeli films? Mizrahi critiques the stereotypical oversexed Mizrahi male in Joseph Cedar's Campfire, the criminal Mizrahim in Gidi Dar's Ushpizin, and the folkloristic portrayal of Mizrahi communities in Avi Nesher's Turn Left at the End of the World (2004). I will elaborate on Nesher's film in chapters 3 and 4, but a brief discussion of the two other films mentioned here will engage the dilemmas of critiquing negative representations. The main character in Ushpizin (ha-Ushpizin, Gidi Dar, 2004) is Moshe, a “born-again” Jew (one who has returned to the Jewish religious fold); after spending years in prison, he is now making an Orthodox Jewish home for himself and his wife but can barely provide for this childless family. The righteous path he is now seeking is put to a test when two fugitives, one of them a longtime friend, pay a surprise visit to him Page 40 →during the Sukkot holiday. How are we to treat the film's employment of these three (apparently) Mizrahi criminals, considering that in reality the large majority of the Jewish prison population indeed consists of Mizrahim? Does Ushpizin malevolently perpetuate cinematic stereotypes, as Iris Mizrahi implies, or does it mirror the extrafilmic world innocuously? Furthermore, surely a film that exposes certain social maladies (in this case, Mizrahi criminals) can be read as a critique and challenge to given conditions rather than merely as a reiteration of those disturbing realities. Similarly, should we, as critics, be “forgiving” of Assi Dayan's scathing and demeaning portrayal of Mizrahi characters in Life According to Agfa (ha-ayim al-pi Agfa, 1992) and An Electric Blanket Named Moshe (Smikha ashmalit u-shma Moshe, 1994), considering that the extremity and playfulness in which stereotypes are cast here can be read not as mirroring certain realities but as a stratagem to reflect on them?62 Indeed, the film is designed to shamelessly slay some of Israel's “sacred cows” (e.g., the Israel Defense Forces [IDF]). Despite the emphatic stereotypical representation of Mizrahim in these films, they defy a facile rebuke. Taken together, Life According to Agfa and An Electric Blanket do not single out Mizrahim. It is Israeli society's liberal artists, Arabs, Mizrahim, and others who are doomed in Agfa's apocalyptic vision and killing rampage in the bar where most of the film is set. Furthermore, as Moshe Zimerman (2007: 69) observes, the only ones who dodge the morbid devastation at the end of Life According to Agfa are the Israeli soldier perpetrators and some members of the Ashkenazi elite. Within the broader context of the film, the elimination of the disenfranchised groups and the survival of those in control can be read metaphorically as the usurpation of power by Israeli elite; this is hardly a cinematic statement that is meant to disparage the Mizrahi. To conclude this discussion about the valence of negative ethnic stereotyping, we now turn to Joseph Cedar's Campfire (Medurat ha-shevet, 2004). The film is set on the eve of Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula that began in 1979. It features forty-two-year-old widow Rahel—a political and religious conservative—and her two daughters Esti and Tami. This Ashkenazi family lives in Jerusalem, but, motivated by ideological and personal inclinations, Rahel decides they should move to a new Jewish settlement in the West Bank. However, Esti's blatant disapproval of the possible move and the relationship Rahel engages in with a caring and sensitive Mizrahi man prove to have more sway, and she eventually declines the invitation of the new settlers to join them. Conspicuous Page 41 →in this otherwise slow-paced film inhabited by mostly sympathetic characters is a harsh scene in which the fifteen-year-old daughter Tami is sexually assaulted by a young man while his friends stand by. In a subsequent scene, a fellow in her religious youth movement intimates to Tami that rumors have it she dallied with a young man (her attacker). Sensing that he has some leverage now, this fellow starts molesting Tami before she shakes him off contemptuously. For the sake of the discussion here I will momentarily accept Iris Mizrahi's (2004) highly doubtful premise that the first attacker is a Mizrahi.63 By her own admission, the film attempts to attenuate its racist stance by also including negative Ashkenazi characters and a redeeming Mizrahi fellow, the one who enchants Rahel. Along

these lines, we may claim that the film counterposes a (seemingly) Mizrahi assaulter/rapist with an (undoubtedly) Ashkenazi molester, and that, therefore, one should temper a reproach of the putatively lopsided approach to ethnic representations in Campfire. If, indeed, we find these heterogeneous characterizations along both sides of the ethnic division, does Campfire not exhibit what we often wish all films would pursue, namely, the normalizing of the other by showing the group's wide range of characteristics, even if some are “negative”? “The mark of the plural”64 and the violation of “the dignity of the specific”65 where differences among and within various others collapse are precisely a target of postcolonial literary and film critique.66 Arguably then, Campfire should be applauded for casting a spectrum of Mizrahi characters—loving and coldhearted perpetrators, hardworking people and idlers, old and young—rather than resorting to a synecdochic and procrustean representation of the Mizrahi. Returning to Mizrahi's (2004) assumption about the ethnic identity of the first attacker, the dynamics we, as critics, engage in this type of interpretive laxness are rather intriguing. In our critique of the works we consider to be ethnically offensive and problematic, we reprove a film for representations that derive from certain assumptions about ethnic identities, cultures, and customs. But we may fall into the same trap we are warning against; we maintain the problematic causal link between identity and representation, only reversed. Put differently, if filmmakers are criticized for the fact that in their representations they infer from “Mizrahi” certain (stereotypical) features and characterizations, our critical lapse is to infer ethnic origins based on representations. In our commitment to social causes and justice and our proclivity to critique positions that may differ from ours, at least at times (and leaving aside for a moment the issue of polysemic readings), we impose on the text that Page 42 →which it is not. Clearly, critics can attenuate this problem by exploring trends and clusters of films rather than relying on single films in their analysis. Specifically, in the context of the portrayal of minority groups on the screen, one should be attentive to repeated decontextualization, (dis)associations, and elisions in the films portraying these groups. The purpose of my analysis here then is didactic rather than interpretive. In various sections in this work I allude to film critiques that are determined more by their writers’ agenda than by the specifics of the film. My attention to “misreading” of a filmic text is not meant to challenge the merits of polysemic readings; I wish, instead, to shift our focus from the film to the interpreter and, more important, to the public ambience and discourses that permeate these critiques. If, indeed, as we proposed earlier, stereotypes tell us not about the stereotyped individual or group, but about the stereotyper (e.g., the representer's fears, dilemmas, and desires), then we should also venture that, to an extent, the critique of representations in cinema tells us as much about the critics’ and the public's sensibilities, desires, and fears as about the films they examine. This metacritique will guide my analysis of the Mizrahi space in chapter 3 and of several Mizrahi protest films in chapter 4, my address of Ronit Elkabetz's role as a director and actress in To Take a Wife, which I discuss in the context of the Mizrahi woman in chapter 5, and my examination of the “Arab-Jew” construction in the next chapter.

NOTES 1. See, for example, Oz Almog's discussion of “The Arab as Hebrew” and “The Arab as a Model for the New Jew” (2000: 185–88). Clearly, the pioneers’ desire to “go native” and the mimicry of the indigenous population it involved were spurred more by the urge to relive what was viewed as the biblical Hebrews’ history and thus to vindicate their historical claim to the land than merely by fascination with the local population and the Oriental space. For the enchantment with the East in Hebrew literature, see Yaron Peleg's Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (2005). Peleg focuses on the Hebrew Orientalism literary trend (1900–1930) to reveal how writers like Moshe Smilansky expressed genuine interest in and respect for (rather than simply a fantasmatic desire) the oriental space and its people and how they deployed the Orient “as a real transformative power” (99) in the creation of the New Jew. 2. Between 1948 and 1951, Israel's population more than doubled, predominantly due to immigration waves. In the early 1970s, first-generation immigrants constituted the majority of Israel's Jewish population. See Eliezer Ben-Rafael (1982: 3). 3. “New Mizrahim” is a designation coined by Sami Shalom Chetrit (2004a: 276–97; 2010: 202–9). In his works, the “new Mizrahim” are mostly second-generation Page 43 →immigrants from the Arab/Muslim Middle East. Many of the “new Mizrahim” have been, at some point or another, members of the Mizrahi

Democratic Rainbow. 4. See Chetrit (2010: 18). 5. See, for example, Joseph Massad's “Zionism's Internal Others: Israel and the Oriental Jews” (1996). After attending to the Ashkenazi power over the Palestinian Oriental Jews and African and Asian Jews, Massad concludes his essay with, “It is in this context that the South African apartheid analogy, made by many, can be appropriately applied, mutatis mutandis, to Israel” (65). 6. See a detailed account of the exploitation of Yemenite Jews, including a study of the Zionist press at that period, in Chetrit (2010, particularly 26–29). The Yemenite Jews were considered fit for menial and agricultural labor that the Ashkenazi pioneers, despite their lofty ideology, deemed either degrading or too arduous. Similarly, in The Arab Jews, Yehouda Shenhav (2006: 92–97) attends to the emissary Zionist work in 1910 in Yemen and the goal of identifying able bodies who would withstand the exacting task of farming the arid land of Palestine. The role and operations of Zionist emissaries in Iraq had already been discussed in 1986 in Abbas Shiblak's The Lure of Zion (1986), specifically, in chapters 2 and 3. 7. Zionist agents in Iraq were sentenced to death by hanging for their alleged involvement in throwing grenades and planting bombs in Jewish public places, including a synagogue, and causing the death of a Jewish mother and daughter. The official Zionist version denies any link to these attacks on Jews. However, a suspicion that Zionist agents were indeed responsible for these attacks has been circulating for years. Proponents of this allegation claim that these acts were carried out to instill fear among members of the Jewish community and to hasten them to leave Iraq. Recent studies, including Shenhav's (2003), can neither aver nor dismiss this accusation. 8. See Haim Malka's study (in Chetrit 2010: 36–37) of the immigration selection policy regarding North African Jews. Likewise, Haggai Ram's Iranophopia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession (2009) discusses “the strict ‘selection’ policy” giving preference to “productive elements”—healthy, wealthy, professional, and strong Iranian-Jews as candidates for immigration to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s (114). 9. See the discussion in Ella Shohat's (1988) subsection “‘Hebrew Work’: Myth and Reality” (13–16). 10. For a discussion of the co-option/assimilationist model and its critique, see Sammy Smooha (2004). 11. See Chetrit's (for example, 2010: 111, 124–25) discussion of the Israeli government's brutal treatment of past Mizrahi upheavals and its undermining of Mizrahi attempts to exert political power. 12. See, for example, Smooha's (1978) references to Ben-Gurion, who stated, “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant” (88). Similar references and arguments can also be found in Aharon Yitzhaki (2003, specifically, chapters 3 and 6), Sami Shalom Chetrit (2004a; 2010, mainly chapters 1 and 2), and Aziza Khazzoom's (2008) rendering of the fear of Levantization as a prime force in what has transpired as discrimination. Clearly, the fear of the Orient and Levantization goes beyond the anxiety about the contamination of Zionism's putatively Western outlook. As Gil Hochberg (2007) observes astutely “The Page 44 →fear of the Orient, as captured in various racist expressions of the Zionist founders, is not only about ‘influence.’ More accurately, it is a fear of identification: the fear of being identified once again with the Orient, the Arab, Asia” (13). 13. See discussion of the “hybridization and purification” of the Mizrahi in chapter 3. 14. “A Yemenite Jew is first and foremost a Jew, and we want to turn him, as much as possible and as quickly as possible, from a Yemenite into a Jew” (quoted in Chetrit 2010: 36). 15. The language-cultural alienation Mizrahi writers experienced after their immigration to Israel is also discussed in Ammiel Alcalay's After Jews and Arabs (1993: 238–47) and in Reuven Snir's “‘Till Spring Comes’: Arabic and Hebrew Literary Debates among Iraqi-Jews in Israel (1950–2000)” (2006). This is also the subject of the documentary Forget Baghdad (2002) by the Iraqi-Swiss filmmaker Samir. 16. Filmmaker Rahel Leah Jones captured astutely this dynamic of the European Ashkenazi contact with the “Orient” in the title of her talk in the conference “The Ashkenazim” (Beit Berl College, June 3, 2004)—“From the Other of Europe to the Europe of the Other.” 17. The quote is from an Israeli history book cited in Henriette Dahan-Kalev's You're So Pretty—You Don't Look Moroccan (2001: 4) where the author reminisces on the oppression she suffered due to her Moroccan background. 18. See, for example, Elihu Katz's The Beracha Report (1999: 82). 19. See, for example, Almog's The Sabra (2000). See also the opening of Moshe Shamir's novel With His Own Hands (1970).

20. See Virginia Domínguez (1989), Sammy Smooha (1978), Daniel Elazar (1989), Lesley Hazleton (1977), Ella Shohat (1988, 1989/2010, 1999b, 2001b), and Eliezer Ben-Rafael (1982). 21. See, for example, one of Sammy Smooha's earlier studies (1978), Eliezer Ben-Rafael (1982), and Efraim Ben-Zadok (1993). 22. Israel's Channel 2's TV special Don't Call Me Black! (Ron Kahlili and Nitzan Gil'adi, 2008), with host Immanuel Rosen, starts off with the premise that the topic of Mizrahiness, let alone the putative ethnic gaps, is a thing of the past. Yet the program reveals that discrimination and stereotyping are still rampant on both institutional and individual levels. 23. See, for example, Sami Shalom Chetrit (2010: 154–55) and Nissim Rejwan (1998: 141–50). 24. In Israel, judges are appointed, not elected. The Israeli parliament, whose members are elected by the public, is very likely the only prominent state institution where Mizrahim are represented in nearly proportional numbers. 25. See Shlomo Swirski (1989: 23–24) for his discussion of the slowing down of the increasing rate of intermarriage between 1952 and 1975 and of the increasing rate of marriage between members of various Oriental/Mizrahi groups, a trend also noticeable in regard to intra-Ashkenazi (endogamous) marriages. Importantly, Swirski's key argument is that the very focus on intermarriage is encoded in a racist stand whereby it is “hoped” that Ashkenazi-Mizrahi intermarriages may save the Mizrahim from their inferiority and deficiency. For more recent studies on endogamous marriage Page 45 →patterns see Barbara S. Okun (2001) and Sammy Smooha (2004: 58). Despite Okun's (2001) overall suggestion that there has been a “weakening of the hierarchal nature of social structure with regard to ethnicity” (51), her findings indicate that even as ethnic endogamy has been declining, “bloc” marriages within the Mizrahi community (e.g., marriage between a man of Iraqi descent and a woman of a Moroccan one) have been increasing. Arguably, the implication of Okun's study is that there is a growing sense of a Mizrahi collective or bloc whereby the importance of intraethnic divisions (again, Iraqis versus Moroccans) is decreasing. In turn, this might explain the peculiar phenomenon where Israeli cinema has hardly attended to intraethnic divisions within the Mizrahi collective. 26. Although this book was originally published in 1981, Swirski's more recent publications and activist work in the field of education attest to his adherence to the critical position quoted here. 27. For the disproportionately high percentage of Mizrahi residents in development towns and its detrimental implications, see Swirski (1989, particularly chapter 3), Ben-Zadok (1993, chapter 4), and Smooha (2004: 57–58). 28. Eli Avraham's studies to which I refer here engage mostly the geographical (rather than strictly the ethnic) periphery. However, his findings are applicable to the study of Mizrahim for the following reasons: As indicated above, the periphery, at least prior to the 1990s’ immigration from the FSU, has traditionally been populated by Mizrahim. Also, Avraham indeed makes constant references to the Mizrahi issue. Even when the Mizrahi is not explicitly mentioned, the references to the overlap between the geographical and socioeconomic margins (see 2000: 16) and between Israel's geographical center and the dominant ideology (2003: 96–98) suggest that his findings and critique engage societal aspects pertaining to the conflation of geography, class, and ethnicity. 29. See Avraham (2003: 101). 30. For Homi Bhabha (1994c), mimicry embeds the colonial's (hegemonic group) ambivalent construction of the other—the “discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference…[and] is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy” (86). 31. See Shohat (1989: 119–20). 32. Although “Bourekas” and “Personal Cinema” refer to films made during a specific time-period and, therefore, should be referred to as “cycles,” I will employ “genre/s” when addressing them since the latter has far more currency in academic writing about these groups of films. 33. This cinematic genre is referred to by a variety of names. In her book on Israeli cinema, Ella Shohat (1989) employs the term “Personal Cinema.” Others have referred to it as “The Israeli New Wave” and “The Cinema of the Stranger and the Deviant” (Nurith Gertz 1993). Judd Ne'eman's (1999) coinage of “New Sensibility Cinema” has become most common in reference to this genre and is used as the title of a book by Ariel Schweitzer (1997/2003).

34. See “We Were Together in the Army” (a symposium on Personal Cinema), in Kolnowa (Summer 1981: 6–16). Also, see Shohat (1989/2010: chapter 4).Page 46 → 35. For a detailed discussion of the Mizrahi substandard language in the Bourekas, see Rami Kimchi's “The Unclosing Gap: The Language Subversion of Charlie and a Half” (2010). 36. See Simon Frith's (1996: 124) observation about the association of fun with the body and lowbrow culture, and the serious and cerebral with “high culture.” 37. See, for example, Nira Yuval-Davis's Gender and Nation (1997) and, specifically, her discussions of wars and eugenic and Malthusian discourses in chapter 2. Also, see Ella Shohat (1989, 1993) for her discussion of the cinematic exploitative construction of women as national allegories. 38. See, specifically, Lesley Hazleton's (1977) chapters 3 (“The Cult of Fertility”) and 4 (“Zionism and Manhood”). For more on the feminization of the land in Zionist discourse, see Sheila Hannah Katz (1996). 39. For the general framework regarding the gendering of the East/West dyad see Ella Shohat (2000a) and Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994). Their analyses pertain to the feminization of the Orient in imperial and colonial texts. See Nurith Gertz (2004) for her discussion of the feminization of the other—Holocaust survivors and Arabs—in Israeli literature and cinema. Also, see Shohat (1993) for a discussion of the construction of the diasporic (emasculated) Jew in binary terms opposite to those of the (masculinized) sabra. In “The Mizrahi Space” (chapter 3), I will expand on the construction of a feminine space for the Mizrahi in contemporary cinema. 40. In their discussion of the historical trajectories of the ethnic discourse in the pre-State era, Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled (2002) reveal how, within the Ashkenazi settlement narrative, the Yemenite Jew was described as “natural,” whereas the Ashkenazi was perceived as “idealistic” and “civilized” (76). 41. For a discussion on the casting of the Mizrahi as a passive, dependent, and needy figure awaiting his reshaping and salvage, see Shohat (1988, 1993, 1999b, 2001b). 42. As implied earlier, the Zionist narrative renders a teleological, male-oriented tale of fulfillment with the creation of the Jewish state as its climax. If we think of the Zionist narrative in terms of a thespian tale, the connection between the Mizrahi man's feminization and his anti-Zionist and antiproductive characteristics (e.g., in this context, his threatening disruption to the Zionist effort/narrative) goes further when we recall the feminist suggestion about the association of femininity with certain antinarrative qualities in cinema and television. For example, Laura Mulvey (1975) and Tania Modleski (1979, specifically 17–18) discuss, respectively, the narratively disruptive presence and anticlimactic (offering a number of “mini-climaxes” [17], instead of one “big bang”) qualities of women in mainstream classical film and television soap operas. For the former, the connection between narrative structure and gender/sexuality has to do with the eroticization and fragmentation of the female body (e.g., close-ups that interrupt the cinematic spatial flow) whereby the film's linear progression is suspended, and for Modleski, this connection relates to the unique structure of soap opera, which emulates female sexuality in, inter alia, offering multiple mini-climaxes. 43. In his analysis of Sallah, Kimchi (2011) reveals that despite the film's seemingly anarchistic and irreverent look at power holders, it nonetheless serves the elites and their entitlement to hold onto power.Page 47 → 44. The term “first Israel” refers to the upper middle class, which has enjoyed high financial and cultural status, while “second Israel” is often a reference to the Mizrahi community in general. 45. See Shohat (1989: 207–9). Also, see Elazar's (1989, mainly 5–7) discussion of the Israeli Left's abhorrence of what it understood to be the Levantization of Israel as reflected in the results of the 1977 election that brought the Likud to power. The victory was attributed to the sweeping Mizrahi support of Menahem Begin's right-wing party. 46. Despite the Israeli military might in combatting relatively poorly equipped and vastly outnumbered PLO fighters, the 1982 Lebanon War lasted months beyond the promised sweeping forty-eight-hour operation, and the Israeli casualties in this war were unpredictably high. It is during this war that a massacre in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila took place; Israel was complicit. An ensuing mass demonstration against the war in Tel Aviv forced the demotion of then minister of defense Ariel Sharon. 47. For more on the responses to her book, see “There Was No Space for This Discourse” (Shohat 2001c). The media's response in Israel—belittling Shohat and her work—is also captured in the film Forget Baghdad (2002), which was made by the Iraqi-Swiss filmmaker Samir. 48. For an overview of the parameters of the Mizrahi scholarly discourse today in cultural studies see

Moshe Behar's (2008) “Mizrahim, Abstracted: Action, Reflection, and the Academization of the Mizrahi Cause.” 49. Scholarship in English whose focus is the Mizrahi in contemporary Israeli cinema includes “Shhur: The Orient Within”—chapter 4 in Yosefa Loshitzky's Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (2001); “The Invention of Mizrahi Masculinity”—chapter 3 in Raz Yosef's Beyond Flesh (2004)—and his article “Restaging the Primal Scene of Loss” (2006); Dorit Naaman's “Orientalism as Alterity in Israeli Cinema” (2001); Peleg's “From Black to White: Changing Images of Mizrahim in Israeli Cinema” (2008a); and Yaron Shemer's “Victimhood, Protest, and Agency in Contemporary Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) Films in Israel” (2007), “Trajectories of Mizrahi Cinema” (2011) and “The Burden of Self-Representation: Reflections on Shur and Its Legacy for Contemporary Mizrahi Films in Israel” (2012). There have been additional works on this topic in Hebrew, and I will attend to them in the course of this study. 50. See Kobena Mercer (1990a, 1990b). 51. In his encoding/decoding model, Hall (1980) strives to challenge the Marxist rendering of the relations between base and superstructure by asserting that culture not only is a by-product of economic relations but may in turn affect the base. 52. In the context of cinematic enunciation via a set of interpretable codes, Francesco Casetti's pithy articulation captures astutely the filmic applicability of the Bakhtinian theory of speech—“[When] the film institutes its own destination, it is not expecting to encounter an absolute stranger” (1998: 41). 53. Shohat addresses an issue tangential to my discussion here, namely, the casting choices when the actor is of mixed racial origins. “Given the ‘blood’ definition of ‘black’ versus ‘white’ in Euro-American racist discourse, one drop of black blood was sufficient to disqualify an actress like Horne [a mulatta] from representing white women” (1995: 171).Page 48 → 54. Naaman's (2001) reference here is to what she considers late Bourekas films. 55. See discussion in my “Trajectories of Mizrahi Cinema” (2011). I use the term “post-Bourekas” after Kimchi's (2008) appellation in reference to contemporary Israeli films’ play with and citationality of the Bourekas. 56. Both Savi Gavison (interview, June 9, 2005, and phone interview, July 3, 2004) and Ra'anan Alexandrowicz (interview, June 8, 2005), respectively the filmmakers of Lovesick and James’ Journey, underscored in our conversations the centrality of the dialogue their films have with the Bourekas. 57. Interview, June 8, 2005. 58. Max Nordau was a prominent Zionist figure and a close associate of Theodor Herzl. His “Jewry of Muscle” (“Muskeljudentum,” 1903/2011) is a well-known paean for the working body in early Zionist writing. 59. Literally, “air business,” but here it stands for a nontoiling person or enterprise. 60. Interview, June 8, 2005. 61. Unlike other films I will discuss in this work, mainly in chapter 5, where I suggest that certain filmmakers intended to proffer a political statement by “miscasting” a Palestinian actor in a Mizrahi role, Alexandrowicz indicated in our interview that he chose Daw because he was simply the right actor for the role of Sallah. 62. The same argument can be made about Columbian Love (Shay Kanot, 2003). In this comedy, the stereotypical representation of a Mizrahi patriarch (along with the stereotypical representation of an Ashkenazi couple) is pushed to such an extreme that the film's treatment of ethnicities is best read as a playful reenactment of the Bourekas genre. 63. Neither the accent and look of the attacker nor the actor's last name (Zehavi) suggests that he is a Mizrahi. 64. Albert Memmi (1965/1991: 85). 65. Ernesto Laclau, in Angela McRobbie (1992: 725). 66. See Unthinking Eurocentrism where Shohat and Stam (1994: 199) demonstrate how heterogeneity and nuances among colonized people collapse in their depiction by the hegemonic group.

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TWO The Cinematic Construction of Mizrahi Identity What is the nature of this “profound research” which drives the new forms of visual and cinematic representation? Is it only a matter of unearthing that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden continuities it suppressed? Or is a quite different practice entailed—not the rediscovery but the production of identity. Not the identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past? STUART HALL1

Culture and Identity: Beyond the Essentialist/Constructionist Dyad Postcolonial and feminist scholars have shown us that the terms of the essentialist/constructionist dyad need to be understood within specific historical contexts and that, by attending to the multifaceted and conjectural nature of each term, the putative binary opposition between essentialist and constructivist stands loses its sway;2 in Diana Fuss's (1989) articulation, “essentialism subtends the very idea of constructionism” (5). For these scholars, when confronted with bifurcating formulations, one should inquire why they are employed, what values are attached to them, and what their impacts are.3 In the binary essentialism versus constructivism rendering, a constructivist position is thought to prompt a definition of identity as a social construct predicated on values, norms, consciousness, and choice, whereas an essentialist stance on identity would focus Page 50 →on ethnic/racial origins and on biologism. In the context of the Mizrahi film, constructivist positions often accentuate a postmodern performative play on identities4 to cast them as porous, fluid, and interchangeable with those of other ethnic groups. To accomplish that, these films often elide the Mizrahi past in the Arab/Muslim world as well as the immigration to Israel as they are more engaged in rhizomic relations (à la Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) rather than in historical and cultural roots. Conversely, an essentialist position in Mizrahi cinema would underline the provenance of a film's characters, actors, and director, and the narratives would accentuate ethnic origins. Indeed, the extrafilmic discourse about Mizrahiness, such as in film reviews and scholarly critiques, often oscillates between those two positions. As we have seen, Mizrahiness was formed in Israel by the government administration that coined “ adot ha-Mizra” (again, a term that connotes plurality and dispersion and emphasizes provenance). Later on, “Mizrahi” has become a self-designated identity appellation that implies some cohesion and a sense of belonging, and is meant to accentuate shared experiences and traditions, and, in the case of the “new Mizrahim,” even common sociopolitical sensibilities and an emerging Mizrahi consciousness. It is clear then that in the Mizrahi case, even the identity marker defies unequivocal articulations of Mizrahi identity as predicated solely either on this collective's origins in the Arab/Muslim world or on an invented construct. Culture, as I choose to conceptualize it, provides us with a further challenge to the dichotomous distinctions between “essentialism” or “biologism,” on the one hand, and “constructivism” or “performance of identity,” on the other. I employ an open and inclusive definition of culture precisely in order to avoid what Aleksandra Ålund (1995) deems the dangerous trend of the “culturalisation of social disparities” (317) or the “representing [of] ethnic relations exclusively in terms of culture” (315).5 But instead of appending or subordinating culture to social struggle as Ålund might have it, I heed her cautionary note by broadening what is signified under “culture”; throughout this work, “cultural” will be contextualized by analyzing its socioeconomic, political, and ethnic dimensions. This inclusive rendering of culture as a lived experience concurs with Stuart Hall's (1990: 226–27) formulation of cultural identities; once we avoid essentialist definitions of culture, we may attend to its fluid and evolving nature while still asserting some continuity, relative stability, and intraethnic commonalities. My analysis here, and particularly its foregrounding of the Arab-Jew, will reveal the complex forces Page 51 →that are interwoven into the intricate tapestry in the formation of collective cultural identities in Mizrahi cinema. Similarly to Hall's above-mentioned assertion, Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav (2003, 2006) eschews notions of Mizrahiness as a stable definition/identity, a position stemming from the belief that Mizrahim, or for that

matter, people of any ethnic group, have innate qualities they all share. Shenhav is equally dismissive of the opposite approach for its suggestion that Mizrahiness is strictly an imagined social construct, a position that ignores the group's shared culture and its historical and experiential commonalities.6 The essentialist approach foists on the Mizrahim cultural and ahistorical identity and is oblivious to a whole set of intra-group differences, geographical spaces and historical chronologies that defy the unitary category of identity. On the other hand, the constructivist approach blatantly ignores the specific histories of the Arab-Jews and foists on them total Israelization…. The first misses out on the [contemporary] postcolonial reality in Israel and the second on the colonial history. (2003: 53) These cultural-historical features and the shared experiences of the Arab-Jews before, upon, and following the immigration to Israel include, inter alia, cohabitation with non-Jewish Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, life in the ma abara, forced settlement in development towns, limited work opportunities, and subsequent protests.7

The Reconstruction of the Past The Dual Valence of Arab-Jewish Identity The following focuses on Mizrahi films that are tuned to the cultural modalities of the hyphenated “Arab-Jew” identity, and specifically in the realms of heritage, shared experiences, and language.8 In An Accented Cinema (2001), Hamid Naficy addresses the “politics of the hyphen” to assess the problematics of the employment of the hyphen to construct ethnic identities. Naficy alludes to both the liberating and constraining qualities of constructed hyphenated identities. I am employing here the “politics of the hyphen” to articulate what I would term the “dual valence” of the hyphen as both a connector and separator of the identities bracketing it. Oftentimes, even within a single film, one can encounter Page 52 →ambivalence about these two vectors of the hyphen. My intent, then, is not to reduce or fix the complex, multilayered, and fluid nature of identity construction into binary opposites, namely, to ossify the two terms of the hyphen—Arab and Jew—but, rather, to identify the tensions and fissures involved in the cinematic treatment of that hyphenated Arab-Jewish identity. Two methodological notes are called for to explicate my references to “Arab-Jew” in this chapter. The first clarification pertains to the comment made in the introduction that not all Mizrahim are of Arab origin. My usage of “Arab-Jew” in this work, then, is meant not as a reference to an ontological reality but as a metonymic term signifying “Mizrahi” in general. Second, the term is rarely employed in contemporary Mizrahi cinema. And yet, my rationale for employing and situating this compound at the center of my analysis is that, as we shall see, the films’ characters and diegetic spaces as well as the discourse about Mizrahi cinema often allude to it. Furthermore, in accordance with Naficy's (2001) observation that, for example, in the American context, “identity cinema's adoption of the hyphen is seen as a marker of resistance to the homogenizing and the hegemonizing power of the American melting pot ideology” (15), we may maintain that the coinage “Arab-Jew” is meant by its users not only as an identity marker, but for the challenge it poses to the formulation of “Israeliness” in terms of Ashkenazi habitus only9 or, alternatively, to the putatively inclusive Israeli pastiche; put differently, the term, as used by the “new Mizrahim,” is designed to subvert and eschew the tenets of Ashkenazi Zionism.10 In his film We Are All Arab Jews in Israel (1977), Igaal Niddam not only unabashedly juxtaposed “Arab” with “Jew” but also dared to link the predicament of the two ostracized and oppressed groups of Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews (a topic to which I will return in great detail in chapter 5). The responses to the film reflected its incendiary power and the unease with which it was received.11 Since Zionism prescribes a national movement that advocates a homeland in Palestine/Israel for the Jewish people, for most Israelis, Ashkenazim as well as Mizrahim, the appending of “Arab” to the ethnic-cultural definition of half of Israel's Jewish population seems to clash with its raison d'être. Likewise, if, as many believe, Israel's very existence has been in peril due to the constant threat imposed on it by its Arab enemies from inside and without, the very usage of this coined phrase would smack of treason.12 The discursive and political motivation for shunning the term “Arab-Jew” becomes evident if one considers that similarly conjoined terms, such as “American-Jew” Page 53 →and “European-Jew,”

have never been challenged. Nearly thirty years after the release of We Are All Arab Jews in Israel, a special screening of the film in Tel Aviv in May 2002 was meant, among other things, to revisit these questions and to examine the validity and relevance of “Arab-Jewishness.”13 Salvage Cinema We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left. PIERRE NORA14

As I have implied earlier, the Mizrahi/Arab-Jew had to be, ultimately, averse to Arabness in order to belong and pass the Zionist crucible; the Arab-Jews had to flaunt their loyalty to Israel at the price of shedding their Arab cultural traditions and language heritage.15 Considering the scarcity of Arab culture in Jewish Israel during the years in which second-generation immigrant Mizrahi filmmakers forged their identity and the uneasiness with which their immigrant parents perceived their Arab past, it is not surprising that a large number of those contemporary fiction and documentary filmmakers must often pry into their families’ pasts in the Arab and Muslim world to find traces of their heritage there. Naficy's (2001: 19) coinage of “salvage filmmaking”—“making films that serve to preserve and recover cultural and ethnic heritage”—accurately captures this contemporary trend in Mizrahi cinema. In Mizrahi films of the last two decades, the effort to salvage the past often takes a literal form.Taqasim16 (Duki Dror, 1991) follows violinist Felix Mizrahi on a journey from Israel to his place of birth, Egypt, to trace musical recordings of his deceased, once-renowned, brother. These recordings are unavailable in Israel, and although he is told they are kept in the Egyptian Radio archives, Mizrahi returns from his journey empty-handed. The documentary Baghdad Bandstand (Chalrie Baghdad, Eyal Halfon, 2003), provides a sentimental look at the Israel Broadcasting Authority's (IBA) orchestra, one of the only venues for Arab-Jewish music until the orchestra was dismantled in the 1980s. In a somewhat crude cinematic symbolism, the filmmaker cuts away several times during the course of the film to a clock whose hands are rapidly moving backward. (The overall nostalgic filmmaking approach is unmistakable if we consider this film's thematic and formal affinity to The Buena Vista Social Club, Wim Wenders's 1999 film about a Cuban band hitherto mostly unknown in the rest of the world.) The sense that these musicians, now in their eighties, and their music are doomed to oblivion permeates the pivotal Page 54 →event around which the film is structured—the reassembly of the band for one performance. In reference to this concert, the opening titles read, “These musicians will be forgotten as if they've never been here.”17 The film's interviews with the Mizrahi musicians offer us a glimpse of the dilemmas they faced upon their immigration. The female singer Iman (Suzan Shahrabani) reveals, “When one sings in Arabic it belongs to neither here nor there. Among Arabs I am a Jew and among Jews I sing in Arabic; it is not what they are looking for.” Yossef Shem-Tov who plays the oud (the Arab lute) regrets immigrating to Israel: “I shouldn't have even come to Israel…over there I was a king, and here, what am I?” Bass and accordion player Naim Rajwan follows suit—he reminiscences that when he disembarked from the plane that brought him to Israel and tried to console himself, “The situation will be better,” he was rebuked by an immigrant of earlier years, “No, it is not going to be better, but you will simply get used to it.” Café Noah at the outskirts of Tel Aviv was one place some of the same musicians could play their music in the past; their audiences were mostly Iraqi- and Egyptian-Jewish immigrants. Like Halfon, in Café Noah (1996) Dror brings together some of these musicians for a performance initiated specifically for the purpose of the film. However, the two films represent opposite positions toward their subjects. In Baghdad Bandstand the opening suggests, rather patronizingly, that the performers are gathering to play their music probably for the last time.18 Although Baghdad Bandstand takes a detached ethnographic approach, the filmmaker's intervention is blatant—his overt symbolism and the opening titles divert the emphasis, to an extent, from the film's subjects to the design of the film and to its maker. Conversely, Dror's directorial hand is largely concealed, but the knowledge that his parents are from Iraq elicits the sense that the filmmaker is personally invested in tracing the music of

which, we infer, he was deprived. In Duki Dror's My Fantazya (Fantazya sheli, 2001) the personal connection to the story told is organic; the filmmaker becomes an integral figure of the film's diegesis as he turns his camera on himself and his family. The film spans a nine-year period and is set mostly in a Menorah (candelabrum) workshop called Fantazya (“fantasy”) that is owned by Dror's father and two uncles. The motivating force in the documentary is the filmmaker's persistent desire to persuade his father, Abudi/Oded, to reveal details about his imprisonment in Iraq at the time when most Jews were leaving the country. The father and his siblings consistently refuse to divulge any information. The mother sides with her husband; she Page 55 →tells her son, “Your father, he eradicated his past in Iraq. Do you understand what it means to eradicate?” However, after a disappointed Dror is about to admit that he is giving up the hope that his unrelenting father would ever talk about his past and to concede his failure to achieve either personal or cinematic closure (he says exasperatedly, “The film doesn't want to end”), the father finally unseals his lips.19 With the company of his fellow ex-prisoners who now meet regularly in Tel Aviv, the father, with a stoic expression, reminisces about his capture by Iraqi authorities. He discloses that his arrest was a result of betrayal—an Israeli Zionist agent, for a reason not explained in the film, informed the Iraqis about the existence of his Zionist underground cell. What was even more devastating to the father than his five-year imprisonment was his sense of abandonment after all his family members (as well as most Jews) had already left Iraq for Israel or elsewhere. This schizophrenic posture toward Zionism—veneration, deference, and the courage to risk one's life for its cause, on the one hand, and a sense of alienation and distance on the other—is beautifully captured in a scene in which the three brothers are in the workshop talking about Page 56 →their father (the filmmaker's grandfather). As one of the brothers recalls that their father was a fierce anti-Zionist back in Iraq, the Israeli Memorial Day siren signaling the commemoration of the Israeli fallen soldiers goes off. (For the Jewish population of Israel, Memorial Day and next day, Independence Day, are the most revered holidays associated with the State of Israel and the entire Zionist enterprise.) The father and brothers meekly end their “unpatriotic” conversation and, as is customary, stand up silently for the duration of the siren's blaring. Mama Faiza (Sigalit Banai, 2002) offers another explicit undertaking to unearth the parents’ past in the Arab world and then in their early years in Israel. Common to Mama Faiza and other films discussed in this section is that the filmic inquiry into the experiences of life in the Arab world and then in Israel is meant to allow a sliver of hope for both the filmmaker or artist and his/her parents to reconcile with the past and to reframe it according to new understandings. Banai's camera follows actress Yaffa Tusia Cohen and her mother, Faiza Rushdi, an eightyyear-old Egyptian-Jewish diva of Arabic music who now lives in a nursing home. The mother, withdrawn and mostly forsaken, used to leave her young daughter by herself days and nights in the heyday of her musical career. Tusia Cohen confronts the painful mother-daughter relationships through her solo theater performance I Am Faiza, where she plays both roles. For her solo performance, Tusia Cohen learns her mother's Arabic songs from old recordings. The reconciliation with her mother in Mama Faiza is then tightly related to connecting with the past and to the Arab-Jewish culture both mother and daughter are now reliving. This reconciliation, both in terms of patching up resentments between children and parents and in the sense of bridging past and present, is also the narrative paradigm of My Fantazya (and Cinema Egypt and Father Language, to which I will attend shortly). Accompanying the shot of his parents silently watching the Independence Day fireworks from their apartment, Dror's subdued final voice-over captures well this particular connection between the filmmaker's story of reconciliation and closeness and the parents’ past prior to their immigration: “Today, after father spoke, I want to hug him and say that although I was born here, I feel a bit like a stranger in this place just as he does. But I don't say anything. It might hurt him that I feel this way. So I keep silent and continue my filming.”20 The initial trigger for Dror to reconnect with his parents’ Iraqi past is the 1991 Gulf War. In the opening of My Fantazya, Dror lives with his Israeli girlfriend in Los Angeles. Studying cinema there, Dror cherishes life away from home; he no longer wishes to realize his childhood dream Page 57 →to be a Menorah maker like his father. But over the television images of the airstrikes targeting Baghdad, Dror comments ruefully, “Everything was fine until one day Saddam showed up. He brought back to me, Israel, home, and also Dad and Iraq.” To fully

appreciate the propulsive power of those television images, we need to underscore the significance of the Gulf War for members of the Iraqi-Jewish community of Israel. The belligerency between Israel and Iraq (including a travel ban) since the creation of the Jewish State, coupled with the scarce images Iraq had disseminated outside its borders during President Saddam Hussein's era, denied these second-generation Iraqi-Jewish immigrants a direct knowledge or experience of the country their parents had left. Therefore, it is striking that the first images of their families’ homeland some of these descendants of the Iraqi-Jewish immigrants saw were of its attack by Israel's ally. These images and this “first contact” then accrue metonymic power to signify the evasiveness of “home.”21 The 1991 Gulf War is also the narrational springboard for reflection on Arab-Jewish identity in David [Taufik] Ofek's 1994 mockumentary Bayit (meaning both “home” and “house” and, in a broader sense, “homeland”). Ofek, the son of Iraqi parents, employs television images of the war to explicitly explore how his (fictive) parents’ past in Iraq sheds light on their experiences of the war against Iraq. The father is watching television, and as he identifies his old family house on the screen's fuzzy, bluish picture taken from American warplanes targeting Baghdad, he excitedly summons his wife, mother, and the filmmaker and his girlfriend to join him. As the picture of an airstrike hitting the house is replayed several times, we witness the father's mixed reaction—to his chagrin, the Baghdadi neighborhood of his old house is being attacked, but the knowledge that the attack is against Israel's enemy exhilarates him. Indeed, even as the grandmother confesses woefully that she cried bitterly when the family had to leave their nice house in the hands of the Iraqis, the father's spirit is up: “Now the Americans are teaching them a lesson.” The filmmaker's leftist, peace-seeking, half-Ashkenazi girlfriend retorts sarcastically, “They [the Iraqis] deserve it,” but the father dismisses her cynicism. “We know them. You don't know the Arabs.” The father's statements about the Arabs in the mockumentary Bayit are reminiscent of a comment made in the documentary My Fantazya by one of the father's fellow ex-prisoners who suggests that Israel take revenge on the Iraqis for what they had done to the Jews in Iraq. Importantly then, in Bayit and My Fantazya the characters’ affirmation of the Zionist (Israeli) framework is explicated as resulting from the rancorous encounters Page 58 →Jews apparently withstood in Iraq prior to their emigration (more on that in chapter 4's “Corrective Histories”). In turn, then, this affirmation refracts the conjoined “Arab-Jew”; it problematizes facile articulations of unperturbed fusion of Arab and Jewish culture and history in the making of the Mizrahi. Cinema Egypt (Cinema Mitzrayim, Rami Kimchi, 2001) conveys a conflicted and intricate sense of “double consciousness” and, befittingly, it will inform my discussions about identity and space in this and other parts of this work. In the film, Kimchi interviews his Egyptian-Jewish mother about her life in Egypt and in Israel, he compiles old photographs for the film, and he even renovates an old film-house in Israel in order to screen his mother's favorite Egyptian film there, the nostalgic Leila the Village Girl (Leila bint al-rif, Togo Mizrahi, 1941). These filmic initiatives are meant to induce the mother, Henriette, to share her pain with her son and, in Kimchi's words, “to take her back to the place of [her] childhood and love.” But Henriette, who first attended school in a Catholic French monastery in her hometown Mit-Ghamr, and then, at the age of seven, was sent to the vibrant cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, gradually distanced herself from “anything Arab,” as the filmmaker suggests. The dilemma of multiple identities is captured clearly in the various languages the mother speaks. She uses Hebrew with the children, French with the grownups, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) as “the language of secrets,” and, as for Arabic, “it lies beneath all these languages, [but] never spoken at home.”22 Early in Come Mother (Azhi ayima [in Moroccan Arabic], 2009), filmmaker Sami Shalom Chetrit looks with his mother, Yakut Chetrit-Edri, at a black-and-white school photograph of the mother and her classmates from the Alliance school in Gourama, Morocco. In Israel, some fifty-seven years after the picture was taken, filmmaker Chetrit and his mother decide to find the schoolgirls in the photograph. As the cross-country journey in Israel begins, Chetrit reflects in voice-over in Moroccan-Arabic and then in Hebrew, “Come, Mother. I will show you your father's house.” We soon realize that this is meant as a double entendre; after a short pause Chetrit adds that this is the way his mother used to cut him off in the past when he tried to outsmart her, as if to say, “Who are you son to teach me about my life?!” And yet, considering what follows—“So we went on this journey following the picture. Mother, and I in her footsteps, to the sites/lands of memory, to the sights and sounds of her childhood”—these statements resonate strongly with Kimchi's desire to take his mother back to the place of her childhood.

“Sites of memory” (lieux de mémoire) is Pierre Nora's (1989) coinage Page 59 →for a memory that turns into a sign or object one is driven to possess—“when memory is no longer everywhere, it will not be anywhere unless one takes the responsibility to recapture it through individual means” (16). These sites of memory, or what he dubs “Secondary Memory” and “prosthesis-memory” (14), which include museums and archives, are a commonplace in our era that has witnessed “a decisive shift from the historical to the psychological, from the social to the individual, from the objective message to its subjective reception, from repetition to rememoration” (15). In contrast to “sites of memory,” Nora casts “environments of memory” (milieux de mémoire) as organic, real, and collective (e.g., as in the “so called primitive or archaic societies”) and as resulting from the social power of repetition (as in rituals) rather than from historicity. These distinctions compel us to reread Nora's seemingly straightforward epigraph above and to understand it anew. Leaving aside the dilemma that arises from Nora's binary rendering of two kinds of memory and, relatedly, whether he intimates that some memories are not constructed,23 his iconoclastic views are rather insightful in consideration of this chapter's perusal of Mizrahi salvage cinema, as my interest lies in the manner those sites of memory are constructed. Arguably, works by young filmmakers whose films focus on their Mizrahi grandparents come the closest to Nora's ascription of (1989) “sites of memory.” In these works, the film becomes that site of memory where Nora's organic or real memory (“the environment of memory”) is absent. Consider Aisha, White Walls, Until Tomorrow Comes, Stone Flower, Grandfather, The South: Alice Never Lived Here, Jenny and Jenny, and Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi; in these films, which I explore here and elsewhere, the strong bond the young filmmakers (or their subjects) have with their Mizrahi grandparents largely skips over the connection with the parents, and, in some of these films, the parents are entirely absent. Generally, the close relations with the grandparent are a vehicle for the grandchildren/filmmakers to relate and document the past and to identify what they construe as an authentic connection to a bygone era. As we shall see, the filmmakers seek in their grandparents certain traditional wisdoms that the parents’ generation might no longer possess. Yet, the tenuous nature of this connection to the past is doubly inscribed. The exclusion of the parents’ generation certainly compromises a living, dynamic, and organic environment of memory, and, furthermore, the grandparents usually provide only fleeting references to their lives in the Arab/Muslim world or even about their early experiences in Israel. In the documentary Aisha (Oshri Hayun and Hila Cohen, 2010), Page 60 →granddaughter/filmmaker Hayun reveals in voice-over at the opening of the film, “As a child I wanted a different grandma. The kind that does homework with you or takes you to after-school activities. A grandma like my friends had.” We learn that grandmother Aisha, who emigrated from Morocco long ago, still barely speaks Hebrew, and her shabby clothes, ill-disposed manner, and reclusiveness—she prefers the company of her goat and a few chickens over that of her family—explain why Hayun admits to having been ashamed of her grandmother. The film depicts Aisha's routine in painstaking details, yet, considering that it reveals virtually nothing about the grandmother's (or the family's) experiences in Morocco and later, about her immigrant experience in Israel, the closing credits of the film thanking all the participants for being the beacon “in the journey in search of my roots” is conspicuously suspicious as these roots are not explored in the film diegesis.24 In Meital Abekasis's fifty-minute-long fiction film White Walls (Kirot levanim, 2005), those sites of memory are its explicit subject matter. The film introduces us to Shahar, an artist living in Tel Aviv who is preparing for her photographic exhibition there. She shares with her boyfriend her frustration over the emotional flatness of the photographs she has been working on. When her grandmother dies, Shahar pays a visit to her home in the Negev desert in southern Israel to join the mourning family. These affairs in the present are intercut with scenes from the past that illustrate the strong bond between Shahar as a little girl and her Moroccan grandmother. Ultimately, Shahar succeeds in creating images worthy in her esteem only when she begins to photograph the places from her immediate surroundings in the past and, particularly, her grandmother's house. Not surprisingly, Abekasis concludes her sensitive and meticulously stylized film with the dedication to her grandparents who “left me the scent, the flavor, and the color.” The phenomenon of strong bond between grandchildren and their Mizrahi grandparents to the exclusion of their parents is also palpable in Until Tomorrow Comes25 (David Deri, 2005) and Stone Flower26 (Sarit Haymian,

2007). Grandson Yaniv in the sixty-five-minute narrative film Until Tomorrow Comes is the only one who objects to the family plan to send the aging and senile grandmother away to a nursing home. The bubbling arguments, the food, language, and the warm colors of this Moroccan family's home are contrasted with the alienating coldness of the new place to which the grandmother is eventually moving (e.g., when Yaniv's sister and mother check out one of the old-age homes and converse in Moroccan Arabic, the woman who guides them there responds Page 61 →in Russian). The documentary Stone Flower seeks to relate the experience of the grandparents’ generation in Iran to the filmmaker's trepidation about getting married to the boyfriend she has been dating for four years. In conversations with her grandmother, and with Ilanit and Na'ima, two mature women who were also born in Iran, filmmaker Haymian attempts to cull out details about their traditions (singing, cooking, and talismans) and life in Iran and Israel or, in the filmmaker's words, “to search in their past for answers to my future.” Again, as in Aisha and White Walls, both films conclude with a dedication to the filmmakers’ grandparents. The films by second- and third-generation Mizrahi filmmakers that are discussed in this chapter, whether they probe into the Jewish experience in the Arab/Muslim world or portray the Mizrahim in Israel, are often permeated by a sense of finality and loss. In My Fantazya, the melancholic background music and the realization that the Fantazya workshop is up for sale enhance the film's woeful feeling. In Baghdad Bandstand, along with the mostly octogenarian musicians, the film also features the younger Yair Dalal—the musical director and organizer of the special performance documented in the film—whose parents are from Iraq. When asked by one of the musicians in that film why he had taken upon himself the role of preserving their Mizrahi music, Dalal responds, “[Because] when you folks are gone, who will be here to pursue the endeavor you were engaged in?” Similarly, the musicians in Café Noah, the parents, friends, and relatives in My Fantazya, Felix Mizrahi in Taqasim, and Iraqi-born Israeli writer Sami Michael who admits in Samir27 that, after all the years he has been living in Israel, he can no longer consider himself an Iraqi, all bemoan an era that is coming to an end. Death, loss, or missed opportunities germane to the issue of the Arab-Jewish identity are constitutive of the documentaries Maktub Aleik and Grandfather. In Maktub Aleik: A Voice without a Face (Maktub aleik28 2005), filmmaker Assaf Basson attempts to trace his late father's mysterious life as a talented Jewish Iraqi singer in Israel who, due to his secretive work as an agent (likely a spy) for the Mossad,29 was not allowed to perform in public (hence “A Voice Without a Face”). The events the film highlights—the father's frequent absences from home (besides his work as an agent and his Arabic music radio concerts, he had numerous love affairs that drew him further away from his family), his rapidly deteriorating health and ensuing death, and, later, Basson's sister's unsuccessful fight against cancer—coupled with the filmmaker's personal, emotional statements and reactions on camera, evince a strongly somber mood. A similar mood is evoked in Grandfather (Saba, Amram Jacoby, 2005) by Page 62 →the ninety-two-year-old Jewish-Iraqi grandfather Avraham Ezekiel, who tells the story of his immigration to Palestine in 1929 and of his shattered hopes for a peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Israelis in that land. The meditative quality of the film that, in turn, enhances the film's austerity and solemnity, transpires by the grandfather's elongated ruminations about the past and the meaning of life and nature, and by keeping the grandfather's voice the only one in the film. As we have seen in the above-mentioned films and in the literature on the emigration of Jews from the Arab /Muslim Middle East, the immigrants’ arrival in Israel marks a rupture that has hardly been mended; many Mizrahi immigrants cannot return to their countries of origin, and, even as they are nearing the end of their lives, reconciliation with the past in their countries of origin is deemed impossible. This experience of loss and finality does not entail an affirming closure for Henriette of Cinema Egypt, Abudi/Oded of My Fantazya, and Sami Michael of Samir. Indeed, their past in the Arab world keeps haunting these people in their new lives in Israel. In the opening scene of Samir (David Benchetrit, 1997), over an old black-and-white film of Baghdad, Sami Michael recites his recurring nightmare: he is sitting in a café by the bank of the Tigris and leisurely drinking his coffee. To pay, he gets up and pulls from his pocket what he realizes, to his horror, are Israeli coins. Suspected for his “Israeli connection,” he is now chased by Iraqi police down the streets of Baghdad, somewhat like his real life experience when Iraqi police were hunting him for his activism in the Jewish communist underground cell. The film's conclusion seems to offer a sliver of hope and closure. Michael reveals that the first time he experienced belonging in Israel was on the day his first daughter was born; through her, he felt that he finally turned into an

Israeli. However, in his rave review of the film, Chetrit (1996) has a more sober interpretation of the ending, and he draws our attention not to that which was gained (Israeli identity) but to the lost past: “I apologize that I have to spoil this sugary conclusion and offer this instead: [Sami Michael] realized on that day that he swore off his ArabJewish identity and entered a voyage to defend what remained of it” (49). The Utility of Rootedness Where authentic histories claim to educate us about the past itself, imposing narrative order on chaotic reality, these modern-day reconstructions [e.g., in cinema] tell us more about our Page 63 →relationship to the past, about the connections between past and present, and our affective responses. PAM COOK30

Thus far we have established that it is against this doom and loss that the filmmakers, often of Mizrahi origin themselves, strive to salvage shreds of the past. This effort, we have noticed, is marked by recognizing the historical and cultural value of such preservation. However, to what extent does the sense of disconcertedness in the films’ subjects reveal the filmmakers’ projection of their own sense of cultural displacement? In other words, a more critical reading of Mizrahi films may suggest that these works only seemingly focus on the immigrant parents’ generation and that they actually deal, implicitly, with the filmmakers’ queries and dilemmas in their search for identity. Indeed, these films bear the features of “I Productions”—works, that according to Roger Odin's (1998) genre taxonomy, are characterized by the filmmaker's engagement with his or her film “as a strategy of affirmation of the self in front of the family; part of the construction of an identity” (198). Accordingly, the following sections will expound on the tensions and ironic gaps between, on the one hand, the stated intentions of Israeli-born Mizrahi filmmakers as evidenced in their films’ narratives and in interviews conducted with them and, on the other hand, the films’ “surplus” that often undermines these articulations. “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile” (1996), Marianne Hirsch points to the impossibility of direct access to the traumatic events previous generations have experienced. It is in this context that she coins the term “postmemory” to refer to the tortuous and mediated connections and “memories” the children of Holocaust survivors create to approach what for their parents are traumatically vivid and direct experiences. Hirsch offers her postmemory/second-generation conceptualizations as a theoretical model applicable to the experiences of other collectives (662). In light of her suggestion, an analogy between second-generation Holocaust survivors and second-generation Mizrahi immigrants seems felicitous—both groups have mostly only secondary knowledge of their parents’ inaccessible or lost worlds. I will return to Hirsch's claim about the highly mediated nature of accessing the parents’ past later in this chapter, but at this point, my focus is on Hirsch's argument that the parents’ exile, trauma, and displacement bear on the second-generation's identity lacuna.31 IN HER SEMINAL ARTICLE

Page 64 → The children of exiled survivors, although they have not themselves lived through the trauma of banishment and the destruction of home, remain always marginal or exiled, always in the diaspora. “Home” is always elsewhere…. This condition of exile from the space of identity, this diasporic experience, is characteristic of postmemory. (662) Considering this lacuna, I propose that the films of second-generation Mizrahi immigrants can often be construed as an endeavor meant to provide a defined identity anchor to which these filmmakers want to cling in a society that used to deem their pliant and weakened ethnicity either irrelevant (in accordance with the notion of Israel's melting pot) or, worse, dangerous to the Western-oriented Zionist project. In his discussion of “accented cinema”—a reference to ethnic, diasporic, and exilic films—Hamid Naficy (2001: 5) argues that it is precisely because of the lack of roots that the accented films engage in rootedness. Similarly, Laura Marks's (2000) intercultural cinema—“characterized by experimental styles that attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge, or living as a minority in the still majority white, Euro-American West” (1)—resonates strongly with the tropes of salvage cinema as outlined above

and, specifically, its construction in negative terms, namely, by lack and loss. I suggest that intercultural cinema performs an excavation of the available sources of recorded history and memory, only to find that cultural memory is located in the gaps between these recorded images. Consequently, I argue, many works of intercultural cinema begin from the inability to speak, to represent objectively one's own culture, history, and memory; they are marked by silence, absence, and hesitation. (21) What follows is meant to take articulations by Hirsch, Naficy, and Marks a step further to explore what eventually transpires from the “silence, absence, and hesitation” the filmmakers encounter in order to broach the possibility that, in the films addressed in this chapter, the filmmakers make a concerted effort to confer onto their Mizrahi subjects (e.g., the parents) an unequivocally stronger connection to the Arab culture than those subjects are willing to accept. Indeed, as we shall see, in this striving for rootedness, at times the films become a stage where the filmmaker and his or her subjects are pulling in two different directions in considerations of the hyphenated ArabJewish identity. In my interviews with Kimchi32 he expounded on his choice of showing Page 65 →his mother an Egyptian film in a renovated movie theater to connect her with her past. The medium of cinema, Kimchi maintained, is associated with modernism and colonialism (the heyday of modernism marks the birth of the film industry); both are formative of his mother's growing up in Egypt. However, ironically, in his search for a cultural harness, origin, and connection, Kimchi himself resorts somewhat to essentialist-modernist articulations in accentuating the mother's “Arabness,” whereas the mother actually ventures a more open and (may I dare) postmodernist stance—her reflections, direct or relayed by Kimchi, regarding her identity and past are qualified and ambiguous. Similarly, the prearranged encounters the mother is having with her past take place not in Egypt but in the cinematic/virtual space of the constructed movie theater in Israel. It is then her place that is marked as the inbetweenness of the cultural slipzone.33 Therefore, despite the filmmaker's expressed desire (as in the abovementioned voice-over) to fixate his mother's past, Cinema Egypt elicits a sense of doubt about cultural origins, identity, and memory. We are reminded here of Walter Benjamin's distinction between memory and remembering: while the former implies the constant disintegration and restructuring of past experiences, the latter “shields consciousness from experience” (quoted in Marks 1994: 258). At least to an extent then, we may argue that the “salvage cinema” of Kimchi and other filmmakers is tantamount to that attempt to reify the past in Arab lands (albeit, for the most part, only indirectly known to them), whereas their parents reexamine and reformulate the past in light of their new experiences in Israel. Dror's interest in his father's Iraqi past in My Fantazya has some of the same qualities as Kimchi's interest in his mother's Egyptian past. Again, the ostensible focus on the parent's story is revealed to be a vehicle through which the filmmaker attempts to emplace himself. This is most noticeable in a conversation Dror has with his mother when he asks her whether she and his father wanted to be “integrated” (read: rendered unmarked) into Israeli society. She answers positively, and Dror protests: “I don't want to be integrated. I first want to know [your] past because no one talked to me about it; it has been concealed from me.” As in my discussion about third-generation Mizrahim who feature their grandparents in their films, also these second-generation filmmakers’ tortuous pursuit of their parents’ Jewish past in Arab lands is reminiscent of Arjun Appadurai's “nostalgia without memory” (1996: 30).34 Indeed, in the remainder of this chapter I will suggest that the connection these filmmakers wish for is often predicated on displacements and virtual substitutes Page 66 →rather than on “actual” artifacts known to the parents from their lives in Arab countries. The Ethnic as a Symptom When Kimchi first introduces his mother in Cinema Egypt, he recounts that when he was younger, he thought his mother's name was Orient, not Henriette. He explains that he made this mistake because, he surmised, if he is a sabra (native-born Israeli) having a Hebrew name, then his mother, who was born in Egypt, should have a name attesting to her origin—the Orient. If this mishearing seems initially merely risible, we gradually realize that it is a part of a pattern within which Kimchi tries to place (or re-place) his mother in what amounts, from her standpoint,

to a displacement. Interestingly, when he refers to the mispronunciation of his mother's name in the film's first voice-over, Kimchi uses the Hebrew word serasti, meaning “I mispronounced” but also “I castrated,” which, thereby, takes us to the realm of psychoanalysis. In this context of my argument about displacement, we may suggest then that the word serasti can signify the filmmaker's fear and disavowal of what his mother lacks—signs of Arabness in her life in Israel; to restore the Arab identity he desires for her, he turns his mother's name to “Orient.” In his reference to film credits, Francesco Casetti (1998) submits, “Placed at each extremity of the film…they function, in a most obvious manner, as an elastic border between two universes, between an interior seeking to escape its limits and an exterior wanting to penetrate into the discourse of the film” (44). This observation sheds additional light on Kimchi's displacement/re-placement of his mother. The opening credits list the names of three people: Henriette Azar (the mother's name), Leila Mourad, and Youssef Wahbi. The latter two are the Egyptian actors in the film Kimchi screens for his mother. This leveling effect between his mother and the actors in the opening credit scene casts the mother as a film persona alongside those of Mourad and Wahbi, and thus it amounts to the mother's splitting and to displacing her: biographically, since she is not an actress; historically, because the actors belong to the past in Egypt whereas she appears in the present in Israel; and subjectively, because she is the viewer of the Egyptian film her son screens for her, but also a subject in her son's film. As mentioned earlier, elsewhere in the film Kimchi concedes that for all the years since his mother became a grownup, she has refused anything Arab. Whereas Kimchi states that he wants to take her back, through conversations and the screening Page 67 →of her favorite Egyptian film, to the place of childhood and love—to Egypt—she persistently maintains a distance between the Arab world and hers; indeed, throughout this film she refers to the Arabs/Egyptians as “they.” Not once does she refer to Arabs/Egyptians as “we.” Granted, we ought to rationalize the mother's detached attitude to her life in Egypt on grounds that the Zionist ethos spurred Henriette and many other immigrants from the Arab world to eschew their pasts. And yet, Kimchi's voice-over “we are embarking on a voyage into the past, into her past” intimates that this is not her journey of discovery, rather, in this exploration of the past the mother is actually a vehicle through which the filmmaker is trying to define his identity. Consider, for example, the repeated references to the effect that Kimchi (and his older brother) was ashamed of his Sephardi/Mizrahi identity and embarrassed by his mother precisely because of her origins. Cinema Egypt then is a platform where the filmmaker strives to settle the unfinished Page 68 →conundrum about his identity by purging the past specters of duplicities. The film concludes with Kimchi's voice-over, “When mom watched Egyptian films on Israeli TV and asked for my opinion, she revealed her most vulnerable side—her childhood passions she was forced to abandon—and thus she tried to recruit me to help her, to be free. I wanted to answer my mom's call. I wanted to free her.” If freeing the mother involves a re-placement, for the filmmaker it would have the benefit of giving him a sense of belonging and gaining a defined identity in a society that is either hostile or indifferent to Mizrahi ethnicity. In Father Language (Sfat av, 2006), Kimchi's last in his family trilogy “Exiles on Their [Own] Land” (“Golim al admatam”), the filmmaker takes his father, a retired educator who is fluent in six languages, on a cruise to Rhodes to revisit the place where he spent his formative years. The family, which resided in Alexandria at the time, sent Kimchi's father, Jacko/Ya'acov, off to the prestigious Sephardi rabbinical school in Rhodes in 1932. As World War II broke out, the school closed down, and the father was forced out and eventually returned to Egypt in 1939. To an extent, the filmmaker's journey to Rhodes with his father is also predicated on filmic displacement and, congruently, betrays a sense that the journey is meant as an identity quest more for him than for his father. Kimchi's casting choices in Father Language supports this proposition. In the reenacted scene where the father is sent off to Rhodes, Kimchi casts himself and his wife and children in the roles of his father's family (e.g., Kimchi appears as his own grandfather). This goes beyond production frugality; in what amounts to a literal and figurative replacement, and in the filmmaker's emplacement, the filmmaker/son wears his grandparent's Orient on his sleeve. At the end of the film, Kimchi returns from Rhodes by plane (some time after his father) and is welcomed at the airport by his family. Not only does this conjure up that scene of the reenacted send-off—in both, the participants are Kimchi, his wife, and their two children—but in the final voice-over Kimchi admits that for him, Israel is home after all, the implication of which is that his father still has no place he can call home.

Even from this brief account of Kimchi's last two films in his family trilogy, it is blatantly clear that these films are replete with allusions that beg for a more sustained psychoanalytical reading. We should then explore the bold proposition that in Kimchi's films (and to extent, even in some of the other films discussed here), the filmmaker's psyche or libido is sublimated into the realm of the ethnic. Put differently, I am interested here in exploring ethnic cinema as a symptom, namely, the return of the Page 69 →repressed in the “guise” of the ethnic. In psychoanalytical theory, in the Oedipal or the Imaginary stage, the toddler has not yet developed complete subjectivity; the world in this prelapsarian realm is perceived as an extension of the baby's body, and the mother is the source of its libidinal enjoyment. The baby boy realizes that his mother lacks what he has, an encounter that induces disavowal and the need to alleviate the effect of this shock and the ensuing castration anxiety by displacing the source of this discomfort. In this mechanism, the fetish affixes to the mother the object she does not have. As implied earlier, the “it” the mother doesn't have in Cinema Egypt is no other than unequivocal “Arabness.” In line with my discussion thus far, at times it seems that Kimchi's films turn into a stage playing out the Freudian Oedipal drama involving mother, father, and son.35 The special relationship Kimchi has had with his mother is accentuated when he reveals to us that in his childhood, “Father left home and went to teach in Eilat. He took my brother Roni with him…. Mother and I were left by ourselves.” The scene in Father Language where the family sends the son (Jacko/Ya'acov) off to Rhodes, and the filmmaker plays the role of the grandfather, echoes the severance from the father to which Cinema Egypt alludes. We may further venture that this reenacted scene in Father Language amounts to a reprisal by the act of role reversal; here, Kimchi (as the grandfather) “rids” himself of his father, not the other way around as implied in the family breakup in Cinema Egypt when the father moves to Eilat and leaves his younger boy behind. If we hold on to these psychoanalytical paradigms a bit longer, we can argue that in Cinema Egypt, Leila Mourad becomes the sublimated or displaced original object of desire—the mother.36 Not only are the mother's story and Leila's drama in Leila the Village Girl cast around displacements (of home and loved ones), but the constant juxtaposition of images of Mourad with close-ups of the mother is, as alluded to earlier, in itself predicated on a displacement of the subjects in time and space. To wit, these displacements take place in the film's representation and presentation. In Cinema Egypt's film poster, the mother and Leila Mourad are juxtaposed; Mourad is seen in color (a black-and-white photo colored by the filmmaker) and looks like a mirror image of the mother (in black and white) slightly behind her. Kimchi's identification of the mother with Leila Mourad/Leila the village girl is all too blatant in the film's conclusion; the filmmaker kisses his mother, and then we see the reunited couple of the screen, Leila and her husband, kissing passionately. End of both films. As a consequence of the parallel editing technique, Page 70 →we cannot read the reconciliation and closeness between Kimchi and his mother without the romantic reunion between husband and wife in the Egyptian film. This sublimation or displacement of the object of desire takes place in the realm of the Imaginary. Eventually, the child enters what Jacques Lacan calls the Symbolic. Originally, the title of the last film in Kimchi's trilogy was “My Father and Other Rabbis,” but in the last stages of editing, the film's name was changed so it now resonates strongly with the Lacanian conceptualization of the Symbolic as the Name/Law/Language of the Father. So, if Cinema Egypt is in the realm of Lacan's Imaginary (“mother language,” so to speak)—the uninhibited, prelinguistic desire for and bond with the mother—then Father Language is in the realm of the word, the Symbolic. Put differently, Cinema Egypt is followed by Father Language just as the Imaginary phase is followed by the Symbolic—a fallout of the Oedipal or the mirror phase that is characterized by law, order, the Phallus, and the acceptance of societal taboos. The father figure in this formulation signals the taboo in the mother-son incestuous relationship and goads the son into entering the Symbolic. Father Language keeps reiterating the Symbolic dominion as explicated here. From the film's first scene to its conclusion, Kimchi's characterization of his father is pervaded by references to his language skills and his veneration of order and duty. “For as long as I can remember, my father likes order, repetition [routine],” the filmmaker reveals when we first see the father as he exercises to the rhythm of the BBC morning radio broadcast. He was a pedantic teacher not only with his students but even more so with his son. When he looked over Kimchi's homework or writing, he would be dismissive, saying, “This is not Hebrew, it's repugnant” (go al

nefesh). The filmmaker bemoans the distance that has always existed between them, but there is a measure of reconciliation at the end of the film. Kimchi understands that his lack of control or command of language frightened the father, and he uses the words ared li (“anxious over my…”) to describe this state of mind. What is important here is that both the growing distance from the father in the past and later this reconciliation transpire in the realm of language. In this last voice-over Kimchi reflects, “…as if among the six languages he knew, there was not even one language he could use to express love.” Earlier, in the penultimate sequence, Kimchi confesses, “I'm no longer angry with my father…. [I understand] that his language skills were the only survival tools in the world he was thrust into and that my inability to command a language Page 71 →frightened him.” In the following sentence, whereas the English subtitles read “I understand now that he was worried for me when he thought that I don't have the skill,” in Hebrew Kimchi actually says, “He was anxious when he thought that I don't have it.” What is this “it” in psychoanalytical terms if not the Phallus, the epitome of the Symbolic language? Admittedly, one should be queasy about the literal application of the multilayered and often enigmatic language of psychoanalysis to cinema. However, by taking this detour into the realm of psychoanalytical theory I mean to point to fundamental dilemmas in the study of ethnic films in general, and Kimchi's films in particular: Is the ethnic employed as a guise, excuse, or sublimation for the psychic as my discussion intimates? If so, should we ultimately dispose of the ethnic analysis altogether? Clearly, that cannot be my position in this work and, likewise, Kimchi as a subject for/of psychoanalytical parsing is ancillary to my analysis. The following discussion attempts to explore the relations between the ethnic and the psychic in finding out why, in the context of Mizrahi films, the subconscious or the symptom reveals itself specifically in the domain of the ethnic. Psychoanalysis does not wish to simply remove the symptom; conversely, the symptom is reckoned as the locus where the subject's repressed voice or subjectivity is not completely choked and where the repressed can surface, even if in a disguised form. Thereby, it is the place that merits our attention in the inquiry of the unconscious. The symptom is neither random nor arbitrary. As Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek maintain, the symptom and the repressed are tightly knitted. In Enjoy Your Symptom! (1992), Žižek (after Lacan) asserts, “There is no repression previous to the return of the oppressed; the oppressed content does not precede its return in symptoms” (14). I read this not only as a temporal concurrence between the repressed content and the symptom but, more important, as a paradigmatic identification between the two. In other words, the return of the oppressed in the form of the ethnic is highly significant; it is not an episodic phenomenon, rather, it attests to the structural and paradigmatic order the psychic displacement and repression (e.g., the son's relations with his parents) share with the symptom—the ethnic displacement to which Kimchi's films persistently attend. The filmmaker's sense of rejection and alienation resulting from the father's estrangement from him and his mother Henriette betrays the same modalities as his sense of alienation and rejection as a Mizrahi in a mostly Ashkenazi environment. Page 72 → The Cultural Past and the Political Present The ascription of the filmmakers’ engagement in their parents’ Arab past, and of their effort to goad their parents to consider their respective Arab lands (rather than Israel) as home, to the filmmakers’ need to tease out a defined identity for themselves would be incomplete if one does not also attend to the broader Israeli cultural-political disposition. The Israeli film and media milieu is known for its relatively dovish views about the Arab/PalestinianIsraeli conflict, and these positions cannot be separated from the Mizrahi filmmakers’ invested interest in the Arab lands of the past. Arguably then, the films are oftentimes a stage not only for intergenerational differences about the perception of the past in the Arab/Muslim world but also for a political discord between parents and children about the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli strife in the present. Without any intimation of filmmakers’ pandering to members of the Israeli (and international) film milieu, it is the critical-leftist position the filmmakers take that, overall, resonates best with the sensibilities of film critics and audiences of Israeli films. In Asmar (Iris Rubin, 2009), after the filmmaker's father Rahamim, a builder working with Palestinian laborers, expresses his concern over the fast population growth of the Bedouins in Israel compared to the slow growth rate of the country's Jewish community, the daughter retorts by suggesting that the father can find his lost Arab habitus among the Israeli Palestinians.

IRIS RUBIN:

Dad, you're lucky there are Arabs in Israel. You know why? Because culturally and mentally you'd have shriveled here. As far as I can tell, you cannot manage with people who aren't Arabs. RAHAMIM RUBIN: IRIS:

I grew up with Arabs. I like their mentality.

So you can live with them in a bi-national State.

RAHAMIM:

And I like their music. You see, my workers and I, we can bring peace in 24 hours. Let them be a minority and we the majority. IRIS:

Why, so that you could have control over them?

RAHAMIM:…I

don't have another country. This is my country…. I suffered from the Iraqis. Every time I left school they'd throw rocks and things at me. Because I am Jewish. I came here to be in my country where I can walk and say “I am Jewish.” The pattern that emerges then in the films discussed here is that whereas the filmmakers attempt to use the parents’ cultural connection to the Arab past (which they concede they still hold on to) as a vehicle to present Page 73 →a correlative political empathy to the Arabs/Palestinians in the present, the parents, time and again, insist on disassociating the cultural past from the political present. In his documentaries ’66 Was a Good Year for Tourism (Shnat shishim ve-shesh haita tova le-tayarut, 1992) and Another Land (Eretz aeret, 1998), Amit Goren explores what home and uprooting are for a family that straddles more than one country. His Egyptian-born father immigrated to Israel in 1951, and then, in 1966, the parents and their three boys—Amit, Yoav, and Yuval—moved to New York. Ten years later, Amit Goren left his immediate family behind and moved back to Israel to serve in the IDF. In Another Land, Goren interweaves the stories of his family back in America and the developments in his private life (e.g., the separation from his wife) with the mid1990s political upheavals in Israel. The disassociation of the cultural past in Arab lands from the political reality vis-à-vis the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the present is even more pronounced in Amit Goren's father than in Iris Rubin's. Filmmaker Goren chronicles the Oslo peace accords, the American-born Israeli fundamentalist Baruch Goldstein's murdering of nearly thirty Muslims in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994, Palestinian militants’ repeated suicide attacks in Israel, the vituperative right-wing demonstrations against the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and his consequent assassination in November 1995, and finally, the gains rightwing parties enjoyed in the 1996 elections. But as the Israeli-born mother (of Ashkenazi descent) and her son Amit commiserate about the election results, all we hear from the father is, “Did you change the [camera] batteries, Amit?” In the two films, the father reflects on his life in Egypt, and he visits Alexandria in both, yet he opts to compartmentalize this past, and thereby he hinders the possibility of relating that past to Arab-Israeli relations in the present. This compartmentalization is probably best captured in ’66 Was a Good Year for Tourism in the exchange the father and son are having after they visit the apartment in which the Goren (then Gormezano) family lived in Alexandria before their departure. Referring to his biography and identity, the father relays that, for him, youth is Alexandria, “maturing years would be Israel, and later on, the business years would be America.” Like the Mizrahi filmmakers whom I discussed here, Goren also seems to seek a more unequivocal answer to the question where home is than his interlocutors are willing to offer. The mother, who spent most of her life in America but has always wanted to return to Israel, admits in Another Land that, even though she considers Israel home, “it is not really home in the full sense of the word.” In ’66 Was a Good Year for Tourism, Page 74 →Yoav's response to his brother's relentless inquiry about home and belonging is, “Who said one needs to belong?” As for the father's reflections in the two films, although he suggests that home now is New York, he makes it clear that, for him, home is where the family is. As the father returns to Alexandria to see his family house for the first time since they left the place forty years earlier, he initially flaunts his Egyptian origins in his meetings with locals. And to his son's question “Are you Egyptian? Do you feel Egyptian?” the father answers, “Of course I'm Egyptian. I was born here. I have affinity with this place. I spent 20 years of my life here, the formative years.” As the conversation with his son proceeds, the father's position about his identity becomes rather

nebulous; in defying identity demarcations he jovially announces to his son, “I'm a citizen of the world.” Clearly, all these responses by Amit's parents and siblings allude to a rather fluid notion of home and belonging. Conversely, Goren has an exact idea of where home is when he reflects on this dilemma. But unlike other filmmakers who, as mentioned, seek their identity anchor within the realm of Mizrahi ethnicity, Goren finds his unambiguous identity within the domain of Israeli nationality and citizenship. In both films, Goren attests to his strong sense of belonging to Israel, and despite the personal difficulties he is confronting and the political crises the country is experiencing, he does not seriously consider the possibility of joining the rest of his family in America; occasionally he actually still muses on the possibility that his family would return to Israel. At the end of ’66 Was a Good Year for Tourism, Goren documents his wife and two children staying in a shelter during the Scud missile attacks from Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. He concludes by stating that following this first experience of war in Israel, he decided to replace his Israeli immigrant card with the standard Israeli ID. Furthermore, when he chose to move to Israel to enlist in the army, this sense of belonging and of finding one's true calling and identity had patent Israeli-macho characterizations.37 Against a succession of visuals of his brawny brother Yuval lifting weights in the gym, of Israeli soldiers, mighty artillery, and finally, of young Amit wearing fatigues and holding a machine gun in a Rambo pose, he admits in voice-over that the military service was a crucible for his identity and his belonging to Israel, “a struggle to be an Israeli like all Israelis.” Whereas Kimchi and Dror mostly sideline the question of “Israeliness” (neither of them spent his formative years outside of Israel) and attend instead to the place the family's Arab past has played in the formation of their own Mizrahi consciousness at the present, Amit Goren, to an extent like his father, resorts to the compartmentalization Page 75 →of the family's Egyptian past. To reformulate my claim here, I argue that while other filmmakers discussed in this chapter flaunt the politics of identity in their films (and, thereby, give Mizrahiness its own legitimate space), Goren bemoans precisely the processes of the sectorialization of Israeli society; indeed, in his films he is weary of where the country is heading, with the increasing polarization between the religious and the secular, and between the political Right and the Left. Mediated Constructions of Mizrahi Identity: Ambivalence and Performance Mediation, virtual representations, and abstractions are pivotal in Marianne Hirsch's aforementioned definition of postmemory; she demonstrates that, not having experienced the original traumatic event, the second-generation memory is connected to that event “through an imaginative investment and creation” (1996: 662). In a significant number of Mizrahi films, the connection to the past in Arab/Muslim lands is constructed by means of a mimetic craft or performative acts—photographs, a film, or a play—within the film diegesis itself. Page 76 → The use of photographic images in White Walls does not offer us a facile connection to the filmmaker's roots. Indeed, Abekasis's film points to the fleeting nature of these sites of memories that the photographs—old and new—strive to construct. At the beginning of the film, Shahar's grandmother sits outside her bedroom as a painter takes down the black-and-white framed pictures on the pastel-green wall in preparation for painting it white. We notice the dark rectangles (left behind by the removed pictures) that now accentuate the empty wall, a wall without memories. The day after the painting is complete, the grandmother dies and, upon her visit, Shahar is dismayed to find the blank white wall instead of the textured wall she remembers from her childhood. Toward the end of the film, Shahar pays one last visit to her grandmother's house before it is sold, and she looks again at the empty white walls, but in her imagination the wall is turning green again and is slowly filled with the old blackand-white pictures her grandmother used to have. The photographs, old and new, strengthen the closeness Shahar feels toward her grandmother, but the connection to the family origins in the Arab world never becomes explicit. In Mama Faiza, it is a stage performance that is employed to bridge the mother's past in Israel and in Egypt. As I have already discussed, the actress/daughter in this film attempts to access and better understand her mother's personal and cultural background through the solo play she is producing. Likewise, the feature films Desperado Square and The Barbecue People, as well as the documentary Cinema Egypt, contain scenes of opening (or

reopening) a movie-house for screenings of old films in order to stimulate their personas—the parents’ generation—to relive the past. More broadly, films such as Cinema Egypt, My Fantazya, Bayit, Lovesick on Nana Street, and The Barbecue People employ “secondary” materials—archival footage, television programs, and so on—as mediatory elements to approximate the older generation's experiences and to reconstruct the past. If cinema as a mimetic art is one step removed from “reality,” then the films or plays within the films are even one step further removed, a construction on top of another construction. I would suggest that the elongated aesthetic-epistemic distance implied by the use of “secondary” and virtual materials by second-generation Mizrahi filmmakers lends itself to a critical reading of their search for an identity when based on their parents’ past. Possibly in spite of the filmmakers’ intent, these materials, which are incorporated into the films’ diegesis, actually bespeak the limitations, if not futility and irony, involved in the attempt to reconnect with the past the filmmakers Page 77 →pursue in their identity quest. In My Fantazya, the virtual pictures of the Gulf War the filmmaker sees on television are meant to explain his sudden interest in the parents’ Arab past, but ironically, as we have seen, the father has long ago distanced himself from his past. Similarly, in Cinema Egypt, despite the central place the film-within-the-film takes, and Kimchi's (the son /filmmaker) wish to evoke the past by the screening of the old Egyptian film Leila bint al-rif this mediated presence of Arabness only accentuates its overall absence in the lives of the filmmaker and his mother. As Kimchi38 ventured, ultimately, the film implies a failure to reach and relive the past. The impossibility of reliving or connecting with the past is then doubly inscribed: (1) due to the highly mediated means filmmakers deploy to access the past, they are still left with only meager knowledge of their parents’ Arab culture; (2) the immigrant parents display little passion (or patience) for their children's effort to revive or delve into the past in the Arab world. Budgetary and logistical considerations aside, it is precisely the lack of milieux de mémoire—the organic connection to the place and people—that explains why the construction of the past by the journeys that filmmakers Kimchi and Chetrit embark on with their mothers in, respectively, Cinema Egypt and Come Mother, is taking place in Israel, rather than in Alexandria/Mit-Ghamr, Egypt, or Gourama, Morocco. The irony that emerges when we consider the filmmakers’ desire to come close to the parents’ experience in the Arab world becomes all the more patent in reference to the Arabic language. When Dror asks semi-accusingly why the family does not want to talk about the past, the uncle fires back at him, “How come you were never interested in learning Arabic?” This rhetorical question might be only anecdotal within the film's text; however, it accretes significance when we consider that one of the key definitions for “Arabness” includes the Arabic language. It is therefore all the more ironic that most of these second-generation Mizrahi filmmakers who wish to connect to their parents’ Arab world have, at best, a rudimentary knowledge of the Arabic spoken by their parents. Conversely, the acknowledgment of the impossibility to fixate “home” and of the ambivalence of origins is a constitutive motif in David Ofek's Bayit and The Barbecue People (codirected with Yossi Madmony) whereby the films embrace the postmodernist realm of a cultural slipzone. In Bayit, television/video images of the American warplanes’ attack on Baghdad are pivotal to the construction, aesthetics, and discourse of this mockumentary. Unlike Dror's rather solemn treatment of the television images, David Ofek employs the same materials with a postmodernist Page 78 →wink; his film celebrates the open-ended nature of home, identity, and origins.39 Hamid Naficy's (2001) analysis of Atom Egoyan's Speaking Parts could have just as well been written about Bayit. Naficy proposes that the inclusion of video materials in Egoyan's accented film offers more than an aesthetic embellishment. Video is integral to the film's structure of deception and guardedness. It instigates unverifiable identities, slippery relations, and absence—all because of the performativity that it encourages and the slippage it induces between self and other, here and there, and now and then. (2001: 139) Bayit takes place entirely indoors, and, ironically, the confining television screen provides the only depiction of the outside, the “real” world. But how can those fuzzy, bluish, and grainy aerial images of Baghdad stand as an indexical signifier for a real place and a real war? “Home” as a signifier of stability and origin turns in a Baudrillardian sense into a virtual reality—fragmented, elusive, unstable, and mediated. Indeed, the meaning of the television broadcast of the airstrike on Baghdad keeps changing during the course of the film. As all family

members are glued to the television screen to watch the images of the airstrike on Baghdad, a discussion ensues between the grandmother, father, and mother about whether they can identify their Iraqi house. But as they debate, their Baghdad neighborhood is bombed by American warplanes, and the images of the family's house that were supposed to be mnemonic of home turn in a flash to signify absence. Attending to the works of the second-generation Holocaust artists and, specifically, their employment of mediated materials in the complex construction of postmemory, Hirsch (1996) examines the photography of Christian Boltanski. Her analysis of this French artist's early work finds his photographic images to be emphatically manipulative—the photograph as a document is rephotographed and altered in his art. Hirsch concludes that “many of his images are, in fact, icons masquerading as indices or, more radically, symbols masquerading as icons and indices” (675). Similarly, the visual abstraction of the television images in Bayit results in their alteration from indexical and denotive signifiers for “house” to symbols suggestive of “home”—a play that is captured well in the double referentiality of “bayit,” meaning both a house, mostly an emotionally neutral and objective referent, and home, an emotionally charged and more subjective referent that also connotes a measure of stability, comfort, and most importantly, belonging. Page 79 → In the film's opening, Ofek dances to Arabic music in a somewhat preposterous fashion. His voice-over “informs” us that as a kid, he would get some allowance when he agreed to perform for his grandparents by dancing to Arab music. The film's conclusion harkens back to the opening to offer a postmodernist liminal space where performativity takes precedence over origins and locality. In the penultimate scene, as the war is waning, Ofek contemplates, “Hava (his girlfriend) and I decided that when the war is over we would move to live together, we'll rent a small apartment in Tel Aviv. But later, when we get married, if we get married, we would move to a quiet place, and we would have a little nice house there.” Sneering at his mother's nagging and his father's putatively Middle Eastern male chauvinistic mentality, he adds, “We would have children and let them eat only when they feel like it. We would never yell at each other and I would even learn to cook.” The voice-over accompanies the filmmaker and his parents saying their good-byes to the grandmother, who is moving back to her place. As she leaves in the film's last shot, the camera pans left to reveal the filmmaker's future family—his wife and children—on the Sabbath. This smooth temporal and spatial transition within the same shot from present to future and from one house to another further attests to Ofek's proposition about the fluidity of “bayit.” Ofek is barely identifiable in this shot; his face is hidden behind a newspaper he is reading, but his voice is clear as he urges his three or four children to keep dancing to the same music he once danced to for his grandmother. His pregnant wife asks him timidly to stop this dancing as another baby is trying to sleep. Notwithstanding the inconvenient and tiring Sabbath meals they are invited to at the parents’ place, overall, for the snug Ofek, life (in this imaginary realm) is good. On the one hand, we may construe the ending as an effort to disengage from a constricting tradition, from home. On the other hand, the film seems to imply facetiously that the Jewish-Arab tradition is so ingrained in Ofek as a father that he is resolute to pass “tradition” to the next generation. Finally, in contrast to the majority of films discussed in this work in which the exploration of the past engages in language, literature, classical Arab music, cinema and the like, the connections to Arab-Jewish culture alluded to in Bayit are deliberately predicated on ludicrous and shallow features that hardly represent that heritage. The very choice of the mockumentary genre for this film about identity and place reveals the filmmaker's intent to blur the lines between reality and fiction, and thus to eschew simple articulations about roots, Page 80 →identity, and belonging. More than any film discussed in this chapter, the search for cultural roots in Bayit is fraught with irony and self-deprecation. The filmmaker plays himself and casts his real-life grandmother for this filmic role to impart a sense of factuality to the film, but the fictive scheme is disclosed early on when Arieh Elias, a wellknown Iraqi-Jewish actor who plays the role of the father, is first seen. Returning to Naficy's (2001) abovementioned “structure of deception,” we may suggest that the ambiguity about the film's verisimilitude keeps the viewers in a state of guardedness, thus triggering reflectiveness and doubts about identity and origins.

Narrative strategies, cast, music, and language in The Barbecue People (ha-Mangalistim, Ofek and Madmony, 2003) accentuate the constructed and conjectural nature of Mizrahi identity.40 The film's frame story takes place in Ashdod on Israel's fortieth Independence Day, a holiday marked by a sense of national unity and pride for (Jewish) Israelis of all walks of life. Reveling families, among them the Idas, dot the city park of Ashdod for the traditional holiday barbecue. But under this façade of solidarity and jubilance the seams that hold the members of the Ida family together are all but torn open. The frame story in the park is the cinematic space where the individual stories and plots intersect. As we shall see, the film's rejection of a tightly cohesive and incrementally progressing narrative in favor of a somewhat beguiling structure consisting of several flashback subplots coincides with the characters’ futile attempt to “make sense” of their past and reach closure. The father, Haim Ida, was an activist in the Jewish Zionist underground movement in Iraq before his immigration to Israel decades ago. When Haim visits the Center for the Heritage of Iraqi (Babylonian) Jews (an actual center and museum in Or Yehuda, a suburb of Tel Aviv), he incidentally steps into a filming session in progress where Ezra Tawil (not Haim Ida) stars as the intrepid underground fighter who used to smuggle arms inside his qanun (a Middle Eastern zither). After failing to convince the film crew that he, Haim, is that person, our protagonist goes on a short trip to New York to meet Za'arur, an old friend from the Jewish underground in Iraq, who Haim hopes will be able to settle the confusion about the real identity of the underground hero. Excited about his first trip overseas, Haim also plans to visit his son Eli who lives in New York. Haim, however, returns disappointed and empty-handed; Za'arur passed away years earlier, and his son Eli could not meet with him. Eli Ida, an aspiring filmmaker, finds himself directing trash films Page 81 →strewn with horror and violent sex. His lead actress Rahel, an Israeli to whom the filmmaker is highly attracted, is murdered in exactly the same way she is killed in the filmic role assigned to her in one of Eli's films. Although Eli is found not to be involved in this murder, the immigration authorities deport him from the United States. The father and son do not meet in New York, but the film's airport scene reveals that within seconds after the son enters the lobby to take his flight to Israel, the father, who has just attempted to call his son from a pay phone in the terminal, exits the lobby and heads to Brooklyn to Eli's place. Back in Israel, Eli meets Rahel's family and mourns her death with them. Perhaps to ease his pain and reconnect with his past love, Eli seeks the company of Haddas, Rahel's sister, and the two eventually fall in love. Haddas gradually succumbs to his courting, and they spend Independence Day together with the rest of Eli's family in the city park of Ashdod. In the concluding scenes there, the father only grudgingly agrees to speak with his son (Eli did not tell Haim why he could not meet him in New York), Haddas leaves the park angrily after she discovers more details about the film Eli made with her sister, and, in the film's final dialogue, young unmarried Page 82 →Tikva dumbfounds her conservative family by announcing that she is pregnant but does not know who the father is. The love story between Haim's wife, Na'ima, and Ezra Tawil is the film's most convoluted subplot. Again, it is a story in which the film's characters strive to find solace in the past. Ezra and Na'ima were sweethearts in Baghdad; however, they have lost contact since the time, several decades ago, when they were supposed to go together to the premiere screening of Gone with the Wind in a Baghdadi film theater, and Ezra did not show up. We learn that Ezra chose to live abroad for the better part of his life after emigrating from Iraq and that he later moves to Israel. He is a charming businessman, and yet, his immense financial success seems to be the result of his organizedcrime operations. (Ezra, we find out, is responsible for the killing of the actress Rahel, the daughter of a rabbi who could potentially ruin his meat business.) When Haim is away on his trip, Ezra invites Na'ima to a movie theater that is fashioned after the old theater in Baghdad. He has arranged for a special screening of Gone with the Wind just for the two of them in what transpires as a genuine attempt on his part to redress the past. But after a romantic night Na'ima spends in Ezra's luxurious place, he disengages from her, and Naima's attempts to find him earn only his contempt. Another subplot involves a character unrelated to the Idas. In the film's opening scene, Haim's daughter, Tikva, finds on the park's grounds an old cigarette lighter buried under the grass and then hands it to a stranger, an old man who stands in the distance. By the end of the film, we come to know that forty years ago this person was hiding with his father in a bunker when the 1947 UN vote for the partition of Palestine was announced and during the ensuing War of Independence (the 1948 War). The bunker was on the edge of the Palestinian village Isdud on

which the Israeli city of Ashdod is now located. In flashbacks, this person is revealed to have been a devoted Zionist who had emigrated from Iraq with his father. In the bunker, he taunted his father for maintaining his Iraqiexilic manners, including his love of Arabic music, and for his use of an embellished cigarette lighter from Iraq instead of the Israeli-made matches. The father could no longer stand the hardship of the bunker and ventured outside to get some food and water, but an explosion nearby took his life. When Tikva finds the father's buried lighter and hands it to the son, he now lights his own cigarette with it. (Tikva knows the lighter is his because sometime earlier the old man had told her the story of his father and the lighter.) In this sense, this subplot is the only one that has even the semblance of closure and coming to terms with the Page 83 →past. The film's last scene—on one side the poised stranger and across from him the Idas, who stand shoulder-to-shoulder for a family photo that can barely disguise this family's widening fissures—accentuates the distinctiveness of this character. The postmodern narrative mode with its open, conjectural, and democratic (since there is no omniscient character or narrator) storytelling is a salient feature in The Barbecue People. The film includes interviews with several secondary characters—a butcher, a hotel maid, a hit man, and a film producer—that are interspersed in the film. Looking just slightly off camera (at one point, the film producer addresses the camera directly) and discussing mostly their professions and jobs, these characters offer information only tangentially related to the narrative. Not only do these interviews then break the progression of the story in a playful manner (are we watching a documentary or a fiction film?), but that address (almost) into the camera lens provides the interviewees with a strong and direct presence the main characters lack. The film's structure further evinces a sense of playful contingency and indeterminacy. The different subplots intersect throughout the film, but, despite its frame story, they never achieve a complete structural convergence or a unitary effect. The fragmentation of the narrative concurs aesthetically with the film's employment of distinct genres—horror (Ofek and Madmony actually invited a different filmmaker to direct the “trash” scenes), melodrama, and comedy.41 Thematically, we should note that various scenes in this film alter their meaning as they are recast in the context of another subplot. For example, a seemingly innocuous phone conversation the mother Na'ima is having while her husband prepares for his trip to New York is revealed in a later scene (a different subplot) to be a hushed conversation she is having with Ezra Tawil to set the time for their rendezvous. Similarly, the film's leitmotifs of absence, breakage (the picnic table keeps falling apart), elusiveness, circularity, and chance further underscore its postmodern stance. This is evident in some of the film's key scenes, including the above-mentioned “miss” at the airport. In another scene, Na'ima buys a chicken, and, back at home, she realizes that it is missing some of its organs (the heart!). Her determination to find the negligent butcher ultimately leads her to the supplier—Ezra Tawil. Despite our high expectations for their reunion, what follows reveals the futility of this rendezvous. I suggest that the film's resort to postmodernist expressions can be explicated in light of Hamid Naficy's (2001) observation that, although Page 84 →accented cinema is often modernist, “when the grand return to the homeland is found impossible, illusory, or undesirable the postmodernist semiosis set[s] in” (27). It is in this context that we ought to understand filmmaker Yossi Madmony's (quoted in Rona Koferboim 2003) provision of the film's thesis—“in this movie people relish their past and strive to re-create it in their present lives. It's a poignant attempt because it is doomed to fail” (44). In this film, as we shall see, the impossibility of the return to Iraq is construed on both political-national grounds and cultural hindrances. The postmodern-inspired notion of the futility and irony involved in the effort to fixate, re-possess, and reconnect with the past or even to narrate it is beautifully captured in one of the film's early scenes, when, at the Center for the Heritage of Iraqi Jews, Haim stumbles into the documentary filming session about Ezra Tawil's legacy. Ofek, the codirector of The Barbecue People, plays the role of the filmmaker shooting the documentary about Iraqi Jewry. Haim begs the documentary director to let him prove that Ezra is an imposter and that instead of joining the Zionist underground movement in Baghdad “he messed around with women.” The filmmaker cannot determine whose the “real” story is, Haim's or Ezra's, and asks his research assistant to talk to Haim and cull more details. But as mentioned earlier, the only person who could corroborate Haim's version of the story, Za'arur, has long been dead. This early scene sets up the struggle over truth, memory, and the history of the Iraqi-Jewish community. By withholding conclusive proof about the different accounts of the past, the film underscores the invented and constructed nature of historical narratives. In Foucauldian terms, it is clear that historiography is

related to power in this film; Haim accuses a museum official of preferring to have Ezra Tawil's version of the story because the latter has donated large sums of money to the museum. The diegetic references to language and music underscore the irony involved in the attempted return to the past. The only Arabic employed in this film is the voice-over of Haim's Iraqi friend Za'arur. In a letter he wrote to Haim years ago, Za'arur goaded his friend to join him in New York “where they can speak Arabic without being ashamed and live among people like them.” Haim, though, never joined his friend in America. As suggested in earlier discussions, Iraqi-Jewish music is hardly recognized or appreciated in Israel; in this film, people find it difficult to even pronounce properly the name of the instrument Haim plays (qanun, with a guttural Q sound). All these might elicit a sense of emergency for recovering the past; however, within the context of The Page 85 →Barbecue People these features further implicate the problematic, if not contrived, nature of the attempt to unearth it. This impossibility is starkest in the bunker scene where the son scolds his father for cherishing his Iraqi homeland; when the father listens on his radio to Arabic music, the son explodes, “I'm fed up. Go back to Iraq.” Later, the instant death of the father as he emerges from the bunker is meant to signify that “there is no going back” (just as for Haim there is no going back to visit his friend Za'arur). Importantly, the father and son in the bunker scene are played by two Palestinians, and the veteran Palestinian actor Makram Khouri is cast in the role of Ezra Tawil. Supplanting/displacing the Iraqi Jews with Palestinians (which, at least partially, flies in the face of historical /political realities; as indicated earlier, many Mizrahim were settled in the villages and towns previously inhabited by Palestinians) and one dialect with another attests to the film's championing of a postmodern stand regarding the slippery and fluid nature of all identities and the untenability of authentic roots. In our interview (May 12, 2004), Ofek explained the choice of Arab-Palestinian actors on the grounds that one cannot find an authentic young Iraqi Jew (e.g., those who can speak Arabic) as the script calls for. In our interview, Ofek mentioned that the other motivation for the choice of Arab-Palestinian actors was to effect an ironic reading of the bunker scene. When father and son hear the radio broadcast announcing the UN partition vote that called for an independent Jewish state, they shout ecstatically, “We have a state; we have a state!” The irony is clearly induced by having Palestinians (as actors) celebrate the creation of Israel, which for their people is considered the Nakba—catastrophe.42 Returning to the scene in the museum where the truth about the past is debated, it is important that, in the final analysis, the history/historiography of the Jewish underground movement in Iraq is determined by postmemory—the reconstructed and speculative story of the filmmaker and his research assistant, both members of the younger generation. As in other films I have discussed in this chapter, the reconstruction and reinvention of events are the filmmakers’ guarded way of approaching the past; fractured and contested experiences in The Barbecue People are then offered to supplant a simplistic and nostalgic return in time. There are two main direct and elaborate references to life in Iraq and, specifically, to the need to preserve Iraqi heritage. Significantly, though, both are mediated through cinema (within the film diegesis) and are, therefore, highly constructed. The first one is the above-mentioned film about the underground Zionist cell in Iraq that Ofek (as a persona in the film) Page 86 →directs for the Center for the Heritage of Iraqi Jews, and the other is the construction of a movie house emulating the old al-Wataniya theater of Baghdad. Ironically, it is only due to the “revisiting” of the old movie theater that the estranged lovers can get back together (albeit for only one night). Put differently, the past is accessible here only through this dual fantasy—the screening of (the fictive) Gone with the Wind in the fantastic “Israeli” al-Wataniya. The character of the old stranger in the park—the son who survived the shelling of the bunker forty years earlier—is also telling in the context of the film's treatment of the past. This old man stands out precisely because of his highly constructed and stylized portrayal. First, his is the only story employing a voice-over (although parts of it may be interpreted as part of a conversation he had with Tikva). This device can be formulated as a nondiegetic construction on top of the overall constructiveness within the film's diegesis. Similarly, as a young man hiding with his father, he appears in black and white; this chromatic device, which significantly appears again only in the fantastic images of Gone with the Wind, underscores the uncanny and fictive features associated with this character. Reminiscent of Hirsch's (1996) discussion of Boltanski's art, the abstraction of this stranger is

furthered when we consider that he is the only one of the film's main characters who is not named. Again, this story of the old man intimates that resorting to contrived means, mediation, and distance, rather than to the immediacy of the “real,” is the necessary condition to reach some closure in connecting with the past.

Conclusion Most of the films discussed in this chapter engage relationships between (grand) parents and children, oftentimes within the filmmaker's own family. The rather unusual recurrence of this phenomenon begs for further attention. In his discussion of hyphenated identities in An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy (2001) distinguishes between films that render nativist relations and those that proffer constructivist and contestatory relations. In the nativist employment of the hyphen, vertical and often familial links (e.g., descent-relations and roots) are underscored, while the contestatory usage of the hyphen operates horizontally, “highlighting consent relations, disruption, heterogeneity, slippage, and mediation” (16). Seemingly, the sheer emphasis on the (grand)parents’ lives in the Arab world prods us to read these texts as “nativist.” Yet, in accordance with Marianne Hirsch's work, I pointed to the prevalence of Page 87 →mediation, virtual representations, and invented histories in the works of secondgeneration Mizrahi filmmakers. Indeed, this is another facet of the argument I made at the beginning of the chapter regarding the intricate connections between essentialist and constructivist positions. Whereas by their emphasis on parent/child relationships the structural frameworks of this relatively large body of films imply the propagation of nativist/essentialist notions, the narrational materials and motifs that charge that framework—irony, absence, and reenactment—testify to the contestatory/constructivist feature of Mizrahi identity. Drawing upon Naficy's (2001) “politics of the hyphen,” this chapter explored the problematics of the “Arab-Jew” construction—its promise and limitations. Most noticeably, perhaps with the exception of Bayit, the cinematic construction of an Arab-Jewish identity in these films does not evince a celebratory pastiche. Rather, it is marked by “double consciousness,” or, to borrow Naficy's assertion about one of the possibilities of hyphenated identities in ethnic cinema, it offers “a divided mind, an irrevocably split identity, or a type of paralysis between two cultures” (2001: 16). This conceptualization guided my analysis of the construction of the other within—the Mizrahi—in relation to the other without—the Arab—where emphasis was put on cultural features. Alternatively, the following chapter will analyze the cinematic rendering of the Mizrahim vis-à-vis the hegemonic center and their emplacement in the geographical, ideological, and sociopolitical margins of Israeli society. The chapter will advance my earlier proposition that the two sets of relations—Mizrahi versus Arab (in terms of identity and culture) and the Mizrahi versus the normative center (in terms of place and power relations)—are interrelated.

NOTES 1. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990: 224). 2. See, for example, Diana Fuss (1989), Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), and Paul Gilroy (1993). 3. Fuss (1989) is interested in the signification and formation of essentialist positions. She professes that an inquiry into “essence” as a sign or construct may enhance our understanding of groups’ discourse and power relations. In and of itself, essentialism is neither good nor bad, progressive nor reactionary, beneficial nor dangerous. The question we should be asking is not “is this text essentialist (and therefore ‘bad’)?” but rather, “if this text is essentialist, what motivates its deployment?” How does the sign “essence” circulate in various contemporary critical debates? Where, how, and why is it invoked? What are its political and textual effects? (xi)Page 88 → 4. Based on Judith Butler's (1993) work, “performance of identity” suggests that an individual or a group identity is articulated or construed not for what it supposedly is, but by the conduct, preferences, and enactment pertaining to that individual or group. Butler's intervention with “performativity” (with an emphasis on gender) has become a staple in conceptualizations where ontology gives way to reenactment and citationality—the nonessentialist identity that is rendered through the act of summoning and through its relations to other nonessentialist identities. To explain and exemplify her notion of summoning or citation, Butler states that a law is not pre-given; rather, it is constituted upon its enactment, for instance, when a

judge cites it. 5. In her essay, Aleksandra Ålund uses the construction of “the stranger” in Sweden and in Europe in general to point to the detrimental effects of multiculturalism based on the designation/adoption of cultural roots to differentiate between ethnic groups. “The cultural has acquired an independent role. Cultural explanations in their bare and distorted form have colonised the social by means of culturalism. The social space has been reduced to a site for the production of identities or merely differentiated entities. But it is usually not acknowledged that the social struggle continues through the cultural” (1995: 319). 6. See also “Epistemology of Mizrahiness in Israel” in Mizrahim in Israel (Hever, Shenhav, and MotzafiHaller 2002). 7. For related arguments about the formation of Mizrahi collective identity based on postimmigration realities, see Sami Shalom Chetrit (2004a, 2010) and Ella Shohat (2001b, specifically 68). 8. For a discussion of the role that shared experiences and language have played in the formation of Mizrahi identity, see Shohat's (1999) subsection “The Making of Mizrahi Identity” (15–18). 9. In the chapter “Oppositional and Insurgent Israeli Hebrew Literature,” Yerach Gover (1994) makes a similar claim regarding certain trends in the writings of Mizrahi authors. Considering that “the term Arab Jew does not officially exist in Israel,” the oppositional Mizrahi writing offers then a challenge to the widespread and dominant discourse where “the term Ashkenazi or Ashkenazim is synonymous with Israeli” (125–26). 10. “Ashkenazi Zionism” is employed by some Mizrahi scholars, such as Chetrit, who critique Ashkenazi hegemony, inter alia, due to its problematic subordination of the Mizrahi to the Zionist enterprise. Often the suggestion is not that there is a counterpart Mizrahi Zionism but rather that a Zionist stand and active or conscious Mizrahiness are incompatible, a topic to which I will return in the next chapters. 11. Despite my efforts, I could not obtain a copy of this film. My references are, therefore, based on secondary sources, including Patricia Erens's “We Are All Arab Jews in Israel: An Interview with Igaal Niddam” (Niddam 1979/80), “We Are All Arab Jews in Israel” (1979/80), Yehuda Stav's (1979) “A Bridge for Understanding with the Arabs,” and Nathan Gross's (1979) “Orientation on the Orient.” 12. Interestingly, even Tunisian postcolonial Jewish theorist Albert Memmi rejects already in 1974 the hyphenated identity marker “Arab-Jewish” (in Yehouda Shenhav 2006: 154). See also Memmi's “Who Is an Arab Jew?” (1975). For Memmi, this juxtaposition of identities is a naïve and misleading attempt to color positively the lives of Jews in the Arab/Muslim world.Page 89 → 13. The showing of We Are All Arab Jews in Israel in spring 2002 was part of an initiative, Sfat Em (“Mother Tongue”), consisting of an exhibit, conference, and screenings of Mizrahi films. The purpose of this initiative was precisely to bring to the fore that which has been repressed and marginalized in Mizrahi cultural identity. For more, see Yigal Nizri's (2004) “Eastern Appearance/Mother Tongue: A Present that Stirs in the Thickets of its Arab Past.” 14. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History” (1989: 7). 15. See Chetrit's (2004a, 2010) chapter 4, “The Old Crown and the New Discourse: The Era of Radical Awareness—1981 to the Present Day,” for his analysis of the connection between the increasing support of Mizrahim for Israel's right-wing parties and the political coercion to which they have been subjected to prove their loyalty, their “anti-Arabness.” 16. “Taqasim” is a Middle Eastern musical genre characterized by instrumental improvisation on a melodic mode. 17. The catchy video cover reads, “[The musicians] return to conquer the stage in a land that never recognized them.” 18. The sense of finality is also conveyed on the distributor's website: “One moment before it is too late, they [the performers] return to the stage…” (http://www.third-ear.com/p_prod.aspx?id=2447l). 19. Interestingly, in a manner similar to Duki Dror's frustration and then resolution in My Fantazya, in Mama's Couscous (Serge Ankri, 1994), the filmmaker's mother facilitates the conception and the closure of the film. In the film's opening part, Ankri reflects on the first scenes he has been shooting for his film; he seeks a cohesive narrational theme and regrets that thus far the film is “too didactic.” When he arrives late one day for his mother's couscous treat, it dawns on him that his mother's couscous is precisely what his film needs: “[I realized that] my movie is right here under my nose, in my house.” 20. The voice-over quoted here is a translation of the original Hebrew version; the English voice-over

version is slightly different. 21. Another association between the Gulf War and the Iraqi community of Israel that is assumed within the film is the uncanny coincidence that the Israeli city of Ramat Gan, which was hit the hardest by Scud missiles during the Gulf War, used to have a predominantly Jewish Iraqi population. A humorous take on this coincidence suggested that, in that war, Saddam Hussein was taking revenge on the Jews who had abandoned his country four decades earlier. 22. The language issue of Rami Kimchi's mother is broached again in Travels with My Brother (Masotai im ai, 1997), the first documentary in the trilogy Kimchi made about his family. The filmmaker tells us that, in Egypt, his mother spoke Ladino at home, Arabic outdoors, and French in social gatherings. 23. In my reading of Pierre Nora's (1989) “sites of memory” (lieux de mémoire), the dilemma of nonconstructed memories is a moot issue. When Nora employs “environments of memory” (milieux de mémoire), he clearly refers to a particular kind of memory, one that mostly lies outside our common usage of the term. Real memory in those often archaic societies is embedded not in reflection but in the absoluteness of people's lived experiences and their iterative rituals. Although not Nora's conceptualization, I would suggest that, in his rendering of real memory, we can identify Page 90 →the collapse of the epistemic distance between subject and object, between the act of conjuring up a memory and the reenacting of the object or event. Arguably then, the “realness” of these memories lies less in their being nonconstructed than in their totality. 24. In his polemical critique of the obsession with documentation in the attempt to recover one's roots, Nora (1989) states, “Following the example of ethnic groups and social minorities, every established group, intellectual or not, learned or not, has felt the need to go in search of its own origins and identity. Indeed, there is hardly a family today in which some member has not recently sought to document as accurately as possible his or her ancestors’ furtive existences” (15). 25. The film was released in Israel as ta Yisba Sba (in Moroccan Arabic). 26. The film was released in Israel as Gole Sangam (in Persian). 27. Samir was Sami Michael's nickname during the time he was a member of the Jewish-Communist underground in Iraq. The film will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter and in chapter 5. 28. “Maktub aleik” is an Arabic idiom meaning “It's written in your fate” or “That's your destiny.” 29. The Mossad is Israel's Intelligence Service, the equivalent of the American CIA. 30. Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (Cook 2005: 2–3). 31. Marianne Hirsch (1996) employs here Nadine Fresco's articulations about the relations between exile and identity. 32. Interviews on June 8, 2004, and June 17, 2004. 33. Naficy (2001: 213) employs “slipzone” as a reference to accented films’ indeterminacy. See also my discussion in the next chapter. 34. Arjun Appadurai's coinage is indebted to Fredric Jameson's “nostalgia for the present” (quoted in Appadurai 1996: 29–30), which captures the notion that nostalgia for the “past” is embedded in the rise of new sensibilities and subjectivities in the present postmodern era. Because of its derisive connotation, I prefer to avoid “armchair nostalgia,” another term that is often used in this context. 35. The stories of second-generation Mizrahim can be read as an Oedipal drama par excellence. As Raz Yosef (2010) maintains in his analysis of Rami Kimchi's Cinema Egypt and Beni Torati's Desperado Square (a film I will discuss in detail in chapter 3), “[these films] are melancholic Oedipal fantasies of heterosexual Mizrahi men, of the second-generation, who restage the cultural loss of the mother by appropriating the father figure” (161). In this context, Yosef attends to the hypermasculine outlook Mizrahi protest movements such as the Israeli Black Panthers opted for, precisely to displace what was perceived as the passive, subjugated, and acquiescent immigrant father. See also Yosef's discussion in “Restaging the Primal Scene of Loss” (2006). 36. In Lacanian articulation of Roman Jakobson's language theory, metonymy is equated with displacement—the syntagmatic (horizontal rather than vertical) relations between two words that are associated by occupying the same lingual function (see Jacques Lacan 1970: 113–15, 119–20). For Lacan, the desire is metonymical (137); like the literary figure of style, it defers meaning or closure—desire is never fulfilled (one object is replaced/displaced by another) just as a metonymy does not lead to the signified.Page 91 →

37. Shmulik Duvdevani (2010) also attends to this sequence but explores it in a context different than mine. For Duvdevani, in ’66 Was a Good Year for Tourism Goren's display of a masculine position is a part of the filmmaker's stratagem to exculpate Israeli militarism on the grounds of the Jewish people's continuous victimization (187). By relating victimization to power, Duvdevani suggests, the filmmaker can absolve himself from any responsibility for the effectuation of that power. 38. Interviews on June 8, 2004, and June 17, 2004. 39. This discussion employs Sigal Eshed's (2002) analysis of Bayit and My Fantazya, specifically her references to the manner in which television images of the Gulf War instigate in these films a query about the Arab versus Israeli/Jewish identity and the connection between the elusive nature of the virtual images and the futility of the attempt to define/identify “home.” Although I concur with Eshed's assertion that the two films eschew simple answers to the last query, my discussion here points mainly to two rather different modes and positions the two films employ. 40. David Ofek and Yossi Madmony based their film on the popular Israeli television series Bat Yam-New York, which they created in the 1990s. 41. See Yair Raveh, “Hatikva Skews” (“Shipude Hatikva”) (2003: 50–51). 42. Clearly, the casting compatibility in The Barbecue People might also imply commonalities between the Mizrahi and Palestinian subjugated collectives, a topic to which I will return in chapter 5.

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THREE The Mizrahi Space In its most extreme formulation, postmodernist thought proposes the de-centering or death of the subject whereby identities and space are defined in phenomenological, relational, and contingent terms rather than ontological or categorical ones. Thirdspace and hybridity, the staples of this theoretical mode to which the following discussions attend, are often associated with playfulness, “in-betweenness,” and becoming; they are thought to have liberatory qualities and are couched in celebratory terms.1 Yet, this chapter will explore how postmodernist thought of the kind limned here also seeks to map the unstable, contingent, and playful dominion of Thirdspace and hybridity within a discursive sphere that recognizes power disparities, displacement, and difference. Along this trajectory, the spatial positioning of the Mizrahim in the realm of their communal and national web of affiliations is the focus of this chapter. Addressing it will guide our examination in this study of the relations between Mizrahi positionality—the way the Mizrahi group is defined and situated—and the emergence of a new Mizrahi subjectivity. I will initially discuss films that accentuate the fluidity and porousness of the ethnic space. Pointing to the shortcomings of the performative/postmodernist rendering of the Mizrahi space, the core of this chapter engages the implosion of the postmodern stand both in regard to the performance of identities (the topic with which I concluded the previous chapter) and Thirdspace. In line with this analysis, I will finally turn to an examination of films in which the Mizrahi space is constructed as distinct and insular, and of the Israeli film institutional structure that, to an extent, impels this distinct Mizrahi space. Page 93 → In his work, Edward Soja deliberately avoids a conclusive definition of “Thirdspace”;2 for him, this coinage implies more than merely a cumulative effect or synthesis between what he calls Firstspace—the “real” material world we perceive—and Secondspace—the imagined and constructed representation of spatiality or the world as we conceive it.3 Soja often employs Thirdspace interchangeably with “lived space” or “spaces of representation” to allude to its physical and imaginative qualities and to the social fabric in which it is implicated. Since Thirdspace shuns the either/or formulations, it has to be drawn from a different logical or psychic realm. Hamid Naficy (2001) builds upon Soja's Thirdspace and relates it to exilic/accented cinema. Consequently, he employs the term “slipzone” to address accented films’ play with open and closed chronotopes (the former often corresponds to home, the latter to exile), the experienced and the imagined, the private and the public. This postmodernist articulation clearly sidesteps notions of authenticity and origins: “In this slipzone of simultaneity and intertextuality, original cultures are no longer fixed. They are presented not discretely but in a structure of play of sameness and difference, of authenticity and translation” (213). In a manner similar to the construction of space and subjects, the text itself is constituted only in its referentiality (citationality) to and within other texts. The previous discussion of David Ofek's Bayit suggests that the concept of house/home of the film is precisely this Thirdspace or slipzone. The space this film's characters occupy becomes a blurry inside/outside zone; an open and closed chronotope. Articulations about origins are supplanted in this film by performativity—the virtual reality on the television screen, the filmmaker's/son's ludicrous dancing to the putatively traditional Jewish-Iraqi songs, and the conclusion of the film, which eschews all notions of discrete identities. As I will discuss later, future and becoming, rather than past or being, take precedence in this postmodernist rendering of the Mizrahi space and the communities it envelops. If in Bayit Thirdspace is created by the exaggerated and played-upon aspects of ethnicity, it is the meager references to ethnicity that form Thirdspace in Passover Fever (Leilsede, Shemi Zarhin, 1995). The film takes place on Passover's eve as Yona and Michael's children and their families join the parents for the holiday feast. The film's rich tapestry of characters and stories is forced into the space of the parents’ grand house—the single locale in which the entire film is set. Other than a few Page 94 →subtle, extraneous, and inconsequential allusions to the parents’ Mizrahi origin—one short phrase in Arabic that the mother utters (shu sar?— what's going on?), a

comment about the mother's knowledge of Turkish, and the fact that some of the dishes served are Middle Eastern—the house is a “realandimagined”4 space where people can share feelings of love, care, longing, grieving, disappointment, and joy, but express or reveal virtually nothing about ethnic identities.5 The decontextualization of space in Passover Fever concurs with the film's strong sense of fantasy. In the midst of an emotional drama between Yona and Michael, the suffering of their bulimic son Shai, and a nearly fatal accident involving one of the grandchildren, a flower bouquet magically floats in the air and, later, snow falls at a time of year when snow has never fallen. Finally, the casual employment of a mixed Mizrahi/Ashkenazi cast for this Mizrahi family, the multiplicity of accents, and the house's indistinct décor are in accordance with the Thirdspace principle of blurring or traversing rigid boundaries. Importantly, the house is not a microcosm of Israeli society as some might be tempted to suggest; rather, it is a highly constructed realm with rules and logic of its own, and, therefore, it is arguably precisely the space that allows for the elision of ethnicity.6 It is here that one becomes suspicious of the use of Thirdspace in this film. I will attend to the problematics of postmodern playfulness in the next section, but already at this point we should wonder, why is it a Mizrahi family that the film locates in the most luxurious villa Israelis could imagine? Why is the area where the villa is located never identified or more broadly situated? What does it mean, then, that in addition to the film's social and ethnic limbo, the characters are forced to perform in a spatial limbo? Whereas Passover Fever constructs Thirdspace as a possible alternative to the space often associated with Mizrahi communal life, Savi Gavison's Lovesick on Nana Street (Hole ahava be-shikkun gimmel, 1995) starts off with a more conventional Mizrahi space. Although the film is set in Kiryat Yam on the outskirts of the city of Haifa (the “center” of Israel's northern region), the place is depicted as one of Israel's derelict and indistinct development towns that are populated mostly by Mizrahim. The film's iconography immediately marks the neighborhood where the film is set as a part of the periphery—the charmless, gray housing projects (shikkunim), the rows of apartments dotted with small windows, the laundry drying in public areas between apartment blocks, and the place's often shabby inhabitants. Similarly, the inclusion of the word shikkun in the Page 95 →film's Hebrew title is an intended usage of what potentially signifies “second Israel”—poverty, unemployment, and crime. The film features the bachelor Victor who is a mix of the slacker, the village fool, and a (Mizrahi) nebbish. But Victor also manages to operate single-handedly a popular pirate cable television station from the apartment he shares with his mother, where he airs mostly tearjerker Middle Eastern melodramas and pornographic films. (The existence of this pirate cable station also helps us situate this film in the early 1990s, a time that witnessed a burgeoning in the operation of these stations.) Victor rents the films from a local video store and reads to his viewers the films’ synopses off the video covers. Lovesick opens with a prolonged ribald story in which Victor uses graphic language to share with his audience of two elderly men a sexual experience he claims to have had. This pre-credits scene concludes when, just as Victor is fully immersed in his depiction of the woman he arouses and who is about to have her incredible orgasm, one of the old people has a fatal heart failure. This scene sets the pattern for the rest of the film—performativity, fantasy, and desire are disrupted by the intrusion of “reality.” And yet, since the former are predicated on a circular and nonconsummated movement (like the climax that is missing in Victor's invented tale of sexual experience) they are destined to appear time and again. Victor's seemingly uneventful life is about to change when the dainty Ashkenazi actress Michaella moves from Tel Aviv to Kiryat Yam. The most conspicuous contrast between the two is apparent at the outset in the characters’ physiognomy: the dark, hirsute Victor versus the blonde, albino-like Michaella. More important, that first meeting between Victor and Michaella early in the film establishes the center/periphery thematic dyad. Looking at Michaella, Victor guesses she is from Tel Aviv, and, when she confirms that, Victor boasts of his acquaintance with that city—“Oh, I have been there” (read, “Oh, I heard about it”)—and he names two main streets there to prove it. This first meeting also contrasts Victor's “local time” with Michaella's “Tel Aviv time.”7 The sophisticated, urban Michaella is always conscious of time—she is on the move and often in a hurry. Conversely, for Victor, time is both expansive and dispensable; he expatiates on his (imagined) sexual experiences, he plays a pornographic film at the wrong time-slot when children are still watching television, and

(even before his hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital in the film's second part) he spends immeasurable amounts of Page 96 →time waiting for Michaella to fall for him. In contrast, Michaella and her boyfriend Gadi's conduct, and, specifically, their treatment of Victor's courting, clearly eschew such behavior. Victor's body language, his uncalled-for verbal intimacy, and the intrusion into the lives of others are constantly contrasted in this film with Michaella and Gadi's reserved behavior and their acknowledgment of boundaries. Constructed within the parameters of the Mizrahi/Ashkenazi sexual economy of the Bourekas—the romance between the affluent, cold, sophisticated Ashkenazi and the poor, warm, gregarious, and simple-minded Mizrahi—the film, then, ought to place the relationship between this newcomer and Victor at center stage. For Victor, he and Michaella are destined for each other; even when he realizes that Michaella lives with her boyfriend Gadi, a drama teacher at the local youth community center with whom she moved to the town. He is convinced that she desires him and that only Gadi keeps her forcefully away from him. The screening of the emotionally charged Middle Eastern films on Victor's station is another allusion to the Bourekas melodramas, but these narratives involving unrelenting and unrequited love and the suffering lover, which are characteristic of both the Bourekas and the films aired, gradually implicate Victor's own story.8 The seemingly romantic comedy of the Bourekas that characterizes the film's first part is aborted as Michaella becomes more assertive in her rejections of Victor's incessant courting. His obsession with Michaella lands him eventually in an asylum adjacent to his neighborhood, a narrational breaking point after which the film switches gears and genres to turn into a slow-paced emotionally moving drama about people trapped in their chimeric worlds. Sympathetic to Victor's heartbreaking love story, the asylum inmates warm up to him. One of them—Harfuf—has also been staying in the asylum because of his obsession with his unreciprocated love for a woman. Already early in the film, we hear his cries to his lost love Evelyn whom he knew years ago, but toward the end of the film we also witness the nightly outdoor ritual in which he lays down his belongings on a small table he carries with him and then desperately cries for her not to leave him. The film's flirtation with the Bourekas genre is in itself a statement about the preference of Thirdspace performativity over ontological or essentialist positions. Arguably, the asylum is cast in Lovesick as a Thirdspace /slipzone of sorts. The impossible love story between a Mizrahi bumpkin—Victor—and an elegant and beautiful Ashkenazi young woman—Michaella—can be (re)enacted precisely in the confining yet Page 97 →fantastic space of the asylum. When Victor makes love to his fellow inmate Levana, he blurs identities and traverses the boundaries separating the periphery from the center; he can call Michaella's name (not Levana's) in the midst of lovemaking, and Levana will “reciprocate” by assuring him that she is going to leave Gadi for him. Also, the asylum is fashioned as having peculiar “thirdspatial” qualities of the specific and the abstract, the somewhere and the everywhere, as both a microcosmic and omnipresent locale. For example, it is fenced and secluded, but, on the other hand, its presence extends far beyond its actual location as Harfuf's desperate cries to Evelyn echo every night in Kiryat Yam. Similarly, Victor's aired plea for Michaella's love and the meeting with her in the asylum are extended to all households connected to his cable station; his story is literally and figuratively augmented and projected onto other peoples’ private and public spaces. Boundaries are clearly transgressed in this film's shower scene when women patients amble into the men's showers. For Homi Bhabha (1994a), any production of meaning involves Third Space; “The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third Space…” (36). Bhabha's understanding of Third Space is then a step beyond Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualization of the speech act. Whereas for Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) communication is predicated on a synthetic dynamic of mutual borrowing among speakers and the construction of one's language on that of the interlocutor's, for Bhabha this act always already necessitates the new realm of Third Space. A key element implied in Bhabha's “act of communication” is its vulnerability; since postmodern Thirdspace eschews any conceptualization attempting to reduce communication to the unequivocal and unproblematic link between the signifier and signified, there is now much more room for miscommunication or “discommunication.” Indeed, the break in communication is one of Lovesick's main themes. In Bakhtinian terms, Victor does assume

the language of his interlocutor—Michaella—yet he fails badly (e.g., his accosting humor, which confuses more than amuses her). The other story of unrequited love is also marked by the frailty, if not failure of communication; Harfuf and Evelyn enjoy intimacy when, finally, she pays a surprising visit to him and only the asylum fence separates them, but Evelyn's words and questions about his well-being hardly reach Harfuf, who returns to his habitual ceremony of calling her name into the darkness of the night, Page 98 →thus preferring to express his love for an unapproachable, fetishized Evelyn rather than the one who now seeks his company. Lovesick literalizes the breakage involved in human communication in the scene where Michaella deigns to visit Victor in the asylum and listen to him. For the first time in the film, Michaella is positioned (seated) next to Victor, not against him, and in contrast to Michaella, who now becomes rather garrulous, Victor cannot utter a word. When the asylum inmates sense that Victor is not getting his love message to Michaella across, havoc ensues as one of them begins to wreck all he can put his hands on, and Michaella has to be rushed out by the staff. If direct, face-to-face communication is doomed to fail, what do we make of mediated messages? To return to Bhabha's quotation above, I would argue that mediated communication epitomizes the condition of Third Space. Media are central to the configuration of “spaces of representation”; like Soja's (1996) terms of Thirdspace, the realms media create and employ are the loci where subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, structure and change, intersect and, therefore, I would add, they are implicated by echoing, split, and reflexivity. When Victor airs his desperate love message for Michaella from the asylum, the whole place turns into a (sound) stage—its inhabitants and objects are positioned strategically for an increased effect for the film Lovesick itself and for the aired love message. Likewise, the real-life film director Dan Wolman is cast in Lovesick as a filmmaker inmate who deems Victor's tragedy most suitable to be made into a film “because it is a story that contains both love and drama.” In addition to the film's aforementioned play with the Bourekas, it is noteworthy that the diegetic space of Lovesick is a playfield where events/scenes are replicated and reproduced time and again during the course of the film. The town's residents, who in the film's first part are mostly inhospitable to Victor, metamorphose into a sympathetic crowd debating Victor's predicament in public when his love message is aired. This crowd scene of the people engaged with Victor's “real-life” melodrama is visually fashioned after (namely, mimicking) a previous scene in which these people gather down the street to listen to the sounds of a woman panting while having sex in one of the apartments above. An intertextual analysis of Lovesick enables us to take this chain of allusions and cinematic quotations even further. In the former street scene where the crowd follows the shadow image of the panting woman as it moves from one window to another, the mise en scène and lighting conjure up the crowd scene in Vittorio de Page 99 →Sica's Miracle in Milan (1951) where the people, cold and shriveled, try to warm themselves by following a ray of sun as it is cracking through the clouds. A more concrete form of the translation and interpretive play is evident in the introductory notes that precede the films’ screening on Victor's cable station. The original film is often in Turkish or Arabic, and Victor reads to his viewers the synopsis in Hebrew. When Victor is in the hospital and his mother takes over the cable station operation, she reads the film notes in Moroccan Arabic and, finally, when a local Russian family is watching Victor's broadcast love plea, one of the family members translates Victor's text into Russian for the benefit of his family members. These cultural translations taking place in the asylum's Thirdspace render what, according to Bhabha (1990b), is “a way of imitating, but in a mischievous, displacing sense—imitating an original in such a way that the priority of the original is not reinforced but by the very fact that it can be simulated, copied, transferred, transformed, made into a simulacrum” (210). Page 100 →

The Collapse of Postmodern Playfulness: The Redrawing of Ethnic Boundaries Postcolonial scholars have warned us against misguided celebratory conceptualizations of hybridity and Thirdspace and have attended instead to the power play they involve and to their material staples.9 I will address the shortcomings of “Thirdspace” in the context of Mizrahi cinema shortly; as for hybridity, the challenge to its putatively ephemeral nature is brought into relief in Bhabha's suggestion, “The importance of hybridity is that it bears the traces of those feelings and practices which inform it, just like translation” (1990b: 211). For Ella Shohat (1992), “A celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated in conjunction with questions of

hegemony and neo-colonial power relations, runs the risk of appearing to sanctify the fait accompli of colonial violence” (109). Although not explicitly mentioning hybridity in that particular discussion, Naficy (2001) concludes his study of accented cinema by pointing to the problematics of performance of identity as a free play by underscoring the sediments they leave behind. Intersecting and evolving identities are fashioned within regimes of power—“coercion, sanction, or reward”—and they leave their marks “at individual, group, or national levels that cannot with impunity be erased, ignored, discarded, or replaced with new improved ones—as some proponents of postmodern fluidity seem to suggest” (286). Regretfully, as Ella Shohat (1992: 110) suggests, “hybridity” has turned into a fuzzy catchall phrase, which, instead, should be situated in specific contexts. The Arab-Jew ethnic hybrid is rather distinct in comparison to other collective hybrids. Take, for example, the hyphenated/hybridized identities of “Italian-Americans.” Prior to the arrival of these Italian immigrants to the new continent, “American” did not exist as part of their identity marker. In contrast, in regard to the Arab-Jews, these people were Jews through and through in their lives in Arab lands even before their immigration in Israel. Yet, what calls for the employment of hybrid theories, and particularly Bhabha's conceptualization,10 in my discussion is that upon their immigration, those Jews from Arab lands were constructed as hybrids in a way that suggests that (their) Jewishness is distinct from (their) Arabness (and, in this view, it is beside the point that the appellation “Arab-Jew” hardly existed prior to the 1990s). To wit, my usage of “hybrid” does not allude to an ethnic collective's “actual” mixed origins but to the consignment of the hybrid to the psychic and physical margins of Israeli society precisely because it is understood to have this conjoined identity. Page 101 → In The Disenchantment of the Orient (2006), Gil Eyal makes a similar argument; relying on Yehouda Shenhav's (2005b, 2005c) reading of Bruno Latour's (1991/1993) “hybridization and purification” model, he demonstrates how the forces of hybridization and purification work on the terms bracketing the Arab-Jew hyphen.11 In Eyal's account, the Arab-Jewish hybrid is a Zionist invention—“Ben-Gurion was depicting the new [Mizrahi] immigrants as too close to the Arabs, as straddling the cultural boundary between Jews and Arabs…. In essence, he constructed them as Arab-Jews, an ambiguous hybrid challenging the state's integrity and character” (135).12 The objective then was to purify and disentangle the components of the hybrid. In line with Shohat's elaborate discussions of this issue already in the 1990s,13 Eyal's main thesis is that this “hybridization and purification” process resulted in the creation of divergent disciplines of knowledge about the “East”—the discipline for studying the Arabs (Orientalism) was designed to be distinct and separate from the study of the Mizrahim (Jewish Studies or Jewish History). Again, identifying certain truths as constructed or invented does not mean they are ephemeral and harmless.14 The “impossibility” or anomalous hybridity of “Arab-Jewishness”—having Arab (“Oriental” or “Eastern”) culture, but also Jewish ethnicity and religion (understood within the framework of Judeo-Christian principles of the West)—transpired in the 1950s, as we have seen, in consigning the Mizrahim to live in the margins of mainstream Israeli society, both figuratively and literally. Large numbers of these immigrants, in contrast to their fellow Ashkenazim, were settled away from Israel's social and cultural centers in “development towns” often located by the borders with neighboring Arab countries. The Mizrahim who are designated to exist in those physical and social margins illustrate what Bhabha deems the ambivalence toward, or even the fear of, the “subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (1994c: 86). In her discussion of intra-and extracinematic forms of hybridity, Laura Marks (1994) states, “Hybrids reveal the process of exclusion by which nations and identities are formed” (251). If for Marks the hybrid reveals exclusion, based on my discussions above I would argue that, in the context of Mizrahi cinema, the hybrid is constituted on exclusion (i.e., otherness) and that the seemingly oxymoronic terms I devise here—“hybridity of emaciation” or “zero-sum hybridity”—well characterize the condition of the Arab-Jew in Israel. What I mean by these terms is that whereas “hybridity” often alludes to an enriching and dialogical process in which groups’ identities transcend well-seated positional categorizations Page 102 →and whereby the subjects are thought to gain from these exchanges, in the case of the Mizrahi in cinema and without, hybridity has been predicated mostly on erasure

(e.g., the process of purification). Instead of a continuous dialogical process between old and new, there and here, Diaspora and Israel, the Mizrahim in contemporary cinema are often cast as shriveled hybrids; they move along a linear track grounded on zero-sum conditions where each nod to the new “Israeliness” necessarily entails the elision of aspects of one's past.

Sh'hur (a film by Hanna Azoulai-Hasfari, 1995)15 embeds this proposition in its structure and narrative. The film gets its name from what might be considered a ritual of black magic or sorcery (reminiscent of exorcism) that is practiced by some North African Jews. The mother of the family portrayed in the film performs sh'ur to protect her children from potential risks involved in their encounters with the outside world (such as the evil eye or the daughters’ loss of virginity before marriage) and to heal the ones who suffer from marital, sexual, or physical inflictions. In the opening of the film, set in the 1990s when the film was made, Heli (played by Azoulai-Hasfari) is in a television studio starring in her own show. Her occupation, demeanor with fellow workers, and, Page 103 →later, her luxurious apartment signify power and professional success. Heli's live show is interrupted when she receives a phone call from her older brother telling her that their ailing father has just passed away. On her way to the funeral, Heli picks up her autistic daughter and her sister Pnina, who has been in a mental institution for twenty years. Heli's anxiety about meeting her sister again after many years of estrangement derives from the fear that such an encounter would bring back disturbing memories and spark the repulsion she had toward Pnina from the period they lived in the same household in the south. (We later learn that Heli, or the name she went by in her childhood, Rahel, spurred her family to hospitalize Pnina by making up a vindictive story about her.) Sh'hur is structured around episodic returns to the heroine's childhood in the 1970s; these scenes reveal Rahel's strained and tumultuous relations with her blind father, superstitious mother, and siblings. That period constitutes the larger part of the film and ends when Rahel goes away from home to a prestigious boarding school in Jerusalem. I will return to the film's subversive structure in the next chapter, but suffice it to say here that the frame story that is set in the present and the inside story that takes place in the past are deemed irreconcilable; the present projects modernity and “Israeliness,” whereas the past signifies tradition (pre-modernity) and “Moroccan Mizrahiness.”16 In February 1995, the daily Ha'aretz dedicated a large section of its weekend supplement to featuring five Mizrahi professionals and some students in the Mizrahi-oriented school Kedma who express their views on the Mizrahi condition in response to the opening of Sh'hur in movie theaters.17 Hanna Azoulai-Hasfari (1995) felt obliged to respond; on the pages of the same daily, she reproached those who, in their assessments, deemed Heli's story in Sh'hur a success—a tale of a Mizrahi woman whose immersion in “first Israel” signifies the overcoming of obstacles and the accomplishing of an enriched self. She titled her response essay “I Came Amongst You Emaciated and Hungry” precisely to attest to the loss of what should have remained part of her (Heli's/AzoulaiHasfari's) identity, including family traditions, but has not. Heli—the TV star and second-generation immigrant, the one who according to the participants [in the discussion in Ha'aretz] deserves all the compliments for rebelling against her forefathers’ yoke, went against them and succeeded—is actually pathetic; she is pitiable in her spiritual and cultural impoverishment, much more than her “primitive” family is…. [She's a] result of an anomalous hybridization Page 104 →of East and West, a callous and thoughtless hybridization from the start. (1995: 32) Like Azoulai-Hasfari, Kobi Niv (1999: 173–75) makes it abundantly clear that Heli's perceived East/West hybridity is inscribed by privation and deficiency; he finds that in the original script Azoulai-Hasfari depicted Heli as a barren married woman whose unsuccessful efforts to conceive are attributed to psychosomatic problems. As Niv argues, the condition of this cripple (the term used in the script) is congruent with Heli's truncated body both in a dream she has (again, only in the original script) where she lacks her lower parts (womb and genitals) and in her profession as a television anchor, always hiding her lower body. Similarly, Heli's neurotic personality (e.g., being impatient with her own daughter and, oftentimes, seemingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown) is illustrative of Hamid Naficy's (2001) qualified “endorsement” of hybridity and performance of identity as empowering; the constant need to redefine one's identity in the exilic/ethnic context (and in the case of Heli, the erasure of her past) “produce[s] subjectivities and identities that are often more anxious and phobic than at-ease

and pleased” (270). “Hybridity of emaciation” is clearly informed by and resonates with the impossibility of restoring the enriching Arab-Jewish identity of the past, a topic I expounded on in the previous chapter. Seemingly, the mother Henriette in Rami Kimchi's Cinema Egypt is truly the beneficiary of life in the centers, peripheries, and intersections of Arab, French, Mediterranean, Jewish, and Israeli cultures. Yet Arabic, one of Henriette's native tongues, is excluded from the various languages Henriette has been using; it had to disappear from her cultural and language horizon in two contexts—once when Henriette's father forced her to go to a French school in Alexandria, away from her Egyptian home-village, and then again in Israel, where any traces of the Levant were expected to be erased. It is in this context that we better understand the son's/filmmaker's voice-over, “ever since she [my mother] matured, she distanced herself from anything Arab.” Importantly, to an extent, the filmmaker/son resorts precisely to that same strategy of “hybridization and purification”; this and other voice-over statements create a somewhat facile bifurcation of East and West. The erasure of the past as the prime characteristic of “hybridity of emaciation” or “zero-sum hybridity” is even more pronounced and unequivocal in My Fantazya. The years filmmaker Duki Dror's father has spent in Israel clearly have not instigated a dialogue between his Iraqi past and his Page 105 →present life. In his case, the psychic and cultural eradication of the years in Iraq (most blatantly, his refusal to talk about it) has not even been a process, but a rupture upon his release from the Iraqi jail and the ensuing emigration from that country. (Notably, this break from the Arab past should be understood within a broader context, specifically, the father's underground Zionist operations in Iraq and then his Zionist inclination in Israel.) Finally, those faintest of references to ethnic belonging regarding the Mizrahi family in the fantastic realm of Passover Fever are certainly yet another illustration of the same “hybridity of emaciation.” Indeed, the film's use of one phrase in Arabic and a few allusions to the mother's Sephardi cuisine constitutes a structuring absence for what might have been a dynamic rendering of Arab-Jewish culture but is instead imploded within the phantom of an unmarked or an “all-Israeli” family. In Lovesick, as we have seen, initially the cinematic construction of the asylum conjures up spatial hybridity, namely, Thirdspace. Importantly though, in the film's conclusion, the asylum resonates more with a Foucauldian institutional regime of power that sanctions and disciplines its subjects, and, in this sense, it proffers the purification of the hybrid Mizrahi-Ashkenazi space. Specifically, the last scene—which we may suggest is in general the most definite residue a film leaves behind—reinscribes identities and affiliations along ethnic lines. If, upon Victor's arrival at the asylum, borders are traversed and identities are confused, then, at the end, spatial boundaries are drawn again. Victor cancels his planned trip to Tel Aviv to see Michaella, who moved back to that city with her boyfriend Gadi, and he returns to the asylum, only this time he desires Levana for who she really is. Indeed, we may claim that instead of the Bourekas’ sexual economy, Lovesick renders an even more restrictive order—marginalized/Mizrahi and the dominating/Ashkenazi members of Israeli society are destined to inhabit two distinct and separate societal and geographic spaces.18 The Mizrahi Victor and Levana may bond only with people of their group (but exclusively in an asylum?); Michaella and Gadi, who cannot acclimate to life in the periphery, inevitably move back to the center, free of the nuisances or interferences of the overbearing periphery and its inhabitants.19 This spatial demarcation between the center and the periphery is most conspicuous in the films I discuss in the next section.

Cinematic Topos: The Inscription of Marginality So far, in attending to Mizrahi films, the focus has been on cinematic representations marked by some direct dialogue between periphery and Page 106 →center, Mizrahim and Ashkenazim. Although these films often conclude with the reinscription of ethnic identity differences and the demarcations of spatial boundaries, they nevertheless, at least initially, allude to or entertain the possibilities of porous identities and spatial fluidity. Whereas the films discussed thus far toy with Thirdspace, a realm in which both center and periphery are present—indeed, they are rendered in relation to each other—in the films I turn to here, the center has minimal or no presence in the film diegesis. For illustrative purposes, I will distinguish between two forms of such cinema. First, I will discuss films in which even though the Ashkenazi/center does not appear, it is present as an

ideological and discursive reference point the films address—a topos contrasted with the place of the Mizrahi. The next section, “Marginality as a Normative Space,” will focus on a more extreme cinematic position—films from which the center is altogether excluded; these amount to an effort to create for the Mizrahi a space away from and independent of the hegemonic Ashkenazi order and subjectification. In order to assess the dynamics and motivations for the construction of the center as a topos, it is useful to expound first on the significance of this term and to relate it to the Israeli media's treatment of the periphery. In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said distinguishes between the “geographical” Orient and the discursive one: “In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone's work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all of these” (177). Eli Avraham's (2003) study of Israeli media identifies a clear trend in the press that, ultimately, renders the periphery as a topos. In Ha'aretz, the highbrow daily that is often associated with Israel's institutional hegemonic power, Avraham finds the following: “There's no need to go thousands of kilometers east or south to get to the third world. It's right here, close to us, an hour from Jerusalem and two hours from Tel Aviv” (Ha'aretz, May 31, 1995, in Avraham 2003: 97) and “a third world, an hour and a quarter from Ramat-Aviv Gimmel” (Ha'aretz, April 3, 1996, in Avraham 2003: 97).20 In my film analysis here I employ Said's notion of the power relations embedded in referencing the other, but I choose to employ “topos” as an ideological construct in reference to the center rather than to the Orient or periphery. In other words, in my analysis of Mizrahi cinema, I focus on the modalities in which the Israeli center (mostly Tel Aviv) functions as a topos against which the Mizrahi periphery references and measures itself. Page 107 →Again, as implied in Said's formulation, this topos is mostly independent of the locations of the center /periphery in strictly geographical terms. The manner in which the periphery relates to the center as a topos elicits an inquiry about the depiction of “first Israel” by “second Israel”/“the Third World” and, specifically, the powerrelated motivations for such articulations of the center in films that otherwise omit any representation or presence of life outside the Mizrahi/peripheral community. Indeed, to be determinant, the center as a topos does not necessarily need to be material or explicit within a film's audiovisual diegesis; it can operate as a latent state of mind that is equally effective and powerful not only in the characters’ conduct but also as a narrational motivation for a film's unfolding story. The Ashkenazi/center may be almost fully absent in Sh'hur, but as Lubin (1999b) maintains in her analysis of the film, “the absence of Ashkenazi characters and Ashkenazi cultural life from the screen does not conceal or vitiate the power-relations in which the Ashkenazi [remains] the appropriating hegemony” (425).21 Similarly, in his critique of Sh'hur, Sami Shalom Chetrit (1999) posits that “only seemingly are there no Ashkenazim in the film. But they are there. All the time” (81). Other than his mention of the “blue shirt parade” (an allusion to an Ashkenazi-Zionist youth movement) in the film, Chetrit does not elaborate on this Ashkenazi presence. But Chetrit is likely referring to Ashkenazi-Zionism's structured presence below the film's surface—the scathing subjectification and interpellation the hegemony enacts and to which those living in the periphery acquiesce. A case in point is the fate of the family members in Sh'hur; with the exception of Pnina and another sister, all the siblings leave the house or desire to do so to escape the entrapment of life in the periphery. One of Rahel's sisters, Miriam, joins an Ashkenazi religious movement; the young brother Avram leaves for a kibbutz—an Ashkenazi establishment; the oldest brother Shlomo enrolls in the Sorbonne (but ends up not going); and Rahel/Heli enrolls in a prestigious school in Jerusalem whose goal is to “re-educate” students, mostly Mizrahim, from the periphery. Again, since these or other Ashkenazi institutions barely appear in Sh'hur, they become an ideological topos against which Rahel and her siblings define their future. Teenager Shlomi of the comedic Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi (ha-Kokhavim shel Shlomi, Shemi Zarhin, 2003) is the family cook and a congenial peacemaker in his pressure-cooker, somewhat dysfunctional Mizrahi family. Although two of his grandparents are Moroccan (another is of Iraqi origin), the domineering mother Ruhama dismisses anybody Page 108 →or anything Moroccan. (Ruhama, whose mother is Moroccan, corrects those who attempt to point to her own origin, asserting amusedly that she is from Tangier, not Morocco.) Shlomi's resilient and calm nature is interpreted by his mother as nature's compensation for his limited learning faculties. But at his

local school in northern Israel, a new teacher recognizes that he is a highly gifted student whose academic potential has so far been wasted. The teacher and the school's principal goad Shlomi into transferring to a prestigious school in Haifa. At the end of the film, Shlomi, who meanwhile finds his true love (a lass of Moroccan origin!), decides to leave the neighborhood and move in with his girlfriend close to his new school. In both Sh'hur and Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi, the intimation of betterment is always situated elsewhere, away from one's Mizrahi hometown. These two films underscore the topos-like qualities of the center into which the characters are about to embark with their new lives by marking the center as the periphery's binary opposite. The referential rather than the actual tangible qualities of Haifa are underscored when the principal drives Shlomi to visit the new school for the first time and a road sign—an indexical object—seen from the car reads “Haifa—24 kilometers.” Leaving the hometown, then, is not merely a concluding stage called for by the narrative order and logic; it is the result of a structuring order in which the periphery is understood only in terms of its distance from and relation to the Israeli center(s).22 In the interview for the DVD version of Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi, filmmaker Zarhin maintains that the film is more of a fable than comedy. Shlomi's windfall in the film's last part—having a charming and loving girlfriend, realizing that he possesses a genius-like aptitude, and getting ready to depart for the big city—clearly lends itself to reading this film as a fable or fairy tale. What is significant to our discussion here is that leaving the periphery for the big city/center is predicated on the frequent impossibility of this “betterment” in reality. Put differently, a story about a change of luck and the opportunity of leaving the periphery behind often defies real conditions and, thereby, it ought to take place in the fantastic realm of cinema. Shuli's Fiancé (ha-Baur shel Shuli, Doron Tsabari, 1997) offers a similar version of the Mizrahi salvation fantasy. In the film, the main character is Mazal, who, in an ironic incongruence with her name (“luck” in Hebrew), is anything but lucky. She is an unemployed divorcée who is staying with her young son Zohar (“glow” in Hebrew) at her parents’ place in Or Yehuda, one of the less-esteemed suburbs of Tel Aviv. The family members shun Mazal—she is charged with taking care of the house Page 109 →chores and is allotted the balcony as a bedroom for herself and Zohar. The film is set during one day—the eve of the 1977 elections when, for the first time in Israel's history, a right-wing party rose to power. On this day, the family is expecting Avner, whom they have never met before, to visit and propose marriage to Mazal's younger sister Shuli. In a somewhat convoluted comedy of errors, Ezra, who is selling ice cream off his truck, notices Mazal and without meaning to do so, finds himself in her house as he runs away from some riffraff right-wing zealots. Shuli is still asleep in her room when Ezra steps in, and the family mistakes him for Avner. Ezra finds an opportunity to tell Mazal that he is not Shuli's guy and, miraculously, offers to share his future with Mazal and to take her away to a place “where I'll turn you into a queen.” When Avner shows up, the scheme is revealed, and the older brother Niso physically assaults Ezra for this blunder. Mazal stands up to her family and announces that she is joining her man. In the film's last scene, Ezra, Mazal, and her son get into the ice cream truck and, from the outdoor television sets in the cafés they drive by, a news anchor declares the victory of Menahem Begin's Likud party in the elections. Kobi Niv (1999: 251–65) identifies three fairy tales the film intermixes: Cinderella, The Three Bears, and Sleeping Beauty. Asked by Niv about her preference for the fairy tale genre, Dorit Rabinian, the film's screenwriter and a renowned Israeli author, responded, “I prefer to plumb into fairy tales so that the fantasy remains intact and I don't have to be too close to the ground…. Realism frightened me, so I didn't want to deal with it” (quoted in Niv 1999: 275–76). Yet again, this fairy tale is not cast in a discursive limbo. Even if we were to agree with Niv that the film should be read as a metaphor for women's oppression (and liberation?), the broader communal and political context cannot be overlooked; it is rather significant that Mazal's salvation story takes place in the peripheral town of Or Yehuda, at the house of a Mizrahi family, and on the eve of historic elections. To an extent, the film flirts with the socialist-Zionist myth of salvation that prescribed the Mizrahim's dependence on the intervention of their saviors to redeem them from their social and cultural predicament.23 The Mizrahi disenchantment with the decades-long ruling of the Labor party and the sweeping Mizrahi support of the right-wing Likud party in the 1977 elections are often considered primary factors in this party's momentous political victory.24 But despite the rhetoric and appeals to the Mizrahi electorate from late prime minister Begin and other Likud leaders, they did little to improve the Mizrahi condition in the post-1977 Page 110 →era.25 I

would argue then that the setting of the film in 1977 and not in the present (Tsabari could have employed one of the more recent Likud election victories) is meant to have an ironic effect underscoring the illusory nature of the Mizrahi salvation as it was offered in the Likud's campaign then and in Zionist rhetoric for decades. Tsabari may have cast the Mizrahi denizens of the Or Yehuda cafés as ecstatic about the Likud victory, but from the perspective of the 1990s when the film was made, these hopes are revealed to be premature, if not naïve. Of all the films discussed here, Turn Left at the End of the World (Sof ha-olam smola, Avi Nesher, 2004) provides the most elaborate and intriguing construction of the Mizrahi space in relation to the Ashkenazi topos. This box-office hit is set in 1968 in an unidentified development town on the edge of the Negev desert and features two Mizrahi/Sephardi “clans”—Moroccan and Indian. The Moroccans, who were settled by the government in that place ten years earlier, are dismayed to realize that the “primitive blackies” who have just arrived in Israel are going to live in the shikkun across from them. For its part, the Indian family, and mostly the mother, is just as derisive of the others’ lack of basic mores. The film then has a twist—the clash of cultures is not so much between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, but within two incompatible Mizrahi clans. Despite the meager economic resources and the harsh living conditions in this town, both families attempt to maintain the façade of “high culture” associated with their countries of origin, or more precisely, with the culture of their previous colonizers. The Moroccan parents speak mostly French and hold to French etiquette, while the Indian family members speak English and cherish the petit-bourgeois way of life back in India.26 But early in the film the two adolescents—Nicole of the Moroccan family and Sara of the Indian one—become best friends and signal the thawing of the relations between the families. In a scene that marks the apex of this comity between the two clans, the local Moroccans, who thus far have disparaged the Indians’ obsession with cricket, join them in a historic match against a British team that deigned to play in the Israeli desert. Yet when the British unmercifully beat the local team and lead 68 to 0, havoc ensues as the Moroccans take out their frustration and anger on all “foreigners”—Indian immigrants and British players alike. The preparation for the game and its aftermath coincide with three personal stories of separation and grief. Nicole, who had romantic relations with her Tel Avivian teacher, is now disenchanted by this first lover of hers; the Indian father, Roger, terminates his affair with Simone, a titillating Page 111 →Moroccan widow (who also coaches Nicole on matters of love); and Nicole's mother, Jeannette, is diagnosed with incurable leukemia. Turn Left situates the center unequivocally as a topos, or, to employ Nesher's formulation, “a state of mind.”27 Mentions of Tel Aviv as the indexical opposite of the local town are strewn throughout the film—the handsome energetic Ashkenazi teacher who comes from Tel Aviv to teach for one year, magazines that feature the luminous media stars from the big city, and Nicole's impatience to leave for Tel Aviv as soon as she is done with school. Draft calls to the Israeli military that Sara and Nicole receive in the mail render another promise of life outside the stifling town; they both cherish the reward mandatory military service has to offer them—life away from their town. Similarly to the end of Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi, in which the titular character moves out to Haifa, to Sh'hur's main story, which concludes with Rahel leaving her family to join the boarding school in Jerusalem, and to Shuli's Fiancé's, last scene, with the couple's departure to start life somewhere else, at the closing of Turn Left, Sara leaves the development town. Situating these stories of departure from home exactly at the climactic end of each of these Page 112 →films, the move to the center(s) accretes symbolic meaning to suggest a breach between life in the periphery (shown throughout the films) and the promise of life elsewhere (rarely present in the films’ diegesis). The significance of the ending is all the more patent when we recall Aristotle's explication of the various narrational phases—if a beginning is “that which of necessity does not follow anything,” then an end is “that which naturally…follows something else but nothing follows it” (1942: 15–16). The ending in these films then becomes a point of breach or rupture between here and there, and between the conditions erstwhile and the (fantastic) promise of the future. As Avi Nesher indicated,28 the elision of the name of the place where the entire film is set is meant to make it any (development) town, or similarly, I would claim, to render it a “non-place.”29 When Nicole's mother returns from her diagnosis in Tel Aviv, a road sign at the entrance to the town indicates the distance to Tel Aviv. At the end of the film, another sign shows the distance to the southern city of Eilat and then, within the same shot, the Tel Aviv

road sign seen earlier reappears. The town, therefore, is defined by its distance from other localities, while the place itself is obscured (not having a name) but also forgone and forsaken. To borrow from the Visual Arts argot, this town is rendered as a “negative space”—an empty space in between objects that is defined by the contours of actual, real objects surrounding it. The “non-placeness” of the town is paradoxically inscribed precisely by the exclusive focus of the film on this one location that is secluded from the rest of the country; in panoramic shots of the landscape, the desert stretches as far the camera's eye can reach. When early in the film, Sara tells Nicole about her diary and the notes she is entering of her experiences in the new place, Nicole retorts dismissively, “Here you'll have only blank pages. Nothing happens here.” Similarly, the excessive use of warm colors and the anachronistic contemporary Israeli music played at the end of the film underscore this town's lacuna; they both defy the film's sense of a real place. Instead of the emplacement of the community, the film offers its displacement, its “non-placement,” and the absence of the town as an actual locality signifies the otherwise abstract topos as a real place. In Turn Left, the rendering of space as “non-place” is congruent with its “non-time”; the film's temporality is offered largely through references to world events that bracket the chronos of the town. One of the film's first scenes has a mention of the 1968 student riots in Paris, and, in the penultimate scene, at the moment when the mother slips into death, the radio is announcing the historic moon landing in 1969. This interpretation Page 113 →of the film's “time-warp” is supported by Nesher's statement that the death/landing scene is meant to mark an end of an era and the commencement of a new stage in humankind.30 Turn Left's local chronos is then being subordinated to historical (and historic) time alien to it and is therefore rendered inconsequential. To wit, it is the outside world, not the town's residents, that generates the narrative's chronologic genesis (that which happened to the community earlier is left unexplored) and that ultimately terminates the story/time of this local community. The film's unique address of a community sealed off in time and space—a “slipchronotope” between spatial and temporal markers—coincides with the overall cultural insularity of this Mizrahi community, namely, with its exclusion from the putative Israeli “melting pot.” To the extent that there is a sustained cultural exchange in Turn Left, it is solely between one peripheral ethnic group and another. Initially, the filmic setup of the bottle factory literalizes the notion of a melting pot; shots of new immigrants from various countries of origin working together are intercut with glass liquefied by fire. But then, this metaphor collapses—first, tensions arise between the “Indians” and the “Moroccans,” and later, as a strike erupts, bottle shards are strewn throughout, and the production line comes to a halt. Furthermore, the language-cultural mix the film offers—Moroccan-French for one family and Indian-British for the other—is not one that is created in the new land but already imported from the families’ countries of origin. Again, the film renders the “elsewhere,” in this case, the homelands of India and Morocco, as concrete places associated with “origins,” whereas the local town's qualities are derivative. In place of the Bourekas's ethnosexual economy with its particular Mizrahi-Ashkenazi exchanges (e.g., in marriages), Turn Left proffers a new order implicated by separation. The cricket game scene is indicative of this new order; the match starts with some unison and amity among the locals who face the British team, but as mentioned, ends with a mass quarrel between the Moroccans and the Indians. In addition to the return of the (Ashkenazi) teacher to Tel Aviv, and the return of Roger to his loving wife, the ethnic/cultural segregation in the film reaches its apex at the end of the film when Sara leaves the town to join the Israeli army, whereas following her mother's death, Nicole is bound to stay home and take care of the family. While the bond between the two initially triggered some cultural exchanges involving other characters, the separation between them is the final seal of segregation. The song over the film's last scene and the end credits reinforces this interpretation. Seemingly, Page 114 →the lyrics of “At the End of the World” are optimistic: “You would be able to forget all the bad days, …you would be able to open a new chapter in your life.”31 But every “would be able” is qualified by “even at the end of the world you will not be able to run away from yourself.” The possibility (fantasy?) of ethnic and cultural exchange “at the end of the world” slips off, and all that remains is the insular self. With that verse in the background, the film's last shot reveals Nicole being (en)trapped in between the two road signs, away from both Eilat and Tel Aviv. Notwithstanding the sweeping, nearly unprecedented success Turn Left enjoyed at the box office,32 numerous film reviewers critiqued it on grounds of its escapist treatment of real social and ethnic problems.33 Critiques often

alluded to Turn Left's affinity to the Bourekas films34 and, thereby, to its reinscription of the demeaning depiction of the Mizrahi. In this context, I would argue that, in one respect, this contemporary film is even more problematic than the Bourekas films of the 1960s and 1970s in its treatment of Israeli ethnicity. Turn Left does not pit Ashkenazim against Mizrahim, but rather Moroccans against Indians. The slurs and slanders one group aims at the other have a dual effect: they render the denigration of the Mizrahim self-evident because even they recognize it, and they free the empowered group from explicitly engaging in the criticism of the deprecated or “inferior” Mizrahi. And yet, based on the previous discussions in this chapter, and sidestepping the film's stereotypical representations, arguably, the film offers a somewhat progressive articulation of ethnic identities; instead of the pejorative “melting pot,” the film recognizes the incommensurability of ethnic identities, and thus it can even open an enriching discursive space for intragroup identity politics. To wit, the film challenges the construction of an allencompassing Mizrahi identity as it attests to the contrived nature of this construction. The Band's Visit (Bikur ha-tizmoret; al-Ar al-akhir, Eran Kolirin, 2007) also offers extensive grounds for the construction of the Mizrahi peripheral space, but in a surprising turn, this marginality is constructed vis-à-vis the Arab other or, as I would argue, against the “Ashkenazi Arab.” In the film's opening scene, eight members of the Alexandria police ceremonial band are lined up in their uniforms as they wait silently for their transportation from the Ben-Gurion Airport to the Arab Culture Center in Petah-Tikva where they are scheduled to perform the following day. Their van never arrives, and Tewfiq, a man of formalities and proprieties who is the band's commander, conductor, and director, decides they should go back to the terminal and inquire there about public transportation to the town.35 The bus drops them off, and, rolling their Page 115 →musical instruments behind them on the bumpy terrain, the band members stride in a military order from the bus station toward what looks like a listless and desolate small town in the Negev desert. In the only place that seems to be open, a modest tiny restaurant, the musicians meet Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), the Mizrahi owner. The Egyptian musicians soon realize that they arrived in the wrong place. The confusion stemmed from the proverbial mispronunciation of the P sound (which does not exist in Arabic) as B among Arabic speakers. At the airport, Tewfiq and his minions pronounced the name of the place as “bet-ha-tik-va” instead of “pe-tah-tik-va,” and when Khaled, the band's trumpeter and violinist, inquired about the bus to Petah-Tikva, he was directed to the bus to Bet-Hatikva. Willingly or grudgingly, a few members of this community give in to Dina's cajoling to host the band for the night. Despite his formal comportment and reluctance to impose, eventually, Tewfiq also acquiesces. In this setting, the band members and the hosts in this Mizrahi town enjoy an evening of leisure that this fairy tale36 depicts humorously and sensitively. That evening, Khaled goes with the local Pappi to the rollerskating rink; Simon the clarinetist Page 116 →joins a birthday party with the family of Itzik, Dina's helper in the restaurant; and Tewfiq and Dina go out to a restaurant. Most of these scenes reveal a measure of human interaction where one party imparts to its counterpart a lesson about life and its joys. At the end of the evening with Dina, the hitherto reticent Tewfiq opens up a bit as he tells her about the suicide of his son and his wife's broken heart and subsequent death. In a hilarious and touching scene in the roller-skating rink, Khaled places his hand on Pappi's knee, rubs it gently, and signals to him to do the same to the young woman next to him who was set up as Pappi's date that evening. Khaled ultimately teaches Pappi a successful lesson in the way men should engage women. Also, Simon the clarinetist has been struggling for years to finish his composition for a concerto overture. Eventually, Itzik's advice to fashion the overture Simon is composing in the spirit of the mundane things they see in the small room they are in—“a lamp, a bed, a child sleeping, and tons of loneliness”—inspires him to write the end for his piece. But these interactions are not meant to last for more than the one short day a happenstance brought these two groups together. In the morning, the musicians are saying their goodbyes to the hosts, and the film concludes with the band's performance in PetahTikva. The “non-placeness” and “non-time” of Bet-Hatikva not only are registered in the film's text but are ultimately its motivating force. Confusion brought the band to Bet-Hatikva and catapults the narrative into motion. But this is the director's sleight of hand; there is no place in Israel by this name. This ploy in obscuring the time and place is evident already in the opening credits: “Once, not long ago, a small Egyptian police band arrived in Israel. Not

many remember this, it was not that important.” As soon as the band disembarks the bus and marches toward the town, we find all the tropes of the cinematic representation of a nondescript Mizrahi development ghost town placed somewhere/nowhere in the Negev desert—the dunes, the wind, a bus-stop sign that rattles unhitched on the post, the sandy air, the road signs to other cities and throughways, and the camera's lingering on the barren land where a row of shikkunim is almost the only sign of human habitation. But as implied earlier, The Band's Visit offers an intriguing spin on the ready-made repository for the depiction of this sociogeographical marginality of the Mizrahi in development towns. The Mizrahi here is not contrasted with his or her Ashkenazi counterpart, as has often been the case in the annals of Israeli cinema, but with the Arab. In chapter 1, I adumbrated an intriguing phenomenon in the Political Cinema of the Page 117 →1980s, where amid the hostilities and wars of the time, it is the Mizrahi, not the Ashkenazi, who together with his Palestinian counterpart mitigates the enmity and establishes a measure of trust and respect between the two sides. However, I proposed that even in these putatively liberal and leftist films of the Political Cinema genre, the bond between the two parties was not predicated on a heightened political consciousness of the Mizrahi; conversely, it was facilitated because of folkloristic and often shallow similarities between the Palestinian-Arab and the Arab-Jew. In The Band's Visit, this contrived symmetry between the two sides dissipates, and the Arab is now endowed with all the features that used to mark Ashkenazi distinction (in Pierre Bourdieu's sense) in Bourekas Cinema.37 Whereas the Arab in this film is being elevated to a position previously reserved for the Ashkenazi, the Mizrahi is still mired in the same sociocultural margins. The very first exchange in English between Tewfiq and Dina sets out this dynamic rather clearly. TEWFIQ: DINA:

I wonder if you could be so kind and direct me to the Arab Culture Center.

Excuse me?

TEWFIQ:

We have been invited by the local cultural department to play at the initiation ceremony of the Arab Culture Center. ITZIK:

What?

TEWFIQ:…We DINA:

are the Alexandria Ceremonial Orchestra.

There is no Arab center here.

TEWFIQ:

No Arab Culture Center?!

DINA AND ITZIK:

No.

DINA:

No Culture. Not Israeli culture, not Arab, no culture at all.

PAPPI:

J'hanam (“Hell” in Arabic, translated in the film as “Bloody nowhere”).

And later in the film in Dina's apartment with Tewfiq and Khaled: KHALED: DINA:

Dead. (Long pause.) Alexandria is a big city, yes? Lot of people, and lights.

KHALED: DINA:

Very quiet here.

And noise.

It's good. You feel like you live, not like here.

In contrast to the film's reviews in Israeli press, which often emphasized propinquities between the two groups (e.g., the two leading characters, Tewfiq and Dina “share a hidden cultural connection: they are both Easterners”),38 I suggest that the bond between the two is effectuated not Page 118 →because of cultural

semblances, but despite differences. Admittedly, the hosts do slip in a word or phrase in Arabic (usually those that are used in Israeli slang in general), and Dina tells Tewfiq about her love for popular Arab movies and music, but these never elicit any reciprocal gesture from the Egyptian, let alone a conversation where the two groups reflect on what must be some cultural commonalities and shared sensibilities. To wit, the Arabic used by Dina and the references she makes to Arab culture accentuate rather than mitigate the differences. Considering the analyses of “high”/“low” culture,39 what transpires in this film is the equation of the Mizrahi habitus with “low culture” and the Arab with “high culture.” In The Band's Visit, the Mizrahi characters are associated with the body; the Egyptian band members, possibly with the exception of Khaled, are often engaged in matters of the human spirit. Specifically, Dina is engrossed in carnal needs and pleasures throughout the film. She incessantly prepares food or nibbles on it. Yet, time and again, Tewfiq declines her prodding to eat. Dina is flirtatious and ends the night in bed with Khaled. Likewise, in the restaurant she goes out to with Tewfiq, she points to a married man with whom she has been having an affair. In the matters of the heart, Tewfiq's love and loyalty to his deceased wife are firm. Whereas Dina is gregarious, brusque, free-spirited, and direct, Tewfiq is reserved, formal, laconic, and stiff. The connection of “low culture,” in general, and the Mizrahi habitus, in particular, to the uncontrolled rather than the contained, to quantity rather than quality, to the random rather than to the measured, and to the expansible time rather than to the measured and obligatory time, harks back to the Bourekas. Recall, for example, the scene in Sallah where the titular character cannot even keep track of all the children he fathered. And, in contrast, here we find the Arabs whose preferences and likings are those that have marked the Ashkenazi—the band plays classical (Arab) music, Khaled quotes “high” poetry, and Tewfiq's English (again, a signifier for the West), albeit stilted, is far superior to that of the Mizrahi characters. Against the locals’ provinciality, these musicians from the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria are true Westerners; whereas, as we have seen, Dina displays interest and some knowledge of popular Arab culture, she does not know about Chet Baker, whom Tewfiq and Khaled discuss among themselves. Given this cinematic paradigm, it is not surprising then that Dina teases Tewfiq after she realizes he had only one son, “What, you, like you a big man, Arabic, you know, family, and only one son?”40 It is noteworthy in this context that, ultimately, the Egyptian Arabs have the voice and narrational power in this film; The Band's Visit opens Page 119 →with the band at the airport and concludes with their performance (again, a space where they have a voice). This power asymmetry comes into full relief with the camera's treatment of the two groups. The camera leisurely gazes at the nakedness of Bet-Hatikva, just as Khaled gazes at Dina's bare foot on the table. Organizing the film around the gaze of the Arab—the Egyptian musicians—clearly intimates the inversion of the colonial gaze. Likewise, if the camera captures the locals instantly as they lend their bodies to it, at least initially this mechanical eye (to use Dziga Vertov's apothegm) cannot nearly as easily capture a clear and stable image of the Egyptian musicians; four times in the film opening the static and frontal image of the band is disrupted or blocked by a van, travelers, and janitors at the airport. Furthermore, whereas the Mizrahi town is set in the desert, the Egyptian Arabs in this film are associated with water and seas; they are, after all, from the port city of Alexandria. Tewfiq states that fishing is the most important thing in the world—“it's the sound of water, and waves.” Conversely, all references to the sea in the context of the Mizrahi inhabitants of the town are illusionary or indexical. Pappi confesses that he has difficulty talking because he keeps hearing the sound of the (imaginary) sea. Likewise, sitting outside with Tewfiq that evening, Dina describes to him the surrounding of their location, and, pointing to the dark space behind them, she says slyly, “And this, this is the sea.” Ironically, a store across from where Tewfiq and Dina were dining a short while earlier is called “The Sea of Life.” Khaled, the Arab musician, flatly disdains the desert; in the scene when the musicians first dine in Dina's restaurant, Khaled, feeling stranded, complains at the table to three fellow performers, “Did I spend five years at the Academy for this? Playing marches in the desert?” The aquatic blue colors of the Egyptian musicians’ uniforms (and Khaled's eye color) stand in stark contrast with the town's brownish tones, and, when the musicians are standing or marching, that verticality clashes with the horizontally laid sleepy town that is surrounded by the desert's undulated dunes. To return then to my previous discussion of the cinematic topos, in The Band's Visit, it is the “Ashkenized” Arab rather than the Ashkenazi Jew who constitutes the referential topos or the benchmark by which the Mizrahi community measures itself.

Rather than showing how segregation might be a survival tactic for communities who experience racism, deprivation or poverty, and rather than differentiating between the reasons why people might not mix with others who are already constructed Page 120 →as “unlike” by scripts of racism, this [multicultural] narrative [projecting a national ideal] defines segregation as a breach in the image the nation has of itself. SARA AHMED41

The setting of Turn Left, The Band's Visit, and other films on the Mizrahi community in the Israeli Negev desert accrues additional significance once we analyze it in light of the hegemonic Zionist discourse already in the decades prior to the creation of the State. One of the creeds of territorial Zionism42 was “to make the desert bloom” (“le-hafriya et ha-shmama”). Arguably, the visual emphasis on the boundless desert in these films can be construed as a commentary on the shortcomings of the Zionist dream. If, indeed, the desert is the visible scar in the Zionist landscape, we can propose that the association of the desert with the Mizrahi community marks the Mizrahi not only as Zionism's other but as the culprit for the failure of the putatively modern and enlightening Zionist endeavor.43 In this discourse, as we have seen earlier, it is due to the Mizrahi people's pre-modern traits, their lack of ideology, their antisocialist preferences, and even their laziness that the Zionist dream has not been fully realized. There is then more to the difference between Petah-Tikva and Bet-Hatikva than merely pronunciation. As em ha-moshavot—the first rural Jewish community in Palestine (founded in 1878, a few years prior to the “First Immigration” of 1881–82) and the birthplace of the Labor Zionist movement, Petah-Tikva has an honorary place in the annals of Zionism. Thereby, the Western/“Ashkenized” Arabs in The Band's Visit eventually reach that venerated city and perform there (mission accomplished!); the Mizrahi locals, though, do not advance at all during the course of the film and are still dug into the margins of Israeli society, in Bet Hatikva—“the house of hope.” It is noteworthy that in the hegemonic Zionist discourse the Mizrahim are often associated with exilic life, with all its putatively negative conditions, in ways from which their Ashkenazi counterparts are somewhat spared. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (1993: 41–42) maintains that Zionism meant to sublate “exilic time” in accordance with the notion that Jews lived outside of History for 2,000 years (and hence also the Zionist dictum “the negation of exile”). In contrast to the empty exilic time, the Zionist ethos is emphatic about agency, and its endeavor is told as a progressing and teleological narrative. In this sense, the association of the Mizrahi with exile, which thereby accentuates their alienation from the Zionist project, is echoed in the above-mentioned films’ use of “non-time” Page 121 →in the depiction of Mizrahi communities. Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled (2002: 76–77) point to the distinction proto-Zionist S. N. Eisenstadt made between alutzim (pioneers) and mehagrim (immigrants/emigrants) in reference to post-1948 immigration to Israel. Whereas the former, connoting vision, determination, and action, was the appellation Eisenstadt employed in reference to the Ashkenazim, he chose the latter—one that is associated with “exile” and that sidelines agency—for the Mizrahim. Ultimately, we can render the compounded “exile—feminineness/effeminization—‘non-Zionist condition’” triad as a paradigm closely associated with the Mizrahi in the films discussed here. I deliberately opt for “non-Zionist condition” rather than “anti-Zionist position” to underscore the lack of agency. The Mizrahim, according to my reading of the films, have not been granted the privilege of developing the consciousness to challenge Zionism; they are simply emplaced outside of the Zionist endeavor. Post-and anti-Zionist critique has attended to the casting of exile in territorial and political Zionist discourse in feminine terms, and the commitment to the Zionist endeavor (and its epitomic sabra) in masculine ones.44 In this context, the effeminization of the Mizrahi in the masculine Zionist discourse, a theme I adumbrated in earlier discussions, reaches its logical conclusion in the placement of the Mizrahi in the fringes of the Zionist body. In “The City as Text and the Periphery as Voice” (2008), Haviva Pedaya astutely observes how the Mizrahi periphery occupies itself by providing manicure, pedicure, hair, and food services, thus serving the “edges” of the Zionist body (134). These Mizrahi subservient engagements are clearly gendered, and, therefore, they buttress the association of the Mizrahi with the “feminineness—exile—‘non-Zionist condition’” nodal triad.

Marginality as a Normative Space Inspired by the works of black feminist scholars such as bell hooks and Pratibha Parmar, W. Edward Soja (1996)

conceives margins as a space where the subaltern can claim its subjectivity not “‘in relation to,’ ‘in opposition to,’ or ‘as a corrective to,’…but in and for ourselves…[where] the margin refuses its authoritative emplacement as ‘Other’” (Parmar, in Soja 1996: 97–98). Indeed, the construction of Mizrahi space characterized by its supplicant relations to the center, as depicted in the previous section, is but one mode the center-periphery relations in Mizrahi cinema are cast in. Arguably, the most radical cinematic construction Page 122 →of the ethnic space is in films that eliminate the Israeli/Zionist center altogether and fashion a realm that can no longer be mapped along the center/periphery dyad. The following discussion of Sion, Desperado Square, and My Family's Pizza purports to delineate the parameters of the Mizrahi distinct and normative space—its construction, its potential to render collective identities, and the problematics of such construction.

In Sion (Tzion, 2007),45 video artist Yosef-Joseph Dadoune takes the proposition of centering the margins (Stuart Hall 1996: 114) to its ultimate conclusion as he models a Sion/Zion without Zionism.46 This enigmatic film/video installation has no storyline; Dadoune structures it around a handful of jarring images and employs mostly nondiegetic Page 123 →sound where cries and groans of a prelinguistic time supplant verbal language. Many of the visuals in this work are permeated with motifs taken from the Bible and Jewish mysticism (e.g., the sacrificed ram, Zion as God's bride but also a prostitute, and the mourning over the people's exile from Zion), but they morph into inchoate images inspired by the filmmaker's own familial experiences and spiritual sensibilities.47 Actress Ronit Elkabetz, who as the credits confirm is the metonymic figure for Zion in this work, appears initially mostly as a degraded, violated, and forsaken woman lying supine or sitting listless. It is her iterative corporeality against stark landscapes as well as her cries and wailing that provide a semblance of cohesion to the film. Halfway through the film, Elkabetz is entering the Louvre's Richelieu Wing carrying a huge black banner. Now she is proud and elegant (her costumes were designed by the Parisian Christian Lacroix), and the Richelieu Wing submits to her as she “conquers” the space with her striking presence. The emphasis the film then gives to the exhibition of the ancient Near East art in the Louvre is meant to point to the theft and appropriation of the treasures of the East that the West has perpetrated. Sion interrelates the theme of the East/West dichotomy to gender and sexuality. In the pejorative orientalist thought, in the modern era it is the masculine West that is endowed with culture, refinement, and sublimation, whereas the East is marked by nature and rawness. In this film, the penetration of the Mizrahi female into a masculine space (e.g., the bellicose Assyrian art at the museum) is tantamount to the imposition of oriental Jewish presence in the cultural pantheon of the West; Elkabetz as Zion sweeps through the Louvre—a museum known to scarcely have exhibited Jewish art. Indeed, Dadoune's stratagem is the artistic equivalent of what Said (1993)48 terms the “voyage in” of intellectuals’ cultural opposition and their interventionist power that are projected from the periphery (e.g., ex-colonies) into the heart of the West's discursive space where they are ultimately acknowledged. The invasion of the marginal into the center is achieved mostly by the film's formalist-like defamiliarization technique and, likewise, by its employment of what Roland Barthes (1982: 42–43) names the punctum—the detail that vanquishes context and draws the viewer into the photographed image. In Sion, mundane objects and body parts are positioned joltingly and are shot from unconventional angles. Consider the extreme close-up of Elkabetz's forehead and eyes from atop her hairline. Instead of sexualizing or objectifying her (the effect the fragmentation of the woman's body is traditionally meant to stimulate), this rattling image Page 124 →disrupts the neat power asymmetry between the spectator and the spectacle, West and East; with her penetrating gaze into the camera, it is Elkabetz who is trespassing into our space. Seemingly, this beguiling work only tangentially relates to Mizrahi cinema as defined earlier. The weeping and whispers in this work are inchoate existential or psychic expressions in the face of the transcendental sublime—nature, God, or death—not a Mizrahi cry against usurpers and social injustice. With few exceptions, most notably Sion's featuring of Elkabetz, an actress immediately associated with her roles as a trodden Mizrahi woman, this work shuns references to Mizrahi identity and experiences in favor of casting a mythic and ancient Levant. And yet, it is precisely the film's particular rendering of the past and present, East and West, as well as the film's aesthetic choices that make Sion pivotal to our discussion about the re-presenting and centering of the

margins. In contrast to films that implore the inclusion of the Mizrahi in the Zionist enterprise by unveiling the Mizrahi contribution to it (a topic I will return to in the next chapter), Sion shows that the presencing of the Mizrahi need not necessarily be within the context of the Zionist framework. Most of the scenes preceding the transition to the Louvre were shot in Ofakim, the poor development town in the Negev desert where Dadoune has been living since his immigration to Israel. What stands out in this film is the materiality, corporeality, and what I consider the completeness or totality of the place. Sion and Dadoune's other films, including Ofakim (2010),49 are probably the closest approximation in Israeli films to formalist Victor Shklovsky's articulation of the role of art “to make the stone stony” (1965: 12)50 and to what Laura Marks (2000) terms “haptic cinema” where “the eyes themselves function like the organs of touch” and the look is “more inclined to graze than to gaze” (162).51 Sight then provides the spatial context of the “abstract” (unreached objects), but tactility allows us a noncontextualized concreteness. In the film's aesthetic stratagem that accentuates the physicality of subjects and objects, the diegetic materials in Sion (and Ofakim) render few contextual time or spatial references (e.g., we learn about the location—Ofakim—from the end credits). But the film shares little with the “non-place” and “non-time” of films such as Turn Left that I discussed earlier. Whereas in the latter the stratagem of temporal ahistoricity and the spatial decontextualization of the margins enhances the supremacy of the Israeli/Zionist center to which the periphery inexorably alludes, in Dadoune's work, his kedem (meaning both East and antiquity) is a vacuous land that erases Page 125 →urbanity, an oriental woman without her occidental counterpart, and, ultimately, a Sion /Zion that is unburdened by Zionism. The rendering of a distinct Mizrahi space in Beni Torati's Desperado Square (Kikar a-halomot, 2001)52 is undoubtedly more explicit than in any other feature film about the Mizrahi community. Unlike the repetitive references to the center in the films discussed in the previous section, in Desperado Square the name of the big city or the center (or for that matter of any other location) is never mentioned. The film derives its title from graffiti the cinemaphile Yisrael (nicknamed “the Indian” for his love of Indian films) painted some twenty-five years ago as an expression of the local people's frustration with the closing of the movie theater in that suburb of Tel Aviv. The movie theater was then owned by the Mandavon brothers—Morris, who is deceased, and Avram, who mysteriously left the place two-and-a-half decades ago but now returns to pay a visit on his brother's first annual memorial service. The night before Avram's return, Morris appears in his son Nissim's dream to order him to break his twenty-five-year-old vow to never reopen the theater. Whereas the mother Seniora objects to the reopening of the movie house, Nissim, his brother George, and all other residents of this neighborhood are eager to carry out the father's plea in that dream. The brothers and Aharon, the projectionist from days past, seek “the Indian's” opinion in choosing the most appropriate film to screen in celebration of the relaunching of the movie theater. Without any hesitation, he recommends the Indian film Sangam—an old-time favorite in that neighborhood. As preparations are made for the screening, the brothers discover a past love story between their mother and their uncle Avram. In turn, this romance explains Seniora's resistance to the reopening of the theater. As young single people, Seniora and Avram believed they were destined for each other. Oblivious to this blooming love, Morris, himself in love with Seniora, asked for her hand in marriage. Avram felt he could not stand in the way of his brother's passion for Seniora, and, eventually, the families sanctified the marriage between them. Out of respect to his brother and to assuage his own pain, Avram left the place, only to return after his brother's death. So for Seniora, the imminent screening of Sangam entails the opening of old wounds and evoking painful memories: in late-night screenings, she used to watch Sangam privately with Avram. In this film, there is only a brief long shot of contemporary Tel Aviv in the background as a wagon is carrying a film projector into the neighborhood for the screening of Sangam. Congruent with this “space-warp” in Page 126 →Desperado Square is, again, the film's time-warp. Other than “the Indian's” motorcycle and the horse-driven wagon, no other means of transportation is seen in this neighborhood, and the incongruence with the highways and high-rise buildings of the hyperurban contemporary Tel Aviv in the background of the wagon scene is conspicuous. Similarly, the film's décor is mostly from the 1970s, and, in a traditional celebration of the Jewish Lag ba-Omer holiday, the residents burn the effigy of Charles de Gaulle, who passed away decades ago and was

probably forgotten by (or has been unknown to) most Israelis at the time the film was made.53 Instead of progress and the linear advance of time (which, in Zionism as we have seen, is associated with telos, living within History), the film renders a circular time as evident in the conclusion, which is a replay of the days of unperturbed love between Seniora and Avram. Following the public screening of Sangam in the film's penultimate scene, Seniora finds Avram sitting alone in the movie theater, and, as he used to do in the past, Aharon the projectionist arranges a late night screening just for this couple. Desperado Square's ending not only constitutes the film's narrative apex but also contains the film's ultimate rendition of a chronotopically insular setting. Camera positioning and editing in the scene of the reunion between Seniora and Avram elicit the sense of a hermetically sealed space; the two are confined between two gazes—the Indian actor is “looking at” the couple from the screen, and Aharon the projectionist peeks at them from his booth. The filmic screen is no longer a window on the world but a mirror, and a time-bound reality is supplanted by a timeless cinematic reflexivity. Seniora and Avram replay Sangam's story, actors “watch” their audience, and the late screening starts with a series of shots of the film apparatus's elements—lenses, projector, and film reels. Various elements in the film's elaborate last shot (in this otherwise frugal production) allude back to the cinematic realm. We first see Yisrael/“the Indian” finding a spot on top of the movie theater roof (as he used to do in the past) in order to watch the lovers on the screen and inside the theater. The beginning of this shot addresses cinema indexically (the inclusion of another film) and paradigmatically (watching a film as a voyeuristic act). From that image, the camera climbs down to the big sign of Sangam on the outside front of the theater, and, finally, it halts on “the Indian's” motorcycle front-light (projector) at the center of the frame (screen). I would argue that reflexivity, understood as the reference back to the medium itself rather than to the world, freezes time. In this sense, this film's key scenes render an indeterminate chronotope Page 127 →where images mirror each other as in mise en abyme instead of temporally leading from one to another and indexing the world outside.54 Israeli/Zionist center in the films discussed in this section evokes the dilemma of whether the subaltern groups’ “separatist” tendencies in the construction of their identity and space may lead to unwarranted articulations about origins and authenticity. Laura Marks (1994) seeks to identify a minority voice that avoids such a trap. Inspired by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, she finds this voice in “cinematic archaeology”—a reference to hybrid and experimental diasporic films in which a subjugated group poses a challenge to the official regime of truth (262). Prefacing his analysis of Desperado Square, Yossi Yonah (2001) contends that the launching of a subversive or alternative narrative to the dominant one is implicated in a subaltern group's formation of a collective identity. Importantly, what Yonah perceives as Torati's greatest accomplishment in this film is his facilitation of a Mizrahi collective while avoiding suggestions of original, stable, and monolithic group identity. For Yonah, Torati's film reveals the forged nature of Mizrahi identity, but since he only perfunctorily alludes to the film's specifics that may support his assertion, his suggestion calls for a closer analysis. THE ELISION OF THE

Page 128 → Indeed, the characters’ successful reliving of their past at the end of Desperado Square—the reopening of the movie theater and the reunion between Avram and Seniora—is not intended as cinematic archaeology to identify origins, let alone as a design to situate an “authentic” Mizrahi culture in the Arab homelands. On the contrary, it is the constructed, even invented, nature of a collective Mizrahi identity that is proffered in Desperado Square. What specifically do the Mizrahim of this film seek to relive? What are the cultural venues they prefer that may distinguish them from other communities? There are only two venues of entertainment for this neighborhood's residents—the movie theater that is best known for its Indian films and a club where Greek music is played. Clearly, a collective Mizrahi identity cannot find its “authentic” origins in these traditions or cultural outlets (Indian and Greek) that were unknown to most Sephardi Jews/Mizrahim prior to their arrival in Israel. The constructed nature of a collective cultural or ethnic identity is heightened when we consider that, with few exceptions, the scenes in the club and the movie theater are the only ones that are shot indoors; they are realms sealed unto themselves rather than contiguous to the “lived” spaces. This is precisely why in his analysis of Desperado Square Sami Shalom Chetrit (2001a) relates the Mizrahi fondness of Indian films and Greek music not to cultural reconnection but to rupture. In line with Ella Shohat's (1989) astute observation that “Greek music, in

many ways, became for Sephardim [Mizrahim] in Israel a kind of substitute for the pariah, excommunicated Arabic music,” (165) Chetrit (2001a) maintains that the film takes us back to a point in time and a state of mind when [we, the Mizrahim] were still able to forgive and patiently absorb so much oppression and violence. We were so naïve, to the point that we adopted those Indian and Greek alternatives into our Arab culture…[but] it does not occur to us to ask the most obvious question: why Indian, Greek, and later Turkish?…The answer to this question is yet another reason to cry in Desperado Square: The Zionist culture police allowed us to wet our kerchiefs in Indian films and to smash plates in a zestful Greek dance, as long as we loyally kept eradicating our Arabness. (24)

The Mizrahi Niche Not only diegetic elements constitute the Mizrahi space in Israeli cinema. The examination of two interconnected issues—the public funding system for cinema and priorities in television programming in Israel—in Page 129 →light of contemporary multicultural models will address both the designated and self-chosen spaces for the Mizrahi voice to be heard. Articulations about a cinematic space where various minorities can speak for themselves, namely, that they do not need to engage in “derivative discourses”55 or speak in relation to the majority group, are often implicated by a progressive multicultural position that advocates the deferent coexistence of ethnic and national groups side by side. Proponents of this particular form of identity politics or multiculturalism (sometimes derisively called the “tossed salad” model, which purports to supplant the “melting pot”) envision a society where various groups can nurture their cultural traditions and augment their political clout without being usurped, dominated, and coerced by other, more powerful groups. Largely, scholars of postcoloniality and subaltern studies wish to employ “multiculturalism” in a diacritical contrast to facile liberal pluralism where market forces shape the relative position of individuals and collectives. But we ought to inquire whether, in the Israeli context with its seemingly progressive model of multiculturalism, which is often cherished by the more liberal-leftist scholars of Israeli culture and society, the power imbalances and the positioning of the Mizrahi remain mostly intact. In other words, we should ask ourselves, who benefits from the fragmentation of a unitary discourse and the rendering of multiple voices, who sets the rules for this putative “free play,” under what terms does the Mizrahi speak, and last, who listens when this subaltern group speaks.56 My thesis about Mizrahi niche cinema in the following discussions is designed to confront these dilemmas. Homi Bhabha's (1990b) discussion of the distinction between cultural diversity and cultural difference reveals his suspicion of liberal democracy's understanding of and motivation for multiculturalism. Whereas he dismissively refers to the former as a liberal relativist's musée imaginaire that renders “other” cultures transparent, cultural difference articulates the incommensurability of cultures, and it points to a political dimension—the conflictual and “potentially antagonistic” ways groups assert themselves. Ultimately, the reluctance to accept true cultural differences translates, in the name of multiculturalism, to the promotion of cultural diversity predicated on subordination and containment of the subaltern groups and to the reinscription of the values and priorities of those who limn the parameters of that cultural diversity. A transparent norm is constituted, a norm given by the host society or dominant culture, which says that “these other cultures are fine, but we must be able to locate them within our own grid.” This is what Page 130 →I mean by a creation of cultural diversity and a containment of cultural difference…the universalism that paradoxically permits diversity masks ethnocentric norms, values and interests. (208) There are chiefly two congruent possibilities in the containment of subaltern cinema in that model of cultural diversity. First, the hegemonic group expects filmmakers to portray their peripheral groups in accordance with its conception of the latter. As we shall see, there is a subtle, yet real system of rewards and penalties exercised by the dominant group and affecting filmmakers involved. The other form of containment relates to Hamid Naficy's (2001) analysis of Third World and exilic cinema claiming that those filmmakers are “generally not expected to make films about either outsiders or other insider groups” (67). The power asymmetry regarding this expectation

is blatant; no doubts are raised about the dominant group's ability and entitlement to represent not only itself but all other groups as well. The experience of David Ofek, codirector with Yossi Madmony of the successful television series Bat Yam–New York and of the film The Barbecue People, which is based on the television show, illustrated this lopsided power to represent in our interview (May 12, 2004). Ofek described the reaction that had been expressed by representatives of Channel 2's franchisee Keshet (which cosponsored the film) to The Barbecue People's screenplay draft. Considering that both Ofek and Madmony are of Mizrahi origin and that their subject matter in The Barbecue People is the story of one Jewish-Iraqi family, the script readers had concrete expectations about the film narrative and style, and deemed the draft “too cold.” For Ofek, this statement betrays deeply rooted perceptions and anticipations that Mizrahim should be associated with hospitality, emotiveness, and conviviality, not with coldness and even alienation as the script was designed to portray them. In Ofek's words, “we felt they [Keshet's reviewers] were reducing/delimiting us” (“metzamtzemim otanu”). Similarly, in interviews with these two filmmakers and others, I often heard that Mizrahi directors who make films about their group are labeled “Mizrahi” filmmakers. Again, the asymmetry between Mizrahi filmmakers and others is glaring; regardless of what Ashkenazi filmmakers portray in their films—their community, culture, and history, or those of others—they would not be designated by an ethnic label, and thus they remain “unmarked.” Furthermore, this designation implies that Mizrahi filmmakers should engage in Mizrahi cinema only. In these last sections of the chapter, I propose that in order to more Page 131 →fully realize the extent of the cinematic containment of the other's culture, we should move beyond textual issues of representation, inquire about the broader context in which films are made, and pursue questions of film finance and distribution. It is beyond the scope of this work to engage in a comprehensive analysis of theoretical and practical issues pertaining to cultural policy, political economy, and reception. Yet, it is necessary to address certain elements of the Israeli film and television infrastructure in order to better articulate what I dub the “Mizrahi niche.” Film Funds The passing of the 1999 Cinema Law was designed to boost the local film industry in Israel.57 The law regulated the funding of this industry from revenues raised by cable and satellite commercial television. However, commercial television broadcasters did not fully abide by the law, and the amounts channeled to support Israeli films dwindled over the years. To ensure a sustained and more substantial money allocation to Israeli films, a revision to the law in 2004 assured a commitment by the government to provide a fixed annual sum of NIS 58 million (approximately $15 million then) to the film industry for the following five years, and, in 2009, that sum increased to NIS 67 million for the five years through 2013. Under the auspices of the Ministry of Science, Culture, and Sports, the Film Council administers the money allocations to five film funds—Israel Film Fund (previously, the Fund for the Encouragement of Quality Israeli Films), the Rabinovich Fund (the Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts), Makor, Gesher, and the New Fund—for a total of approximately 85 percent of its budgetary pool. The remaining 15 percent is earmarked mostly for Israeli cinematheques. The 85 percent (approximately NIS 57/$15 million) is divided between seven categories: narrative feature films (67 percent), documentary (16 percent), television drama (10 percent), designated track (maslul yiudi) on which this section will elaborate (5 percent), experimental films (1 percent), and student films (1 percent). Each of the abovementioned foundations offers finance in one or more categories.58 The support this system offers is meant to provide partial funding for selected films, and filmmakers often have to approach broadcasters, mostly in Israel and Europe, to ensure additional funding. The most prominent fund supporting documentary filmmakers is the New Fund, which was created in 1993 by the Ministry of the Arts. Based on the mandate given to it, the New Fund has to exhibit a record of Page 132 →supporting films about various national, religious/secular, and minorities/ethnic groups in Israel. The New Fund's support of films is based on the quality of proposed projects (smaller amounts are given to project development and project completion). The New Fund provides a complete institutional framework for preproduction, production, and distribution; often, it also plays a pivotal role in the local and international marketing of the films it finances. Under the directorship of Orna Ben-Dor, David Fisher (from September 1999),

and then Dorit Inbar (since August 2008), the New Fund has paved the way for the impressive record of success that Israeli documentaries are enjoying in foreign markets, and particularly, in some of the most prestigious international film festivals and competitions, including idfa (the Netherlands), Hot Docs (Canada), Silverdocs and Golden Globe (United States), the César Award (France), and the Berlin International Film Festival. Indeed, few in the Israeli film milieu would question the role this fund has played in the approbation Israeli documentary cinema has recently been enjoying. And yet, a number of the filmmakers I interviewed challenged the merits of the New Fund to promote Mizrahi cinema. One of the key areas this critique attends to is the utility and management of the Fund's designated track. The creation of this category in the amendment to the original Cinema Law was meant as a form of affirmative action (in Hebrew, “corrective discrimination”) where funds for films about underprivileged or underrepresented groups, including Arabs, ethnic groups, and Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories, are set aside.59 However, whereas the general category is open to applicants throughout the year, proposals for the designated track are accepted about once a year, and, more important, each year only one subcategory offers funding (e.g., in 2005, the designated track was “Films by People with Disabilities”). The amount budgeted by the Fund for the designated track is about one-third of the allocations for the general track. The Fund's guidelines stipulate that amounts per film are similar in the two categories, but exceptions are not uncommon. For example, the Oscar-nominated film Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), which competed in the general category, received 33 percent of the overall film allocations of the Fund for that year.60 It is noteworthy in this context that the New Fund has one group of lectors for the general category and another selected ad hoc to determine nominations and fund allocations in the designated category. In the view of filmmakers wary of this allocation system, the New Fund furthers the displacement and estrangement of the Mizrahim precisely by Page 133 →the implied creation of Mizrahi niche cinema—a space that defines and contains subversive or alternative voices more than it nourishes them. In my interview with Madmony, he more than once used the terms “ghetto” and “ghettoizing” to address this Fund's (and others') policies and purposes visà-vis Mizrahi cinema.61 Similarly, David Benchetrit, whose documentary Ancient Winds: Moroccan Chronicle (2002) was partly financed by the New Fund, deemed the track system racist and the quotas it imposes stifling; for example, Benchetrit pointed to the practice where the Fund would support only one Mizrahi film or one Arab film at a time.62 On similar grounds, film producer and social and political activist Osnat Trabelsi vehemently attacked the New Fund.63 Ashkenaz, the film she was producing at the time of our interviews, strives to reveal the extent to which Israelis find it difficult to “mark” the Ashkenazi (as is evident, for example, in the confused answers passersby give to the filmmaker's topical question—“What is ‘Ashkenazi’?”). Osnat Trabelsi and director Rachel Leah Jones submitted their film proposal to the New Fund, requesting that the project be considered under the designated track's minorities category. Their film was not supported by the New Fund, but their request was meant to be more than simply an effort to raise money for the making of the film; it was designed to provoke the New Fund's director and its lectors to put films about Ashkenazim in the same niche designated for other ethnic groups. Clearly, Trabelsi and Jones's unusual request, which for them was intended to reveal the problematics involved in the transparency of the unmarked Ashkenazi, coincides with the film's own thesis.64 The issues raised by the aforementioned filmmakers also featured centrally in my interview with Ziv Naveh65 —director of Gesher (in Hebrew, “bridge”) Multicultural Film Fund. When Naveh (the first Mizrahi ever to head any public film fund!) took office at the beginning of 2005, she set out to revamp the current system of financial allocation to “designated”/multicultural films. In accordance with Israel's Cinema Law, in 2005, approximately $560,000 of the overall budget the Film Council administers was channeled to the category of designated films. At that time, Gesher was receiving twice the amount allocated to the New Fund for its designated track projects. However, whereas for the latter these funds constituted only a small portion of the overall money appropriated to it by the Film Council, since Gesher was considered a “specialized” fund (supporting only multicultural films), Gesher's $373,000 allocation was all it received from the Film Council.66 As a “specialized” fund, then, Gesher's sole effort has been to support unprivileged/underfunded Page 134 →filmmakers whose works delve into particular social, cultural, and political issues that are rarely presented on the Israeli screen. Naveh's undertaking

was designed to make Gesher the sole proprietor of the budget for “designated” projects, but as of now, her campaign has not yielded the desired results. For Naveh, the splitting of the (already relatively small) “designated” films’ budget between various funds is detrimental to the success of “designated” films. In our interview, Naveh reiterated that the New Fund's support of “designated” projects is meant merely to comply with the mandate given to it (several times during the course of the interview she employed the phrase “putting a check mark,” in reference to the way the New Fund handles its mandate); in practice, Naveh maintains, this support is categorically peripheral considering the New Fund's allocations, priorities, and efforts regarding the general, “nondesignated” projects.67 Among the filmmakers I interviewed for this study, Yamin Messika, whose work includes low-budget independent films, holds the most unorthodox view about public and government funds for Israeli films.68 Unlike his fellow filmmakers who advocate a remedy to what they perceive to be an unjust allocation of resources, Messika proposed expunging the current funding system in its entirety and turning film and television industries into a fully private enterprise of the American ilk where films’ financial success will be determined solely by market forces—viewers, distributors, broadcasters, and investors. Specifically, instead of the current system where films compete for public funds mostly in the preproduction phase, Messika suggested a free-market competition based on the finished product, and, to the extent that there is public funding, the allocations should be used mainly to boost film distribution. Messika focused on the New Fund's category of the Social Fund to demonstrate how the funding system and the broader context in which it operates predetermine films’ distribution and broadcasting avenues and success. The Social Fund is a collaboration between the New Fund, which administers it, and the Second Authority, which manages Israel's Channel 2. For filmmakers who are awarded funds in this category, the Social Fund collaborative endeavor guarantees the broadcasting of their works on Channel 2. For Messika, it is clear then that films not supported by the Social Fund have comparatively diminished opportunities to be shown on Israel's most popular television channel.69 Indeed, in our interviews, the New Fund's previous general manager David Fisher underscored that films supported by the New Fund, regardless of whether they are in the general or the Social Fund categories, have the added benefit Page 135 →of a semi-official seal of quality.70 More broadly then, considering also my previous discussions about the “ghettoizing” funding system, it is expected that, to an extent, Mizrahi films are not as likely to benefit from the preproduction/broadcasting funding synergies and the various distribution initiatives the New Fund has undertaken. Several years after the interviews I conducted with Fisher and Naveh, I met with Inbar to inquire about her vision as the newest general manager of the New Fund and to seek her responses to the concerns of the aforementioned filmmakers.71 To my surprise, Inbar stated flatly that she cannot recall a single film proposal that dealt with the “Mizrahi issue as a Mizrahi issue” during her tenure as the Fund's general manager. She added that when this topic is addressed in Israeli cinema, it is derivative of other themes, such as Israel's geographic periphery. After I listed some of the films from my corpus of over 100 Mizrahi films that were made in the last two decades or so (some with the support of the New Fund), it became clear that what Inbar considered Mizrahi films are those works that focus on the ethnic issue in their attempt to point to power discrepancies or discrimination in the present. In my Introduction, I pointed precisely to this prevalent interpretation (and dismissal) of the “Mizrahi issue,” and, similarly here, my discussion is not meant to single out Inbar or, for that matter, any other film fund directors. However, clearly this discursive ambience where the “Mizrahi issue” is equated with the flaunting of victimization is hardly conducive to an institutional support of Mizrahi cinema in ways that would sustain and nourish it. Television The following discussion will explore the marginalization or ghettoization of Mizrahi terrestrial, cable, and satellite programming on Israeli television and will go beyond the problems broached thus far by Messika and others. Although my focus veers away from cinema into the domain of Israeli television, admittedly, film and television are highly interconnected in the realm of Israeli media. The previous discussion about the Social Fund already alluded to one aspect of this imbrication; another is the common practice where members of the Israeli

film milieu are involved in television productions of drama, situation comedies, and talk shows. Moreover, institutional and financial connections between the two media industries were made explicit after the passage of the Cinema Law in 1999, which, as indicated earlier, stipulated the partial funding of the film industry from revenues generated by Channel 2 and cable Page 136 →companies. In order to further pursue the issue of marginalization and containment of Mizrahi programming on television, it is necessary then, even if somewhat cursorily, to examine certain aspects of the infrastructure of Israeli television and to address some momentous changes that have taken place over the years. From the launch of television broadcasting in 1968 until the early 1990s, Israel had one television channel only—the noncommercial, state-owned, terrestrial Channel 1 (IBA). The heavy control the government exerted over key appointments and contents of Channel 1 created television audiences (and special interest business groups) desperately awaiting alternative broadcast outlets. Expectations for drastic changes ran high with the introduction of cable television and the inauguration of Channel 2—the first commercial television channel in Israel.72 This channel, modeled mostly after UK's ITV, first included three and, since November 2005, two private franchisees selected by government tenders. The Second Authority, whose executive power consists of fifteen government-appointed council members from various public sectors, constitutes the institutional framework under which Channel 2 operates. The Second Authority law from 1993 situates Channel 2 in the public domain (among other things, the law requires that the council protect “public interest”), but the Channel's direct ties with and dependency on private (e.g., corporations) and political sectors are also anchored in the law.73 Minority groups, Mizrahim included, had much to celebrate or at least to hope for with the expansion of media outlets in Israel. One can identify a number of potential benefits for Israel's subaltern groups resulting from the creation of the Second Authority and Channel 2. Stipulated by law, “public interest” was meant to augment Israeli television's discursive space and to offer an alternative to the monolithic government-oriented social and political perspective of Channel 1. Similarly, the franchisees were required to allot at least 50 percent of their broadcasts to locally produced programs.74 (The law has often been overlooked and cynically abused by the franchisees.) These expectations were furthered with the sweeping changes rendered by the introduction and rapid availability of cable television. A specific act in 1997 in the direction of opening up the media space to subaltern groups was a recommendation (partly implemented) by a government-appointed public advising committee to allow for the operation of five new niche cable channels, including Orthodox-Jewish, Arabic, Russian, twenty-four-hour news, and Middle Eastern music channels.75 In 2005, in their bid to renew their operation Page 137 →license with the Second Authority, media franchises Reshet and Keshet stipulated that they would offer two alternative versions—a Mizrahi and ultra-Orthodox—to the IBA's 1981 proto-Zionist mini-series Pillar of Fire.76 The potent fragmentation of electronic media that just over two decades ago were fully centralized seems to be so revolutionary that some Israeli media scholars have feared that the trend may lead to the disintegration of the core values and culture that, supposedly, have held Israeli society together.77 To the chagrin of those who advocate multiculturalism predicated on cultural difference (again, not musée imaginaire) with its potential to induce the decentralization of institutional and political power, Channel 2, cable television, and satellite television have not delivered on the promise of a true or revolutionary alternative where minority groups have equal footing and presence in Israel's media space.78 The critique offered in Noam Yuran's study of Israel's Channel 2 may be summarized by the title of his book—Channel 2: The New Statism (2001).79 Yuran's main thesis is that ideological conservatism and traditionally unifying values are just as rampant in the new channel as they had been in the old statist television channel.80 For Yuran, the centralization of television has not been abolished; rather, it simply switched hands so that the power over and control of media are now in the hands of a few profit-driven wealthy companies. According to Yuran, the program variety that Channel 2 is putatively offering is merely an illusion; ultimately, the new media order goads viewers (back) into a unifying agenda. Channel 2's policies and codes of operation, Yuran claims, can be construed by the franchisees’ close ties with political powers (often referred to as the connection between money and governance, hon ve-shilton), and therefore these media owners have no desire to offer or promote meaningful discursive and political alternatives (12). Further explanation for the channel's reluctance to introduce truly alternative programming options is that fragmentation of the television audience (which, considering the size of Israel's population, is already relatively

small)—a likely outcome if radical programming alternatives are introduced—is detrimental to commercial television, whose subsistence depends on advertising money and large audiences.81 Similarly, Muting Israeli Democracy (2009), Amit Schejter's study of numerous media laws, regulations, and court cases, attends, inter alia, to the sidelining of the Mizrahi and ultra-Orthodox communities in television programming. Schejter concludes, “Broadcast regulations in Israel are designed to mute certain groups and certain forms of speech, to Page 138 →prevent them from engaging in the cultural discourse that contributes to the development of the national culture, while promoting others quite aggressively” (136). Although not specifically addressing Israel's Channel 2, Moshe Zimerman (2003: 74–79) offers a scathing critique of government and public funding of Israeli cinema that coincides with Yuran's and Schejter's analyses. Inspired by Herbert Marcuse's discussion of capitalism's creation of “false needs,” Zimerman contends that, like any product promotion, the seeming plethora of film themes is a conceit where people are led to believe in their freedom of choice, while in actuality, all offerings are merely variations on a theme and are meant to distract people from real needs and dilemmas. In the case of Israeli cinema, this theme or framework, according to Zimerman, is a nationalist-Zionist one, dictated by the people who hold key positions in Israeli film funds. I would argue then that, taken together, Yuran's, Schejter's, and Zimerman's perusal of various facets of Israeli media make it abundantly clear that media privatization, the provision of mostly fictive dilemmas, the connection between money and governance, and the designation of the viewing audiences not as publics82 but as consumers, all can have only deleterious effects on Israel's unprivileged groups. Haim Bouzaglo, a prominent film and television director/producer and one of a relatively few Mizrahi filmmakers who operate successfully from within the “system,” described in our interview83 a particular problem then facing a Mizrahi television program on Channel 2's Tel'ad franchisee.84 Despite the impressive high ratings of his controversial television series Zinzana, a program that features mostly Mizrahi characters and is set in locations such as a prison and a mental asylum, the original prime-time slot the franchisee designated to the program was moved to a late hour of the night. For Bouzaglo, the explanation for this and other curiosities lies in the ambition to contain and marginalize Mizrahi culture and society. On a related note, Bouzaglo contended that with ranking, the franchisee and advertiser are as concerned about audiences’ quantities as about their quality, namely, considerations about the limited buying power of the Mizrahi viewers were, in his view, determinant in the rescheduling of Zinzana. In his analysis of programming policies, Ron Kahlili, a pivotal player in the creation of Mizrahi programming on Channel 2, cable, and satellite television, expressed similar misgivings. For Kahlili, television programming is largely responsive to capitalist agenda and motivations, not necessarily to ideology, and clearly not to public needs.85 In 2000, Kahlili Page 139 →launched Briza—the first (and last) Mizrahi niche channel. The channel was carried on the Israeli satellite station Yes, and overall it enjoyed significantly high ratings. For Kahlili, Yes's inclusion of Briza meant the station wanted to capitalize on the periphery where cable had not yet been available. In 2003, Yes had a new CEO who decided to cut 90 percent of Briza's budget. Kahlili realized that his superior and Yes's board of trustees actually intended to close down the channel. The reason, Kahlili figured, was that high ratings alone are insufficient. Yes's trustees and CEO cared about the “quality” of the audiences; they wanted consumers/audiences whom advertisers desire—those with deep pockets and not the poor Mizrahi audiences that are presumed to watch Briza. It is tempting then to intimate the unyielding circularity regarding the displacement of the Mizrahi. Upon their immigration, Mizrahim were doomed to occupy the lower socioeconomic rungs because of their cultural otherness; in recent years, it is their economic status that feeds back into their cultural marginalization and thus reinscribes their otherness.

NOTES 1. See, for example, Homi Bhabha (1994b: 4), the “interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.” 2. In postmodern texts, there are morphological variations for “Thirdspace.” Whereas Bhabha employs

mostly “Third Space” (often alluding specifically to hybridity), others use it as one word, capitalized or not. Throughout this work, unless I refer to or quote Bhabha, I will employ “Thirdspace.” 3. See W. Edward Soja (1996: 6, 10, 60–63). 4. Soja (1996: 11). 5. Like Shemi Zarhin's Passover Fever, his 2006 film Aviva My Love (set in Tiberias where the filmmaker grew up) also deals with a Mizrahi family and includes only fleeting allusions to ethnicity; in one scene the mother of the family joshes with her neighbor about their Moroccan origins, and in another scene there is a reference to the father's skills at baking mamul, a Middle Eastern/North African pastry. 6. Indeed, in contrast to the stark realism characteristic of Israeli films that have been made over the years, Passover Fever incorporates fantastic elements that, stylistically, call to mind Latin American magic realism. 7. See Yehuda Ne'eman's (1998) “The Cup of Coffee and the Glass of Tea” for a discussion of “Mizrahi time” in Bourekas Cinema. 8. In my interview with Savi Gavison (July 3, 2004), he indicated that in making Lovesick, he was fully interested in having a dialogue with the Bourekas. 9. Notably, for Bhabha (1990b), Thirdspace is closely related to hybridity: “The importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which Page 140 →the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it” (211). 10. The discussion here draws upon Bhabha's (1985) formulation that the hybrid is not a self-contained ontological entity. Rather, it is the colonial discourse that effectuates the hybrid: “The colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory” (154). 11. Peculiarly, Gil Eyal does not mention Bruno Latour by name in this book. Yehouda Shenhav, though, states clearly that his employment of the “hybridization and purification” model is owed to Latour's work (1991/1993). 12. Eyal (2006) seeks to present his assertion about the Zionist invention of the Arab-Jewish hybrid diacritically to Ella Shohat's. He claims that, for her, Zionism attempted to erase the Arabness of the Jews, whereas in truth it accentuated this feature. In my view, Eyal flattens Shohat's argument (as should be clear from my references to her work), and what he considers the “purification” of Arabness in his book is mostly tantamount to Shohat's elaborate attention to the erasure of the Arab culture the Mizrahim brought with them. 13. See, for example, Shohat (1999b, 1999c). In revisiting the topic of the disciplinary bifurcation in the study of Arab-Jews, Shohat (2003) observes, “The ideological rupture characteristic of Zionist discourse, then, is reflected in much of hegemonic scholarship. The rupture is reproduced not only in the themes but also in the analytical modes, resulting in a kind of a methodological schizophrenia” (67). Shohat's emphasis in these texts is on the disciplinary “schizophrenia” regarding the study of the Mizrahim (Arab-Jews); Eyal and Shenhav attend to the bifurcation of the study of the Arab-Jews, on the one hand, and of the Arab world, on the other. Clearly, these two claims are highly related. 14. See also Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994: 180). Specifically in the context of hybridity, Shohat (2004: 70) maintains, “‘Hybridity’ must be seen as always already power-laden.” 15. The film is officially considered Hanna Azoulai-Hasfari's. She wrote the screenplay, and her partner, Shmuel Hasfari, directed it. Sh'hur was the winner of six prizes in the Israeli Academy Awards. In hindsight, Sh'hur is generally recognized as one of the harbingers of new Mizrahi cinema. Unprecedented in the realm of Israeli cinema, some fourteen years after its release, the film yielded a book—Sh'hur (AzoulaiHasfari 2009)—that includes two versions of the script and seven essays. 16. To an extent, as Kobi Niv (1999) suggests, the film's finale is symbolic of Heli's coming to terms with her past (represented by the sister Pnina) and future (her daughter Ruth). In Azoulai-Hasfari's words, “Only the making of Sh'hur brought [my] two identities closer, welded them” (quoted in Orna Kadosh 1995: 48). 17. “Sh'hur: The Second Generation” (February 3, 1995). 18. I concur with Yaron Peleg (2008a) that Savi Gavison's previous film, Shuroo (1991) accentuates the indeterminacy of ethnic identities. The film focuses on Asher, who is an existentialist-spiritual guru of sorts for a “new age” petit-bourgeois group of Tel Avivians. As Peleg suggests, despite these ethnic ambiguities,

one can safely assume that Asher is a Mizrahi character. Peleg employs this film as a single case study that purports to represent a whole corpus of contemporary Mizrahi films to assert that Page 141 →Mizrahim in cinema today are on equal footing with their Ashkenazi counterparts—“Shuroo clearly brings an end to decades of cinematic separation between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim and presents a much more integrated society. In some respects, it can even be argued that the film presents Mizrahim in positions of control or at least authority” (139). Clearly, this formulation (already captured in the article's title, “From Black to White: Changing Images of Mizrahim in Israeli Cinema”) is markedly different from the positions I take in this book. In this section I discussed the implosion of the “game of indeterminacy” in films such as Lovesick. As for Shuroo, it is sufficient to mention that Asher ultimately fails to help the members of the group that he leads. 19. Victor is played by the well-known Moroccan-born Moshe Ivgy (also in the main role in the abovementioned Shuroo), and Levana is played by Hanna Azoulai-Hasfari, whose Moroccan origins became known to Israeli audiences following her semi-autobiographical film Sh'hur. Michaella, on the other hand, is an Ashkenazi, and her boyfriend in the film is played by Menashe Noi. The latter is actually a Mizrahi, but he is not recognized or identified as such (by looks, accent, or last name) in the film. I discussed these possible ambiguities in chapter 1, yet, to reiterate, my references to ethnicity are based less on “blood” or origin and more on its construction within the film diegesis. 20. Ramat-Aviv Gimmel is a prestigious Tel Aviv neighborhood. 21. With the exception of the Ashkenazi Gila Almagor who is cast as the mother in Sh'hur, all other main characters are played by Mizrahi actors. Interestingly, Almagor started her cinematic career playing the roles of a Mizrahi prostitute or maid. 22. The construction of the periphery in relation to the center is also rendered in two soccer films, Rino Tzror and Doron Tsabari's documentary Underdogs: A War Movie (Beit She'an: seret milama, 1996) and Ori Inbar's narrative film Beitar Provence (2002). The latter depicts an obscure third-league soccer team (with the fictitious name of Giv'at Tzurim) from a small town in the southern Negev desert that faces Israel's elite team of Maccabi Tel Aviv in the preliminary play-offs for the national cup final. Although Giv'at Tzurim loses to Maccabi Tel Aviv, its young star Shlomi signs a contract with the winning team from Tel Aviv. Indeed, in Beitar Provence, fantasy is the film's main motif; most of the main characters in this desert town indulge in dreams that can be materialized only elsewhere. 23. In Shuli's Fiancé, the savior in this fantasy is the Mizrahi ice cream man. Clearly this is in contrast to the hegemonic narrative that prescribes the Ashkenazim as saviors. 24. See, for example, Yakir Elazar (1989: 46–50) and Sami Shalom Chetrit (2010: 141–44). 25. See chapter 1 for my discussion of how, in some respects, despite the right-wing rule over most of the last three decades, the Mizrahi-Ashkenazi disparities have worsened over time. 26. In a humorous scene, as the two mothers dry their laundry on a clothesline in the dusty area between their apartment complexes, an argument ensues about what laundry soap is better; “French!” “British!” the women repeatedly hurl at each other. 27. Interview with Avi Nesher, June 30, 2004. 28. Interview with Avi Nesher, June 30, 2004.Page 142 → 29. Israeli film critic Uri Klein (2004b) refers to the town and its bottle plant as “a vacuum of a romantic, historical, even sentimental fantasy” (23). 30. Nesher refers to this juxtaposition in his commentary on Turn Left's DVD version and he also addressed it in the Q&A session following the screening of the film (in conjunction with the conference “The Mizrahi in Israeli Literature and Cinema” at the University of Texas at Austin, March 7, 2005). 31. The song is performed by Ninet Tayeb and the lyrics are by Ehud Manor. 32. See Ruty Russo (2005) and Goel Pinto (2005). With 460,000 tickets sold, Turn Left has become one of highest-grossing Israeli films ever. Also, the film was playing in major movie theaters for over six months. 33. See Meir Schnitzer (2004b), Uri Klein (2004b), Iris Mizrahi (2004), and Ya'el Shuv (2004). 34. See Meir Schnitzer (2004b), Iris Mizrahi (2004), David Shalit (2004), and Yaniv Zakh (2004). Shalit qualifies the labeling of Turn Left a Bourakas film. Zakh employs the term as he relays an exchange in the press between Nesher and a member of the Israeli Film Academy over the Academy's choices not to nominate Turn Left and its maker in the categories of best film and best director in what is known as the Israeli Oscars.

35. Tewfiq is played by the Mizrahi actor Sasson Gabai; Palestinians play the roles of all other band members. 36. The director Eran Kolirin considers his film a sort of a fairy tale. See, for example, “The Band's Visit: Making the Fairy Tale” in the DVD released by Sony Pictures Classics. 37. In “The Band's Visit: Ethnicity and Stereotypes in Israeli Cinema,” Mati Shemoelof (2008) develops a similar argument. Employing Bruno Latour's model of modernism's “hybridization and purification” principles, Shemoelof claims that despite some similarities and connections between the Arab performers and the Mizrahi hosts, in the process of purification the Mizrahi Jews are stripped of their Arab history and the Egyptian Arabs are stripped of their nationalism and religion and are thereby rendered in this film as the “new Jew”—modern and Western. 38. Anat Zuria (2008: 77). 39. See, for example, Herbert J. Gans's Popular Culture and High Culture (1999) and Simon Frith's Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (1996). 40. In her analysis of the film, Dorit Naaman (2011) interprets the film's meager use of Arabic as an example of its broader intent to lead to “escapist aesthetics and not to an engaged political or even cultural drama” (263). As should be patent from my discussion, I attribute this and other occurrences where the band's Arab characterizations are diluted precisely to the film's design to “Ashkenize” its members. 41. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004: 139). 42. Territorial Zionism underscored the importance of settling the land as part of the broader design to find a solution to the Jewish problem and to effectuate the creation of the State. This is in contrast to so-called “spiritual Zionism,” which focused instead on Palestine/the Land of Israel as a cultural, spiritual, or religious center for Jews worldwide and did not necessitate a sovereign political entity. See, for example, Arthur Hertzberg's edited volume The Zionist Idea (1997). 43. The tendency in the past to point to the Mizrahim as a hindrance to the Page 143 →fulfillment of Zionist ideology (mostly in reference to their putative primitivism and Levantine mentality) and, in more recent times, to blame them for addling its projected trajectory has its traces even in the writings of statesmen and authors who are thought to hold “leftist” or “liberal” views. See, for example, Ella Shohat (1988: 3–7) and Rachel Shabi (2008: 154–55). For an illustration of these sentiments among some “liberal” Zionists see Omri Dolev's “Ashkenazim from the Bunker” (1998). 44. In his critique of “the negation of exile,” Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (1993: 41) relays Zionism's depiction of Jewish exilic suffering in feminine terms—“the raped/ravaged daughter of the people of Israel” (batYisrael ha-ne'eneset) or “the anguished virgin of Israel” (btulat Yisrael ha-dvuya). Likewise, one of Daniel Boyarin's theses in Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1997) is Zionism's “phallicization” of the new Jew. 45. In my discussion, I am referring to the hour-long, color version of the film. The film was also screened in a shorter black-and-white silent version. Sion, in its full or short black-and-white versions, has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Europe and the United States, most notably, in the Louvre, where a substantial part of the film had been shot. In exhibitions, Sion is often screened with Universes (Olamim, 2003) and Chanti (2006), the two other works in Sion: A Film Trilogy. In Israel, the trilogy premiered in the Petah-Tikva Museum of Art and ran from November 2007 to January 2008. 46. “Sion” is the French spelling for “Zion” and the sound “sion” echoes the Judeo-Arabic pronunciation of the place. “Zion” in religious traditions stands for the Land of Israel but also, specifically, for Jerusalem. 47. Interview with Yosef-Joseph Dadoune, September 22, 2010. 48. See discussion in Edward Said's (1993: 239–61) “The Voyage In and the Emergence of Opposition.” 49. Ofakim is the first film work in “In the Desert,” a socioartistic project that is designed as a collaborative effort with local young people for cultural empowerment of the communities in the Negev's northwestern area. 50. Victor Shklovsky's (1965) conceptualization is informed by Formalism's disenchantment with “habituation” and by its designation to the artists the task of defamiliarizing the world around us. 51. In The Skin of the Film (2000), Laura Marks distinguishes between optical visuality and haptic visuality in the context of cinema; “Optical visuality depends on a separation between the viewing subject and the object. Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus”

(162). 52. Upon the completion of the film, the Hebrew title was changed from Desperado Square to The Square of Dreams. 53. De Gaulle, whose support of Israel was unequivocal before the 1967 War, had a change of heart (and policy, as in his proclamation of a weapons embargo on Israel) due to the attack Israel launched against Arab countries in disregard of his stern discouragements. For many Israelis, de Gaulle turned into their sworn enemy. It is customary among revelers of the Lag ba-Omer holiday to burn the effigies of historical figures they deem enemies of Israel or the Jewish people.Page 144 → 54. In comparison to Desperado Square, Ronen Amar's documentary My Family's Pizza (Pitza mishpatit, 2003) offers a more personal and intimate portrayal of the distinct Mizrahi space. Against distanced and tonally cold, digitally enhanced images of outer space and a sophisticated urban area where cars move swiftly on futuristic highway overpasses, Amar reflects, “At this era of globalization and technological progress, when the Internet is threatening to turn us into one little village, we are reverting into a time of small kingdoms, to a way of life in which each household is an entire world in itself.” This opening underscores the totality of the local. Amar's distinctively North African accent in this voice-over situates the film in the periphery even before it introduces Amar's household. Then, the superhighway in the film's beginning is supplanted by a new space where the rest of the film is set—the shabby development town of Netivot in the southern part of Israel (“with a population of 25,000 and one bus route”)—and the indistinct nondiegetic music gives way to the town's ambience. Although My Family's Pizza has a few allusions to the world outside Netivot, still, if anything, Netivot is a “small kingdom” oblivious to the world outside. Several other documentary films construct Israel's ethnic and socioeconomic peripheries along similar parameters that do not measure the margins against the center. In Khamara, A Place next to Life (1999), filmmaker Benny Zada, who grew up in Shkhunat Hatikva (Hatikva Neighborhood), a working-class neighborhood of Tel Aviv that used to have a large population of Iraqi and Yemenite Jews, depicts the colorful and eccentric denizens of the local khamara (from Arabic, a neighborhood pub). Hula and Natan (Robby Elmaliah, 2010) features two trodden mechanics; they are brothers who live on the outskirts of Sderot in a debilitated caravan that also functions as their garage. Likewise, although not focusing strictly on the Mizrahi periphery or Mizrahi characters, the centering of the margins is also achieved in two collections of short films—True to Life: Stories by Ramleh Youths (Moshe Levinson, series creator, 2006) and People of Hope (Tel Aviv University Film Students, 2004); taken together, these films delve into the experiences of people and stories of communities that have been mostly overlooked or marginalized in the past. Finally, the collections of short films—Graduate Films 2004–2006, Tales from the Southern Frontier (2005–7), A Question of Identity (2008), and Daka Darom (2009, 2010, minute-long films about the South)—have only minimal references to Israel's center and, instead, focus on the life of the local communities of the periphery. Some of the films in these collections are discussed in detail in this work. These films were made at Sapir Academic College, which is located in the northwestern area of the Negev desert, close to Sderot and the Gaza Strip. 55. See Robert Young (2001: 344). 56. Hamid Naficy (2001) also recasts Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's maxim to ask, “Can the subaltern be heard?” My emphasis here differs though from Naficy's; whereas he examines the problem of “the cacophony of voices competing for attention in the market” (11), my interest in rephrasing Spivak's dilemma is, as we shall see, to profess the “ghettoization” of the subaltern's voice. 57. See http://www.tamas.gov.il/NR/exeres/0EBF26AB-1A9B-495A-9E87-B946C914D7A9.htm. 58. Budget information is based on interviews with Dorit Inbar, the New Fund's Page 145 →general manager (September 26, 2010), and Yoav Abramovich, the Rabinovich Fund's production manager (September 26, 2010). 59. The funding structure of the New Fund is rather complex. The New Fund supports films in a general, nondesignated category. In addition, there are several tracks/special projects; as mentioned, one is the “designated track”; another is the Social Fund (a collaboration between the New Fund and Israel's Channel 2 on which I will elaborate in the following discussions). 60. Information is based on interviews with David Fisher, June 8, 2004, and June 8, 2005; and Inbar,

September 26, 2010. 61. Interview with Yossi Madmony, May 18, 2004. 62. Interview with David Benchetrit, June 24, 2004. 63. Interviews with Osnat Trabelsi, June 8, 2004, and June 2, 2005. 64. It is noteworthy that, according to Dorit Inbar (September 26, 2010), the New Fund may recommend to applicants what category is most suitable to their film proposal, but the final decision regarding the category /track is left to the filmmakers. 65. Interview with Ziv Naveh, June 12, 2005. Budget information provided here is based on this interview. 66. Like other Israeli film foundations, Gesher raises additional funds from public and private sources. 67. The Film Council appropriates more funds to the Rabinovich film foundation than to the New Fund or Gesher. Yet, this fund no longer seeks the Council's funds for “designated” films, leaving that amount of $560,000 to be split between the New Fund and Gesher. In addition, the Israel Film Fund provides the most generous financial support, but its allocations are for feature films only. This Fund's allocations are based strictly on the proposed films’ quality; no categories or quotas of the kind the New Fund and Gesher employ apply here. 68. Mizrahi filmmaker and social activist Yamin Messika received his film education in the United States (interviews on June 24, 2004, and June 8, 2005). I will discuss his work in more detail in the next chapter. 69. Messika has made over ten films in Israel, one of which—Kerem Hatikva (1997)—was funded by the Social Fund (information here is based on my interviews with Messika [June 24, 2004, and June 8, 2005] and on articles and reviews by Vicky Shiran [2001], Sigalit Banai [2004], Zohar Vagner [1997], and Yuval Yoaz [1997]). 70. Interviews with David Fisher, June 8, 2004, and June 8, 2005. 71. Interview with Dorit Inbar, September 26, 2010. 72. Channel 2 started its full, independent operation in 1993. Cable operators were licensed at the beginning in 1989, but penetrating a significant section of Israeli households took place only after Channel 2 went on the air (see Ruby Ginel [1997], and Yuval Elizur [1995]). For more on the infrastructure and operations of Israeli electronic media see Dan Caspi and Yehiel Limor's The In/Outsiders: The Media in Israel (1999). 73. For a more detailed discussion of the Second Authority law and the often-conflicting private, public, and government interests pertaining to the operation of Channel 2, see Gideon Doron (1998), Ruby Ginel (1997), and Yuval Elizur (1995). 74. See “Israel TV Revolution” (1993/1994).Page 146 → 75. See Gideon Doron (1998: 177). 76. See Amit Schejter (2009). 77. See Elihu Katz's analysis and recommendations in the Beracha Report (1999) and Gideon Doron's (1998) critique of what he terms the Israeli media's move “toward a multicultural model.” The deep concerns about the social and political fragmentation of the Israeli public and about the multicultural trend inspired by identity politics extend beyond the field of media and are evident in the works of scholars from a wide range of disciplines and with different political convictions. See, for example, Gadi Taub (2004) and Nissim Calderon (2000). 78. See, for example, Eli Avraham's (2000) reference to Shelly Yachimovich's television survey, which finds that 86 percent of senior editors/decision-makers in the Israeli media are Ashkenazim (171). Also, the two media franchises Keshet and Reshet did not fulfill their promise to develop alternative versions to Pillar of Fire, which, in turn, triggered the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow to file an appeal in the Israeli Supreme Court against the Second Authority (officially known as Vicky Shiran vs. Israel Broadcast Authority). See Amit M. Schejter (2009: 67–69, 135). 79. Peculiarly, the Hebrew title Arutz 2: ha-mamlakhtiyut ha-adasha is translated in the book as The New Statehood. The proper translation of “mamlakhtiyut” is “statism.” 80. Filmmaker Eyal Halfon (interview, June 2, 2004) expressed a similar concern; he maintained that Channel 2 is the new tribal campfire—a media space marked by unanimity rather than heterogeneity. These concerns triggered Halfon and some other members of the film/television community in Israel to organize in order to intervene in the government's then-impending tender for launching Channel 10—Israel's second commercial channel. Their efforts failed, and the new commercial channel went on the air as originally planned.

81. Clearly, broadcasters can sometimes benefit from niche audiences, a topic to which I will return briefly in the next discussion. 82. I use “publics” in order to underscore the plurality of audiences but also to allude to Jürgen Habermas's conceptualization of the public sphere. 83. Interview with Haim Bouzaglo, June 17, 2004. 84. Since 2005, Tel'ad is no longer one of Channel 2's franchisees. 85. Interview with Ron Kahlili, June 10, 2004.

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FOUR The Absence of Power and the Power of Absence Victimhood, Struggle, and Agency The dream of the Zionist Left is dead. We are now left with my dream. KORHAVI SHEMESH, IN THE FILM The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak We [Mizrahim] have already conquered the music scene in Israel; now onward to cinema. ELI HAMO (FILMMARER AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST)1 One of the guiding principles in the following discussions is the premise (and promise) that group consciousness and agency can develop not in spite of the group's marginality but because of it. The dialectics of marginality—absence and power—is succinctly captured in the opening of “Minimal Selves” (an intended anagrammatic play on “liminal” selves?) where Stuart Hall (1996) relays his own tale as a migrant living in the United Kingdom: “Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become centered. What I've thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience! This is ‘coming home’ with a vengeance!” (114). In this context, agency, empowerment, and subversion become celebratory terms, and in my view, are often overused to the point of turning them into all-encompassing buzzwords that vitiate these concepts of a puissant political significance. My discussion does not shun these terms, but it seeks Page 148 →to situate them within the broader context of power relations in Israeli society and to examine the particular modalities of agency in Mizrahi protest cinema. Consequently, in employing the phrase “The Absence of Power and the Power of Absence,” I do not wish to imply that the lack of power, for example, a group marginalization, can be fully compensated for by certain empowering qualities that the margins may provide, nor do I propose a symmetry between the dominating and the dominated groups whereby the former's usurping of power has the same weight and consequences as the latter's attempts to gain political clout. Ultimately, after addressing scholarship germane to subaltern agency, this chapter's film analysis will also assess the utility of this scholarship in providing a theoretical framework for the articulation of agency, struggle, and protest in the context of Mizrahi cinema.

The Dialectics of Power: Casting Subaltern Agency Michel Foucault's conceptualization of power has greatly inspired postcolonial thought, and it provides the intellectual framework for my inquiry about subaltern agency and the power to effectuate change. In History of Sexuality, Foucault (1978/1990) asserts, “Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and allencompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations” (94). Contrary to orthodox Marxists and to scholarship produced by the Frankfurt School, Foucault rejects articulations of power as fixed and affixed to only the dominating group(s), clarifying, “By power, I do not mean ‘Power’ as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state” (92). Foucault maintains that the discursive practices of power are dispersed and to be found in all human practices and institutions, including sex and law. Likewise, power is always generative, never restrictive or “poor in sources, sparing of its methods…incapable of invention, and seemingly doomed always to repeat itself” (85). Ostensibly then, Foucault's (1978/1990) theory is empowering—all human beings have a share of this inexhaustible resource of power. Granted then that power is dispersed and locally produced, but subsequently, it is appropriated by the state or ruling class where it is congealed and solidified to “form a general line of force” (94). Furthermore, in Foucault's theory, resistance is emptied of its liberating connotations and its subject is devoid of a

meaningful, independent volition: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (95). Page 149 →Foucault adds that genealogy (effective history) “knows only one kingdom…where there is only ‘the iron hand of necessity shaking the dicebox of chance’” (88–89). It seems, then, that whereas the Frankfurt School is consigned to the notion of subjects (individuals) without power, Foucault only finds power without subjects. The question of power can be reformulated in terms of the tenability of agency in consideration of conjectural subjects and identities. In “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency,” Homi Bhabha (1994d) proffers that not only is agency possible within the realm of contingency (which is most palpable and indisputable in the experiences and lives of [im]migrants and exiles) but is its necessary condition. The conundrum persists though as for the tenability of social and political changes if, as extreme postmodernist and deconstructionist positions have it, there is no subject—a cohesive and relatively stable identity—to desire these changes. Bhabha and other postcolonial scholars have then endeavored to wrench or salvage subaltern agency (e.g., the instigation of social changes) in the postmodern condition whereby volition is attenuated, given that steady and cohesive subjects are deemed untenable. One route Bhabha takes to tackle these issues is by assigning importance not necessarily to the subjects per se but to the accrued knowledge and experience that emanate from their social marginality: “It is from those who have suffered the sentence of history—subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement—that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking” (172). Similarly, alluding to the power the subjugated other may have, bell hooks's Yearning (1990) makes it clear that the power of the individual or “a community of resistance” (149) to intervene and resist is not a result of one's consignment to the margins, but rather, it is one's (difficult) choice. In the context of Film Studies, this notion of a defiant collective voice underlies Laura Marks's rendering of minority media—they “make it clear, by virtue of their strained relation to dominant languages, that no utterance is individual” (1994: 257). Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1986) “minor literature,” she asks minority cinema for nothing less than to “destroy myths from the inside” (262).

Protest in Mizrahi Cinema Modalities of Mizrahi Protest in Cinema The next sections of this chapter will attend to various modes of Mizrahi protest in cinema and assess them in light of the theoretical formulations Page 150 →about “a community of resistance” and the role shared experiences play in its formation. Before we turn to a thematic and discursive analysis of relevant films, we should first consider several elements of resistance and subversion that pertain to form and extradiegetic materials; these include narrative strategies, the rendering of Mizrahi corporeality, use of language, and distribution and reception. Inspired by the above-mentioned articulations of subaltern agency, in her analysis of old and new Mizrahi films, Orly Lubin (1999a) argues, It is here, on the margins…that the space of the ethnic “home,” the location of the excluded, is situated. The margins can supply such a space, a space for the creation of Otherness as accepted, a “normative” center, since they, the margins, are located far from the centralized gaze of the monitoring, policing hegemony. The margins are where ethnicity can find a home…. (175) Ostensibly, this articulation contains a contradiction in terms; Lubin employs “margin,” but she also conceives of the possibility that the margin/periphery is constructed as a normative space or, as she adds, a space that claims for itself the “status of the putatively ‘non-marked’” (1999a: 175). By definition, periphery and margins are derivative terms; they accrue meaning only in relation to what they are not. How then can films about societal margins (a marked space) construct these localities as normative (unmarked spaces)? We might find a solution for this dilemma not on a thematic level but on a rather theorized register where we distinguish between the realm within the film diegesis and the spectatorial space. Within the film diegesis of Desperado Square and My Family's Pizza, the normativization of space is a moot issue. For the inhabitants of the neighborhoods depicted in these films, their habitus—their preferences and way of life—is the norm. Therefore, whereas the film's personas may not

acknowledge their places as nonnormative or marginal—they are those “small kingdoms” where “each household is an entire world in itself”—viewers do; for them, the screening of old Indian films in Desperado Square and the Amars’ travails in My Family's Pizza do signify marginality. In Marxist terminology, a distinction is made where “for-itself” refers to a group (class) that has developed a sense of common interests and an elevated political consciousness regarding its oppression, and, conversely, “in-itself” is an ascription to a group lacking these characteristics. In “Marginality as a Normative Space” of the previous chapter, my focus was on the construction of Mizrahi space where the (Ashkenazi) Page 151 →center is deliberately elided. But the films discussed there, such as Sion, Desperado Square, and My Family's Pizza, construct Mizrahi communities “in-themselves” only; there is hardly a suggestion in these films’ texts of a group realizing its common interests vis-à-vis the regnant Ashkenazi group, let alone casting characters who articulate, promote, or engage in a challenge to the hegemonic center. Ultimately, these films’ main accomplishment may be their ability to avoid what Robert Young terms “derivative discourse[s]” (2001: 344). I do not question then the aforementioned arguments made by Yossi Yonah (2001), Sami Shalom Chetrit (2001a), and Orly Lubin (1999a) about the subversive power of the films they discuss, but I do find it necessary to specifically situate this potential subversion as much in the realm of reception—the particular audiences watching a given film, the discourse around it, and the knowledge about the filmmaker's persuasions and sentiments—as in the film's text. Along the lines of my earlier analysis of “meta-critique,” I maintain that viewers who are empathetic to the Mizrahi dilemma, highly conscious of its historical trajectory, and familiar with the filmmakers’ Mizrahi agenda are likely to confer sociopolitical agency onto the communities portrayed in the films I discussed, while the films’ storyline and characters hardly lend themselves to that reading.2 Indeed, these films derive their meaning and vigor, and accrue their polemic power, at least partly, precisely from the audiences’ preconceived recognition of the cinematic spaces of these works as margins and, hence, nonnormative in their contradistinction from the center. Lubin's (1999b) Deleuzian analysis of Sh'hur identifies subversion in the film's narrative design; specifically, she refers to the relations between the film's frame story and the story inside in order to demonstrate that, if anything, “naturalness” and “the norm” are associated here with the marginal group of the Mizrahim. The frame story, which depicts the “Ashkenized” adult Heli, is revealed to be a peripheral tale, and ultimately the main, internal story (taking place almost exclusively in a Mizrahi space) marginalizes both the frame story as a literary/cinematic device and the all-encompassing Zionist master narrative that is contained in the film's edges. No longer constructed as organizing forces in Sh'hur, the frame story and the Zionist narrative implode and are dethroned from their position as the necessary, yet transparent agentive power. Similarly, Lubin states unequivocally that sh' ur—the black magic ritual—does work; on most occasions when it is performed in the film, it yields the desired results. Lubin is more interested in sh'ur as an organizing agent than as an event—she treats it as a constitutive and emblematic Page 152 →force that is intended to supplant the Zionist master narrative and to tell history from a framework other than that of the exclusionary national one. In accordance with the earlier discussions in this section, Lubin emphasizes that the film does not form a cohesive and stable alternative; rather, it is meant to carve a nonderivative Mizrahi (and feminine) space: “When the critical act is operating from the margins, it does not entail…the negation of the autonomy of the displaced; this critical act does not necessitate the subordination of the critics and their positioning vis-à-vis the center” (431). Indeed, Lubin's position here entertains the possibility that Sh'hur is designed to accomplish no less than to “destroy [the] myth[s] from the inside” (Deleuze, in Marks 1994: 262). Attending to Marks's (1994) explication of the untenability of cinematic truth allows us to further our discussion about the formal or constitutive subversive power of Sh'hur. In her formulation of minority cinema in “A Deleuzian Politics of Hybrid Cinema” Marks maintains, The power for people in the process of becoming is the “power of the false,” an assertion that will not privilege their experience as truth either, only undermine the hegemonic character of official images, clichés, and other totalizing regimes of truth…. In the cinema, “powers of the false” are at work when there is no single point that can be referred to as real or true. (1994: 260)3 For Marks, a cinematic truth—a cogent and unifying discourse—is necessarily nonviable considering that the

medium's constitutive elements are multifarious and multilayered and that rather than complement each other, they form a cinematic polyphony.4 The aptness of cinema to guide us in reconceptualizing the power of the margins and to offer sites of intervention and struggle is encoded then as much in its fundamental aesthetics as in its narratives. The aforementioned cinematic notion of “mimetic surplus,” coupled with Stephen Heath's (1975) claim for the unresolved tension between a film's narrative and its discourse, fully concur with Marks's articulation of minority cinema. These formulations about the structural impossibility of this medium to provide a dialogic closure deem monolithic and stable power relations in the production and the reception of the filmic texts untenable.5 The excess regarding the cinematic “mimetic surplus” entails and connotes overflow, that which cannot be contained and, therefore, transgresses boundaries. Feminist scholars, including Mary Douglas (1966), Julia Kristeva (1982), and Elizabeth Grosz (1994), refer to the body's orifices as sites of transgression and boundary violation between the inside and the outside. Page 153 →Drawing upon Douglas's work, for Grosz, the body's “orifices and surfaces can represent the sites of cultural marginality, places of social entry and exit, regions of confrontation or compromise” (193). Physiologically, these orifices are the gateway for a person's body fluids, such as blood, vomit, saliva, and semen. It is precisely its fluidity, shapelessness, and “uncontainability”—and therefore the risk it poses to physical, social, and cultural order—that render this excess abject (in Kristeva's formulation) or transgressive. Considering that Sh'hur’s diegesis is replete with references to blood, urine, saliva, tears, sweat, and vomit, arguably, the film's excessive usage of these bodily fluids is meant precisely to undermine a given social order. (The film's most explicit scene of “bodily repellence” takes place in the sh’ur the mother performs on her son Shlomo to relieve him from his romantic misfortune. She is covered with a white sheet only and then also wraps her naked son with it. The mother pushes down Shlomo's head, as if giving birth to him, and calls “exit, exit as you exited from your mother's womb” in what amounts to an act of exorcism.)6 Put differently, I suggest here that Sh'hur's emphasis on bodily excess furthers our previous discussion in intimating that it is not only the inside story that undermines the frame story, the local narrative that displaces the Zionist master narrative, and the Mizrahi that challenges the Ashkenazi, but it is the oppressed body itself that asks to defy the dictates of the official order. As significant to our inquiry about constitutive elements that render Mizrahi protest in cinema are formal aspects of the language Mizrahi films employ. More than ever before, the “presencing” of Mizrahi speech in cinema is designed to puncture the supposed transparency of the Hebrew language. This emerging trend often takes one of two forms: (1) In a large number of Mizrahi films, the corporeal qualities of language, including diction, accent, lilt, and register, provide fresh sounds that conspicuously challenge the unmarked Israeli Hebrew that, with the exception of the Bourekas, dominated Israeli cinema through the late 1980s; (2) within a given film, Hebrew is often employed as only one of the film's languages. Among the most common other languages and dialects in contemporary Mizrahi films are Iraqi Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (fusa), French, and Persian.7 Likewise, films such as Come Mother (Azhi ayima), Until Tomorrow Comes (ta yisba sba), Maktub Aleik, and Stone Flower (Gole sangam) were released in Israel under a non-Hebrew title; the first three have Arabic titles (in different dialects), and the last one Persian. It is indisputable, even among its critics, that Page 154 →one of Zionism's crowning achievements has been the revival of the Hebrew language. The diminishing presence of Hebrew in the language landscape of numerous Mizrahi films should then be read as more than an attempt to render a realistic portrayal of Mizrahi communities; it is a stratagem to connect to the past and amounts to a protest against the linguo-cultural erasure Zionism inflicted on Mizrahi immigrants. Finally, nontraditional modes of production and distribution strategies of Mizrahi films may also constitute an act of subversion. Readdressing Yamin Messika's films, most of which are overtly melodramatic tales of love and crime and are set in Mizrahi slums and working-class neighborhoods, we can identify elements of protest in his film endeavors.8 As Vicky Shiran (2001) proposes, Messika's persistence in producing films even with extremely limited budgets makes him a protesting artist “who challenges subsidized, arrogant, and alien to many…Israeli cinema” (82).9 His earlier films were made with a minimal budget of $10,000 each where crew members (often only one or two people) and actors deferred their compensation.10 It is clear that these lean production budgets imbue the films’ aesthetics—Messika works mostly with nonactors or obscure ones, the films’ camera movements are never elaborate, the audio quality is wanting (in some of his films, Messika uses a camera-mounted

microphone), and the mise-en-scène, in films such as Hello Sigal (Shalom lakh Sigal, 1996), is determined by narrative functionality, not splendor. In the Afterword I will return to the issue of aesthetics to explore whether Mizrahi films at large offer an alternative cinematic language. It will suffice at this point to note that Messika's practice of including songs by a film's main character in the diegetic and nondiegetic soundtrack is highly uncommon in Israeli feature films, but it is evocative of Arab, Turkish, and Indian melodramas known to many Mizrahi audiences. For years, Messika's distribution strategy relied almost exclusively on direct sales of large quantities of VHS video copies (hereby the term sirte kasetot [literally, “cassette films”]) of his films to owners of music and video booths in areas heavily populated and trafficked by Mizrahim, such as the open-air markets in Tel Aviv's southern district. This distribution strategy—where public screenings became either secondary or nonexistent—was utterly unconventional among Israeli filmmakers, and it calls to mind the Mizrahi music revolution of the mid-1970s when Mizrahi singers, repeatedly shunned by radio broadcasters and “reputable” music halls, launched a successful alternative venue to distribute their audiocassettes.11 Likewise, Sigalit Banai's study (2004) of his films reveals that Messika, who in the 1970s was a film student in the San Francisco Page 155 →Bay Area, was greatly influenced by the Iranian “cassette revolution” where Ruhollah Khomeini disseminated his taped messages from France to U.S. campuses, including the University of California at Berkeley (183–85). Relatedly, tracing the affinities between Messika's filmmaking and filmmaking in the Arab/Muslim Middle East, Banai concludes, “In its style, its target audience, and the reality it depicts, Messika's cinema is emplaced in an extra-institutional ‘Mizrahi’ territory. Messika's choice of this type of filmmaking and distribution methods turns into a subversive act against the dominant culture” (186). Attenuated Protest The bulk of Israeli films that attend to Mizrahi protest only superficially challenge the hegemonic Zionist discourse about the Mizrahim and its modernist/co-optation model that I discussed previously.12 “Attenuated protest” is not meant to discount these films but to point out that, in contrast to the films explored in the following sections of this chapter, Mizrahi consciousness, contestation, and struggle are oftentimes only tangential to the films’ main themes; it is not surprising then that in a number of these works, protest is employed as a narrational springboard for other stories or dilemmas the films are actually interested in bringing to the fore. A case in point is Turn Left at the End of the World and, specifically, its address of the workers’ strike at the bottle factory. Seemingly, various factory scenes—starting with the one in which Roger, the Indian newcomer, commiserates about the need to work there and concluding with the penultimate scene when the management announces that the strikers’ demands are met—encourage us to consider Turn Left as a film whose motivation and focus is Mizrahi protest. Indeed, these factory scenes expose the Mizrahi workers’ harsh conditions, and the strike clearly pits the workers—Moroccans and Indians—against the Ashkenazi management, thereby underscoring the ethnic aspect of the workers’ exploitation. The workers’ recognition of the mistreatment they have been subjected to and the depiction of the course of action where they go on strike in an attempt to improve their lot amount to a rendering of Mizrahi consciousness and agency. Finally, the film opts for the Mizrahi point of view/focalization and is sympathetic to the strikers’ struggle. Yet, a closer analysis of the film will reveal that Turn Left is hardly a subversive film. The factory scenes are merely a vehicle filmmaker Avi Nesher employs to advance the narrative; they are subordinated to the film's overall Page 156 →erotic code and are particularly meant to provide the spatial context for the increasing sexual tension between Roger and Simone, which culminates in their love affair inside the factory. The factory scenes conjure up the “melting pot” notions that I discussed earlier, and the repeated images of fire and boiling glass may also allude to the simmering anger among workers. Yet, it is just as compelling to posit that these visuals, coupled with the rhythmic motions of the bottle machine and its ejecting/“ejaculating” of the liquefied glass, are suggestive of the steaming passion between Roger and Simone and are isomorphic with the ensuing sex act.13 Importantly, in Turn Left, it is not the actual protest that yields the desired results where the management eventually improves the working conditions. The film underscores how, following the strike and the decision by

the factory management in Tel Aviv to close down the plant and to fire the workers, the bosses initially did not even deign to arrive in the town to negotiate with their former employees. The management's interest in the town is awakened only as the result of the auspicious (and fantastic) visit of the British cricket team to the local town and the coverage received by the match between the British and the local teams. (When the factory manager is about to announce the decision to meet the strikers’ demands, the single statement he enunciates is, “You have more luck than brains.”) Framing the protest in that way immediately calls to mind Sallah's treatment of the challenge the inhabitants of the ma abara pose to government officials when they request the improvement of their housing conditions by moving them to shikkunim. Knowing that a protest for this cause will not yield the desired results, the ma abara inhabitants in this comedy, led by Sallah, employ a new tactic—they ask government officials not to provide them with the shikkun. Indeed as the schemer Sallah hopes, the government is giving them what they “do not want”—the shikkun. Both Turn Left and Sallah then broach the dispiriting possibility that, if people's struggle yields the desired results, it is not because of, but regardless of or even in spite of their protest. If Turn Left is a subdued version of Mizrahi protest, the documentary Who Is Mordechai Vanunu? renders a scathing critique, but one that only tangentially offers Mizrahi protest. The following discussion of Nissim Mossek's Who Is Mordechai Vanunu? (Mi ata Mordechai Vanunu?, 2004)—a documentary that relays the extraordinary story of Israel's nuclear “whistle-blower” Vanunu—points to both the film's diegetic realm and to the broader context of the Vanunu affair. The film was shown on Israeli television in April 2004, around the time Vanunu was released Page 157 →from prison.14 Relentlessly, over a period of a few weeks in the spring of that year, Israeli media turned into a public forum where people of all political affiliations and with various personal and moral convictions engaged in a debate about Vanunu's sentencing eighteen years earlier, his treatment while in jail, and the risks involved in his release even as he completed the whole term of his imprisonment. The film's references to the role Vanunu's ethnic origins and socioeconomic situation played in forming his political convictions and moral stand are of much relevance here. Who Is Mordechai Vanunu? chronicles the story of a man harshly vilified by most Israelis (e.g., “public enemy number one” and “national punching bag”) and extolled by others. It begins with Vanunu's emigration from Morocco and the family's disillusionment with Israel once they were settled in an impoverished neighborhood in Beer Sheva. Later, the film follows Vanunu's adolescent and college years. In 1977 Vanunu was hired as a lowlevel technician in Israel's most secretive and protected site—the nuclear power plant in Dimona—and, despite his well-known radical leftist political views, he managed to work there for ten years. Attending Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva while working in Dimona, Vanunu sought the company of Palestinian students and expressed his support for their national aspirations, a daring and subversive conduct at the time. Clandestinely, Vanunu started taking photographs of some of the nuclear plant's facilities, yet, even today, it is still unclear what he intended to do with the evidence he had gathered. (Vanunu did not develop the negatives for some time after he had left Israel.) Vanunu was eventually fired, apparently because of his dubious contacts with Palestinians, and he decided to start a new life abroad. First, Vanunu spent some time in Australia and converted to Christianity there. At some point during his stay there, he was goaded into collaborating with the London Sunday Times by sharing with the newspaper the pictures he took of the nuclear plant. Consequently Vanunu traveled to Britain. Once he suspected that he was being watched by Israeli intelligence agents, he transferred to Italy with a woman he met and did not suspect—a decoy named Cindy, who was working for the Mossad. Agents of the Mossad then kidnapped Vanunu from Italian territory15 and, following his transfer to Israel, hid him for several weeks until the opening of his trial behind closed doors. Vanunu's sentence of eighteen years in prison, eleven and a half of which he spent in extreme solitary confinement, is the harshest ever given in Israel for charges of high treason and espionage—the specific charges brought against Vanunu. Page 158 → The film proposes that Vanunu was actually used by the Israeli GSS (General Security Service, the equivalent of the American FBI, and known in Hebrew as Shabbak), which knew about his activities all along and insisted on maintaining his employment. One hypothesis is that, as a measure of deterrence and intimidation, the Israeli

government and its intelligence services wanted the world and, specifically, the Arab enemies to know about Israel's nuclear power without having to publicly divulge this information; according to this hypothesis, Vanunu's clandestinely taken photographs could serve this purpose. (Importantly, although it is now an open secret that Israel has nuclear capability, to this day not a single Israeli government official has acknowledged this fact.) The film also intimates that the GSS might have had plans to use Vanunu as a mole infiltrating Arab student organizations or the Arab-Israeli communist party, but that Vanunu declined to cooperate. In the film, Vanunu is highly aware of and disturbed by the drastic status change his family had undergone upon their immigration to Israel. Even in his trial, Vanunu mentioned the economic comfort the family enjoyed in Morocco and contrasted it with their predicament after emigration. Filmmaker Mossek's voice-over toward the end of the film emphasizes that Vanunu “felt on his skin the deprivation, discrimination, and bigotry against the Sephardi Jews.” Moreover, one of Vanunu's lawyers, Avigdor Feldman, proposes that Vanunu's heightened awareness of the Mizrahi discrimination may explain his actions. Yet, the film (in the expanded version that includes Vanunu's release) underscores that the demonstrators who chanted “death to Vanunu” and “Vanunu—a traitor” outside the prison in Ashkelon on that day of his release were mostly Moroccan locals themselves. Against these demonstrators stood a group of supporters, many of whom are international activists, who deem Vanunu's recalcitrant struggle a heroic stand against the global proliferation of nuclear threat.16 One member of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, Matityaho (Mati) Shemoelof, carried a sign: “Vanunu—You Are My Mizrahi Hero.”17 Several days after this demonstration, I attended the Rainbow's forum meeting that set out to reflect on the organization's position toward Vanunu. To aver their view of Vanunu as a Mizrahi hero, some interlocutors stressed that his mistreatment has been precisely because of his provenance, they identified with his peaceful message, and they acknowledged the heavy price Vanunu had paid for expressing it.18 My position, which I also shared in that forum, is that the contention that Vanunu is a Mizrahi hero whose actions amount to Mizrahi agency is founded on problematic grounds. Page 159 →Indeed, we may suggest that Vanunu is a Mizrahi victim and, possibly, he is a hero, but I would argue that those explications do not render him a Mizrahi hero. To return to the film, despite its repeated allusions to the linkage between Vanunu's sense of discrimination and his heroic conduct (in the eyes of some), the film fails to offer even a single instance to indicate that, at any point since his imprisonment, Vanunu strove to advance the Mizrahi issue. In the Israeli context, his conversion to Christianity (and signing his letters with “JC”—Jesus Christ), coupled with his desire to leave Israel and to disengage from it altogether, render his activism peripheral to Mizrahi protest. Corrective Histories The challenge Mizrahi cinema has posed to the regnant Ashkenazi-Zionist narrative transpires in a growing number of films that unearth a controversial story about Jewish life in Arab lands or events based on early encounters between the Mizrahi immigrants and the absorbing society in Palestine/Israel. These films’ purpose is rather patent: to right historical wrongs. The Ringworm Children (Yalde ha-gazezet, David Belhassen and Asher Hemias, 2003) is an exposé of sorts about North African child immigrants in the 1950s who were treated in Israel for ringworm (Tinea capitis) with ionizing radiation to the head. According to the film, about 100,000 children were exposed to this harmful medical care; thousands of them have died, and many others have suffered from cancer and other critical side effects. Overall, according to the film, the ringworm maltreatment took the lives of more Israelis than all the wars combined did. The film broaches the possibility that Israel colluded with the United States (where that treatment had been banned a few years earlier) to experiment with irradiation by using the children as guinea pigs and that this treatment was designed as “social medicine” tantamount to eugenics.19 The Ringworm Children is an exceptional film in this group of “corrective history” Mizrahi films; as we shall see, although these films seek the rewriting of the Zionist narrative, and in this sense their stand is one of protest, they are nevertheless rather reticent and conciliatory. The Ringworm Children as well as the documentaries I discuss in the next section—the two films focusing on the Israeli Black Panthers and Ancient Winds—provide an alternative narrative to past events as a part of a stratagem to shake the very foundations of Zionist ideology and praxis. Conversely, the documentaries and docudramas that I discuss next—Unpromised Page 160 →Land, The Pioneers, The Farhud, and Pigtails—are designed to create a more inclusive Zionist narrative by pointing out that

Mizrahim, too, participated and contributed to the Zionist enterprise and that it is time their share is finally recognized. Furthermore, in these latter works, the filmmakers contrive to impart a story of life in the Diaspora or in the Land of Israel that, if not quite equal to, then at least is reminiscent of the Ashkenazi tale of suffering in exile and redemption in the Promised Land. Unpromised Land and The Pioneers are designed to bring to light tragic Mizrahi experiences of the past in the context of the early Zionist effort. Unpromised Land (Dekel shfal tzameret, Ayelet Heller, 1992) chronicles the immigration to Palestine/the Land of Israel of about ten Jewish families from Yemen in the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite the immigrants’ Zionist zeal and their settlement in the marshlands near the Sea of Galilee, in 1913 the land they had gradually been cultivating was given to the pioneers of the second aliya (a wave of immigration from Eastern Europe). The members of the new kibbutz nearby snubbed those Yemenite Jews and were eventually successful in transferring them to an uninhabited area near the town of Rehovot in the centralsouth coastal region. The Pioneers (ha-alutzim, Aharale Cohen and Sigalit Banai, 2007) attends to the establishment in 1951 of the town of Sderot close to the Gaza Strip and to the settlement there of mostly Mizrahi immigrants from North Africa and Asia. Although the town has grown and its demographics have changed over the years, The Pioneers reveals the prevailing dour conditions of the Mizrahi residents—from their socioeconomic troubles to being the targets of the Qassam missile attacks from Gaza. Yonatan Yifrach, former chairman of Sderot City Council, captures astutely Sderot's role in the Zionist enterprise: “When you create a delicate part for a plane, you are left with some scraps. We are the scraps sacrificed for the sake of the creation of the State of Israel.” The predicament of Iraqi Jews in the 1940s and 1950s is the focus of Yitzhak Halutzi's The Farhud and Pigtails. On May 7 and 8, 1941, in Basra and a few weeks later on June 1 and 2, in Baghdad, concurring with the Jewish holiday of Shavu ot, Iraqi Jews were subjected to pogroms,20 also known as farhud. In Baghdad, where the farhud was fiercer, over a hundred Jews21 and tens of Muslims were killed, hundreds injured, and ransacking of Jewish stores was rampant.22 Initially, the farhud was led by military officers, policemen, and paramilitaries motivated by anti-British sentiments. (The British had just overthrown prime minister Rashid Ali Page 161 →al-Kaylani's proNazi regime on May 30.) On the second day though, the perpetrators were mostly looters from poor Baghdadi neighborhoods who sought easy gains from the ensuing chaos. British troops stationed in Baghdad's outskirts entered the city only after a two-day power vacuum during which the pogroms took place (a delay that is still not fully accounted for and that intimates Britain's calculated tactics not to intervene in the pogroms). Ultimately, it would be imprudent to construe the farhud as representative of Jewish-Arab (Muslim) relations in Iraq in the pre1948 era. As Orit Bashkin (2012) suggests, “A distinction should be made between an analysis of the farhud and the farhudization of Jewish Iraqi history—viewing the farhud as typifying the overall history of the relationship between Jews and greater Iraqi society” (138). The Farhud (ha-Farhud, Yitzhak Halutzi, 2008) employs reenacted scenes and personal accounts by Jewish Baghdadi eyewitnesses to relay what is often considered a turning point in those Jews’ sense of belonging to their motherland Iraq. This made-for-TV film and the studio discussion on Israeli Channel 1’s program “Mabbat Sheni” (March 10, 2009) that followed its screening made a concerted effort to underscore the pro-Nazi sentiments that permeated the riots, while broader contextual considerations that might have provided further explanations for the riots are given relatively little attention. These include the Arab revolt/civil war (1936–39) in Palestine and the heightened conflict between Jews and Arabs there, the issue of the broader Arab nationalism's opposition to the Zionist enterprise, mounting tensions in Iraq over the Zionist movement's growing presence and influence among Iraqi Jews, and the decision of the Zionist leadership to side with the Allies. To wit, the film and the studio discussion conceptualized the farhud mostly as symptomatic of racial anti-Semitism instead of also exploring the same events as an expression of anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist sentiments. In her opening remarks on “Mabbat Sheni,” the program hostess Keren Neubach sets out the parameters of the discussion: “For many years, the story of the pogroms [in Iraq] did not draw the attention of the Israeli establishment, and only recently is the recognition that the pogroms in Baghdad are part of World War II's Holocaust affairs beginning to seep in.” This is precisely where Ella Shohat (1988) aims her critique of Israeli historiography vis-à-vis Jewish life in Arab lands; for her, this ideologically motivated rendering of history is “a morbidly selective ‘tracing the dots’ from pogrom to

pogrom (often separated by centuries),” while it ignores the reality where “the Sephardim [Mizrahim] lived, on the whole, quite comfortably within Arab-Moslem society” (9). The framing of the farhud Page 162 →along these historiographical lines accomplishes two goals: (1) The association of the Arab with the Nazi (which is one of the film's themes);23 (2) a way for the Arab-Jews to enter the Ashkenazi-Zionist collective by proffering, “We too had a catastrophe inflicted on us by (pro) Nazis.” In his reference to the dominant academic discourse about the farhud, Shenhav (2005a: 45) broaches the Zionist maxim “mi-Shoah li-tkuma” (literally, “from catastrophe /holocaust to revival”) in order to reveal the calculated analogy between the Arab Mizrahi and European Ashkenazi, on the one hand, and between the Arab and the Nazi, on the other hand. Shenhav consequently poses the question of whether it is possible to wrest a Mizrahi historical narrative away from the Zionist procrustean memory.24 Halutzi's television docudrama Pigtails (Tzamot, 1989) is set in Iraq in the years 1947–50 and centers on Suad, a teenage Jewish woman who joins a Zionist underground cell in Erbil (in Kurdish Iraq) and is then captured and imprisoned in a women's jail in Baghdad for her illegal activities. Incarcerated, she is awaiting a trial whose verdict is certain to be a life sentence or worse. Shortly before the scheduled trial, news reaches the prison that all Jews are now allowed to leave the country legally and immigrate to Palestine (based on the Iraqi parliamentary law from March 1950 that stipulated that a one-year window of opportunity to immigrate would be granted to Jews on condition of forfeiting their Iraqi citizenship). The film concludes with Suad's release from prison and the rendezvous with her father, who is making the final arrangements for the family's departure. In contrast to Suad's determination, the film addresses the Iraqi Jews’ ambivalence and inner schisms regarding the Zionist effort to “rescue” them and to the reaction of non-Jewish Iraqis to the Jewish question. Although the Iraqi authorities are relentless in their surveillance of the Jewish Zionist underground, common Iraqis are dismayed by the deteriorating relations with the Jews and the impending departure of their Jewish neighbors and friends. Pigtails dramatizes an ideological debate between Suad and her fellow prisoner and friend, a Jewish communist inmate named Munira. In line with other Jewish members of the underground communist party in Iraq, Munira eschews Zionism and its operations in Iraq and fights for a just country for all its citizens. Suad tells Munira that from now on she would like to go by the Hebrew name Hertzliya (!), whereas Munira snubs Suad's suggestion to go by the Hebrew/Israeli name Ora (like “Munira” in Arabic, “Ora” in Hebrew is derivative of “light”). In the verbal duel between the two women amid Page 163 →the prison's general hunger strike, Suad expresses the need to leave Iraq precisely because they are Jewish, whereas for Munira it is mandatory they stay because Iraq is their nation. However, despite the film's general effort to allow multiple and contending voices, when the exchange between Suad and Munira turns to the farhud, the film's discursive design is laid bare and the association between the Holocaust and the farhud is stated clearly. (in response to Munira's determination to stay in Iraq): Do you want us to sit and wait to be killed? SUAD

MUNIRA:

Until the [’48] war broke out, nobody came to kill you.

Munira, open your eyes. The slaughter [farhud] in ’41 which was here in Baghdad had happened before the war in Palestine…. The blood shed was Jewish, just like in Europe. The [Zionist] emissaries cried when they reported murdering of millions there. The few who escaped found closed doors. Where else can we go? SUAD:

MUNIRA: SUAD:

We don't have to go. The European Jews have no other place, but we have.

You call this a place?!

Noticeable here is the swift transition in Suad's text from “Europe” and “they” to “Iraq” and “we” (“The few who escaped found closed doors. Where else can we go?”); this juxtaposition is meant to equate one historical narrative with another. Munira attributes the farhud to the government instigation of the hungry mob and to a class-based

antagonism where poor Arabs looted the property of rich Jews; for Suad, the farhud is the resultant expression of anti-Jewish sentiments just as the extermination of Jews in Europe is the sorry manifestation of deep rooted antiSemitism. In a dialectical manner, by sheerly employing “farhud” and “Holocaust” in this exchange, Munira's seeming rejection of Suad's ascription of the farhud to the prevailing hatred of Jews in Iraq and her own refusal to seeing it as the equivalent of vitriolic anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany facilitate for the filmmaker precisely such a linkage between the two events. Pigtails is based on the life story of Hertzliya Lokai. In the acknowledgments at the end of the film she is referred to as “A Prisoner of Zion” (asirat Tzion), a term that was initially reserved for the Jewish-Soviet refusniks who were willing to go to prison rather than forgo their efforts to immigrate to Israel (hence, “Let My People Go”). This effort to relate Lokai's story to the tales of European Jews becomes even more patent if we consider that, in all likelihood, Pigtails was designed to conjure up Page 164 →the proto-Zionist legend of the Hungarian Jew Hanna Senesh (Szenes). Both Lokai/Suad and Senesh were young women who risked their lives for the Zionist cause (Senesh was on a mission to save Hungarian Jews and was a part of a small, all-Jewish force trained by the British military in Palestine), they both sat in prison for their clandestine operations, and both of them withstood torture after their capture but never divulged information to their interrogators.25 Halutzi's is a genuine effort for corrective history by the medium of cinema. My argument though is that these undoubtedly important accounts of Jewish life in Iraq in the 1940s and early 1950s are narrated from a relatively narrow Zionist perspective where the prolonged and multifaceted experience of the Jewish community in Iraq is subordinated to the EuropeanZionist teleological narrative of a national and political revival in Palestine.26 Similarly to Yitzhak Halutzi's narrativization of Iraqi-Jewish experience within a particular Zionist framework, Eli Cohen's docudrama Egoz (1999) reveals from a mostly Zionist perspective the story of the Casablanca Moroccan community on the eve of the escape of some forty-four Jews from the shores of al-Huseima on the boat Pisces. The boat departed on January 11, 1961, but sank on its way to Israel as it was heading to the Strait of Gibraltar. All the Moroccan Jews on board died, and the forty-four bodies were later buried in Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem. Like Halutzi, Cohen allows for contending non- or anti-Zionist voices. Refa'el, the head of the family on which the film centers, challenges the Israeli Zionist emissary who is in charge of organizing the Jewish “exodus” from Morocco: “We've lived here for one thousand years without you. Who asked you to come here?…Until you established your state there was no hatred of Jews here [in Morocco]. There was no fear.” Yet again, the “escape” from Morocco and the fashion in which the exodus serves as the film's narrational climax are meant to be mnemonic of some formative events involving the plight of European Jews that are etched in the collective Zionist memory. In the film, Pisces is referred to as sfinat ma apilim—a boat smuggling Jews to the shores of Israel. In the Zionist narrative, this term is reserved mostly to describe the illegal operation of bringing European Jews, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, to Palestine under the radar of the British navy in the Mediterranean. The association with the story of the ship Exodus is then inevitable. Again, the allusions to the Holocaust in this film subtly establish equivalence between the Arab and the Nazi.27 When one of the local Zionist activists questions the rush to smuggle the Jews outside of Morocco, the emissary's Page 165 →peremptory response is, “I have already been to such places when Jews did not leave in time.” If the above-mentioned films implicitly suggest that to be a part of the national memory a community needs to have gone through the crucible of the Holocaust, then Don't Touch My Holocaust and the two-part television documentary series “A Matter of Time” choose to examine this assumption and reflect on its implications. I will elaborate on Asher de Bentolila Tlalim's Don't Touch My Holocaust in the next chapter; it is suffice to mention at this point that, in a section titled wittily “What Does a Moroccan [Jew] Have to Do with the Holocaust?” the Moroccan-born filmmaker tackles this issue not so much by suggesting that Moroccan Jews also suffered during the Holocaust (in actuality, they were probably affected the least of most European, Middle Eastern, and North African Jewish communities) but by allowing Mizrahim (and Palestinians) to participate in the discourse about the Holocaust and to represent it from their perspective in theater and cinema. “A Matter of Time” reveals the largely untold story of some North African Jewish communities during World War II. The first installation—From Tripoli to Bergen-Belsen (mi-Tripoli le-Bergen-Belsen, Marco Carmel, 2005), which focuses on the story of Libyan Jews—opens with Irit Abramski-Blei, a historian at the Yad Vashem

Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Abramski-Blei regrets that, during the preparations for the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, as North African Holocaust survivors wanted to share their World War II experiences under Nazi rule, the Vichy government, or the Italian fascist rule, they were told (apparently by the Israeli legal team) that “they don't belong to this story.” This and the second installation—Common Fate (Goral meshutaf, Serge Ankri, 2005)—reiterate that although incomparable in scale to the Holocaust in Europe, North African Jews were also victims of the war crimes. To accentuate certain similarities in the war experiences of European and North African Jews, the films address the transfer of Libyan Jews holding British passports to concentration camps in Europe, and to the escape of some European Jews to Morocco (often en route to the Americas) and the warm reception they received by the local Jews. However, both films of “A Matter of Time” reframe the dilemma of the place of the Mizrahi in the national memory of the Holocaust; From Tripoli to BergenBelsen and Common Fate guide the viewer to include the North African Jews (and by extension the Mizrahi) in the story of the Holocaust not because of considerations about their experiences during World War II, Page 166 →but because they are a part of the Jewish people. In the conclusion of the series, historians dismiss what a couple of interviewees suspect was a crematorium in the works in Libya, and they attribute this erroneous claim to the desire of North African Jews to partake in Jewish history. To provide a definitive conclusion to AbramskiBlei's dilemma from the beginning of the first installation regarding the unjust exclusion of the Mizrahi story, the second film returns to her one last time: “I strongly oppose it when people try to integrate into the Israeli fabric through the Holocaust; that Jewish identity is determined by the Holocaust. We are in a sorry state (oi lanu) if this is what Jewish identity means.” Louis Althusser's “interpellation” (1971), Bill Ashcroft (2001) coins “interpolation” to point to the power of the subaltern to transform the modes of imperial discourse by “resistance to absorption” (14) and by “practices of inhabiting” (15). This “horizontal” lived experience is culture-centered and is possible as long as the subjugated group writes its history back rather than attempts to rewrite it simply by inserting the excluded histories (102). My intent in qualifying the subversive power of most “corrective history” documentaries and docudramas discussed here is clearly not meant to question the Mizrahi suffering and the Mizrahi contribution to the Zionist enterprise as portrayed in these films, nor is it designed to doubt the filmmakers’ sincere effort to bring to light tragically important stories from the past and to cast contesting narratives to the hegemonic one. Rather, I argue that most of the films that I examined in this section opt for a derivative discourse whereby they “rewrite” history instead of “write it back.” To wit, I deem it significant that the manner in which these stories are told amounts to a concerted effort to narrate the Mizrahi story within the parameters of the Ashkenazi-Zionist master narrative and to subordinate the former to the latter, namely, to facilitate the acceptance of the Mizrahi past into the pantheon of the Zionist sanctified myths about the trauma of exilic life, the immigrants’ pioneering spirit, and the settling of the land. IN CONTRADISTINCTION TO

The Coupling of Victimhood and Agency in Mizrahi Protest Cinema Victimhood can be a prime way of suspending or attempting to suspend the political through an appeal to something non-agentive and “beyond” or “before” politics…. Even in such cases, victimhood does not negate politics through and through. Rather, victimhood establishes a space for a specific kind of politics; but it clears the ground, it poses itself as the neutral or Page 167 →indisputable starting point from which discussion, debate, and action—in a word, politics—can and must proceed. LAURA JEFFERY AND MATEI CANDEA28

“Victimhood” looms large and inspires various artistic, journalistic, and scholarly works on the Mizrahi community. Challenging the widespread positioning of this term in contradistinction to agency, in my analysis of Mizrahi cinema I seek to point to the relevance of victimhood to empowerment, and of the relations between the two to the formation of group identity. Put differently, I suggest here that protest—motivated by a sense of victimhood, meant to effect change, and resulting in solidifying group identities—epitomizes the link between those two putatively dissonant terms. To situate this argument in the context of Mizrahi cinema, we first need to identify the particular roots of the compartmentalization of the discourse about victimhood away from articulations about agency in light of the Israeli/Zionist discourse and the broader scholarship on this dilemma.

Broadly speaking, contemporary scholarship in media and cultural studies favors works whose emphasis is on agency, change, and social consciousness over those that focus on victimization and victimhood. What then triggers this lopsided interest in agency? To a large extent, the cautionary position toward an overemphasis on victimhood derives from contemporary cultural studies’ disenchantment with top-down conceptualizations about people's cultures, societies, and politics as articulated by orthodox Marxism and the Frankfurt School. This is clearly not meant to suggest that recent scholarship discounts the severity of displacements, deprivations, and oppressions that have taken place in the modern era, but rather to point to the emergence of theoretical models that problematize a monolithic reading of history and power. Among the most significant interventions of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was its effort to articulate and situate agency within pregiven, deep-seated, structural power imbalances. In line with my inquiry, one of the central dilemmas tackled by a 2006 issue of History and Anthropology titled “The Politics of Victimhood” is, “How do claims to passive victimization come up against counter-claims of agency…?” (Laura Jeffery and Matei Candea 2006: 287). In my view, the wish to go “beyond victimization” is designed precisely to supplant the trudging work on victimhood with the zestful politics of ownership; if victimhood and victimization are likely to connote passivity and fait accompli, agency, as a social praxis, represents a more uplifting worldview, and it signifies change Page 168 →(or at least the determination to effect it), empowerment, and a process by which collective identities develop high consciousness of their conditions, namely, they become communities “for-themselves.” Arguably, a related factor that has further contributed to the gradual diminishing of scholarly interest in victimhood as such pertains to postmodernist and poststructuralist conceptualizations that deem cohesive individual and collective identities as social constructs only and thereby eschew notions of “natural” or essentialist identities. In this formulation, expressions about victimhood can be, albeit too facilely in my view, interpreted as derivative of an essentialist stance. For example, we may look at a position adopted by those afflicted by the perpetrators’ heinous deeds in professing their victimhood. The victims are likely to argue, “We are discriminated against because of who we are (e.g., African-Americans, Mizrahim, or women)”; the oppression or victimization is understood by its victims as a targeting of their group based on their racial and ethnic origins, even on biology or sex, namely, on “pre-given” categories. In this rendering of discrimination, the oppressed groups proffer a position that smacks of essentialism, even when the essentialist stand is propagated by the dominant group and the victims purport to challenge it. It is precisely this adoption of predetermined essentialist categories to which the contemporary theories I alluded are suspicious. Drawing upon bell hooks (1990), I argue though that positions that either elide altogether any discourse on victimhood and focus only on agency or those that draw a categorical distinction between victimhood and agency overlook the formative power of shared experiences (one of which is victimization) in the forging of identities, bonds, and coalitions, and in eliciting awareness and agency.29 Yet, importantly, that bifurcating position has been central to the Zionist narrative and constitutes yet another key explanation for the suspicious view on victimhood in the Israeli sociopolitical discursive realm and praxis. We have seen that central to the Zionist ethos is the sabra—a native-born Israeli who is independent, assertive, strong, healthy, and active. Oz Almog's The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (2000) provides a comprehensive account of the mythic sabra figure and explicates its casting as the radical inversion of the diasporic Jew, perceived as dependent, rootless, and meek. In this binary positioning, if the Zionist-sanctioned sabra is isomorphic with agency (and masculinity), then victimization, associated with the Jewish diasporic experience, conjures up passivity (and femininity). Accordingly, in the years immediately following World War II, Zionism saw mostly shame in the Jewish experience of the Holocaust; Page 169 →in contrast to the glorification of those who participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1944, Jews exterminated in Europe were often berated for being a submissive mass that was “led like lambs to the slaughter.”30 Once construed as antithetical to the sabra ethos, expressions of victimhood have been harshly censured in official and public discourse; the subjects who flaunt their pain venture into a social taboo where it is assumed that other members of society have suffered no less and where victimization contest has no place. Consequently, victimhood has been construed as opposite to the willingness to sacrifice one's self for the state.31 In this context, “sacrifice” signifies, paradoxically one may say, agency whereby individuals are willing to give away their goods for the collective and even risk their lives for a national cause.32 Conversely, “victimhood,” as I formulate it here and with the subtle disparaging connotations its Hebrew equivalent (korbanut) carries, is associated with a collective's passivity, neediness, undue whining, and its persistence in getting what, in the first place, is doubtful this group deserves.33

We have already pointed to a rather significant corpus of recent studies about the Mizrahi community of Israel that attest in unequivocal terms to the cultural displacement and discrimination that Mizrahi Jews have experienced mostly in the early years following their immigration from North Africa and the Middle East to Israel. Importantly though, as I intimated a number of times in this work, broaching the Mizrahi plight in the Israeli realm is still often dismissed as yet another cry of victimhood and is presumed to attest to people's preference to passively focus on the past instead of actively seek the betterment of their lives by hard work and purpose at the present. Not surprisingly, then, in “The Culture of Complaint Rides Again,” Gideon Samet (2002) critiques David Benchetrit's Ancient Winds: Moroccan Chronicle protest film, which I will discuss here, on the grounds that it participates in a “victimhood contest.” Samet argues sarcastically that if the film “describes any relevant phenomenon, it is the film's reverting to the culture of complaint” (B1).34 Clearly, we may suggest that the dominant group's dismissal of victimhood, as conceptualized here, is meant precisely to silence protest and, thereby, to reinscribe power imbalances. The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak, Have You Heard about the Panthers?, and Ancient Winds: Moroccan Chronicle, all of which are documentaries in which first-and second-generation Mizrahi/Sephardi filmmakers explicitly explore the Mizrahi predicament and struggle, initially seem to be motivated by a sense of victimhood. Likewise, ostensibly the films’ construction of Mizrahi identity is predicated mostly on ethnic and Page 170 →geographical origins. Yet, I am most interested in discerning the filmic presentation of the interrelations between structure and change, victimhood and consciousness/agency, and essentialist and constructionist positions. As we shall see, ultimately, these films guide us to rearticulate Mizrahi victimhood in terms different than those stipulated in the regnant Israeli/Zionist discourse that I limned here, and to reassess essentialist conceptualizations of Mizrahiness. My analysis will suggest that the films discussed here attest to a Mizrahi struggle that is consciousness-based and purposeful, rather than one that is prescribed or predetermined by the presumed ethnic “culture of complaint.” In turn, our findings here about the consciousness-based protest will guide us in the next chapter where we discuss Mizrahi films’ attempt to open up space for struggles based on groups’ solidarity and coalitions. These Mizrahi subversionary films clearly do not amount to a passive dwelling on the group's own victimization, and they attest to an agentive mode that interrelates the oppression of the Palestinians to the displacement of the Mizrahi. The documentary The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak (ha-Panterim ha-Sh'orim medabrim, Eli Hamo and Sami Shalom Chetrit, 2003) assembles the founders and some of the most prominent figures of the Israeli Black Panthers movement of the early 1970s to reminisce about the origins of the movement, the sociopolitical realm in which they operated, and the racial and social struggles that inspired them, and to assess the movement's legacy and its relevancy to the Mizrahi condition at the present. Haim Hanegbi, an activist in the late radical movement Matzpen35 who features centrally in the film, discusses his movement's collaboration with the Black Panthers. The film begins with the caption, “This independent film was produced with no financial assistance from any Israeli cinema foundation, all of which have rejected it.”36 At the very outset then, the film evokes a sense of victimhood by drawing an analogy between the (negative) reception of the film by the Israeli media establishment and the discrimination of the Mizrahim in general. Consequently, over still pictures of the Musrara neighborhood in Jerusalem where the Black Panthers’ revolt burst forth in March 1971, crawling titles provide information about the Mizrahim's dire state. The Mizrahim and Ashkenazim are constructed in this film along binary terms—for example, “1970—Israel is divided. The economy and power [were] dominated by Ashkenazim (European Jews) while Mizrahi Jews were exploited as cheap laborers.” Statistics about Mizrahi unemployment, education, and poverty are interspersed throughout the film, again, often to starkly contrast them with information about the socioeconomic status of the Ashkenazi. Page 171 →The emphasis on unchanged conditions and power disparities, the homogenization of each of the two groups, and the references to ethnic/geographical origins seem to reinscribe essentialist formulations of the two groups. However, The Black Panthers Speak does not fall into a reactionary form of essentialism; to use Diana Fuss's (1989) terms, it deploys and activates essentialism, rather than lapses into it.37 As we have seen, the historical and discursive contextualization of a position, movement, and struggle often render facile and sweeping generalizations associated with essentialism untenable. The film (like the study IntraJewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews [2010], authored by the film's codirector Chetrit) strives to

reveal the evolution of the ethnic protest over the years. Instead of viewing the social outbursts as sporadic events, the film seeks to identify connections between them in order to offer change within continuity. Former Black Panther Reuven Abergil and Haim Hanegbi of Matzpen claim in the film's first interviews that the Black Panthers’ revolt was a direct offspring of the Wadi Salib riots of 1959.38 Likewise, the electoral power the Sephardi/Mizrahi Orthodox party of Shas enjoyed in the 1990s is linked to the efforts of the Black Panthers some twenty years earlier. (Notably though, most of the film's participants render this specific development—the clout Shas has had—detrimental to the Mizrahi cause.) This “de-essentialization” of the Mizrahi in The Black Panthers Speak is further illustrated when Kokhavi Shemesh, one of the Black Panthers’ ideologues, reveals that his movement had to confront Mizrahi organizations that were co-opted into and collaborated with Israeli authorities’ repression of the movement. Similarly, he is dismayed that, at the present, no Mizrahi revolution can take place because many of the potential “soldiers” of the revolution—the Mizrahi poor—have turned to drugs rather than to social and political activism. In these references, Shemesh not only eschews notions of unqualified Mizrahi unity and comity, but he intimates that Mizrahi agency is highly imbued with awareness of the past and with acute political consciousness (not whining) and is predicated on people's experiences (e.g., discrimination and oppression) rather than on ethnic origins alone. In Have You Heard about the Panthers? (Shama ta al ha-Panterim, 2002), Nissim Mossek incorporates clips from Have You Heard about the Panthers, Mr. Moshe?—his 1973 film about the Black Panthers—into a journey he is taking now with three of the movement's leaders to find the whereabouts of the Panthers’ other founders. In the first few scenes, the film addresses the Israeli authorities’ ill-treatment of residents of the Musrara Mizrahi neighborhood in Jerusalem, which ultimately led Page 172 →to the 1970s riots. In addition to the dire housing conditions there, the film implies that the settling of the new immigrants in this neighborhood near the Jordanian border rendered them cannon fodder in the years prior to the 1967 War. Locals of this and other neighborhoods attest in the film that, triggered by increased property values in a gentrification-like process these areas underwent after the 1967 War, the government attempted to evict them. Also, they relay their sense of anger and frustration following prime minister Golda Meir's and Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek's disparaging and condescending responses to their pleas at that time.39 Charlie Bitton, one of the three leaders the film features, maintains that, on his way to screen the film abroad in the 1970s, Israeli GSS agents stole from his suitcase what was believed to be the film's only copy.40 However, like The Black Panthers Speak, this film does not dwell on victimhood; instead, it is designed to raise consciousness, and ultimately, it centers on the residues and relevancy of the 1970s struggle to Israeli society today. Nissim Mossek and his interlocutors contemplate the possibility of reestablishing the movement to fight injustice in present-day social and ethnic power disparities. Importantly, the titles of both films on the Black Panthers attest to the filmmakers’ intent to expose a voice that had previously been hushed, ignored, or unknown (“have you heard”/“the Black Panthers speak”). The films provide then a stage for the Panthers to speak and to be heard in what amounts to “presencing” the absence of this movement and to advocating agency that is propelled by a sense of victimhood. Ancient Winds: Moroccan Chronicle (Ruwa kadim: khronica Maroka'it, David Benchetrit, 2002)41 features six Moroccan Jews who immigrated to Israel while still in their formative years: former Black Panther Reuven Abergil; poet, scholar, educator, filmmaker, and social activist Sami Shalom Chetrit; Ezer Bitton, resident and former secretary-general of a small settlement near the Lebanese border; Ovad Abutbul, an activist in the publichousing campaign; Arieh Deri, former leader of the Shas party who was removed from office and convicted on charges of embezzlement; and Labor party member and former government minister Shlomo Ben-Ami. More than the other films discussed above, Ancient Winds provides an elaborate chronicle of victimization and an acrid sense of victimhood. The film opens with the Moroccan national anthem, thus situating the film, from the outset, outside the hegemonic Zionist discourse. The Moroccan anthem is played over images of the demonstration on September 3, 1999, when Deri's supporters gathered to protest his conviction and to say farewell to their leader who was about to start his time in jail. From the stage, David Yosef, the son of Shas's spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef and Deri's former student, proclaims that this day of conviction is “The Bastille Day of Sephardic Jewry,” a cry that is meant both to conjure up images of group persecution and repression and, as we

shall later see, to intimate Sephardi revolution. Page 173 → Later in the film, Deri and Ben-Ami express their disappointment with their Ashkenazi political partners; Abergil reveals the systematic selection the Israel absorption authorities enacted in bringing Moroccan Jews to Israel, often allowing only the young and capable to immigrate; and Abutbul points to housing policies that blatantly discriminated against the Mizrahim. The film intensifies the sentiment of victimhood by underscoring former prime minister Ehud Barak's public apology in September 1997 to the “ma abara generation” (read Mizrahi) for the wrongs inflicted on them by previous Israeli Labor governments. Similarly, in the following sequence, the camera lingers on a mass demonstration following Barak's election in May 17, 1999; the crowd supporting Barak keeps chanting “anything but Shas” in a plea for the elected prime minister to form a coalition government without this Orthodox Sephardi/Mizrahi party, which has just won the substantial number of seventeen seats in the Israeli parliament. The juxtaposition of the scenes impels us to interrelate the events, and it confers an additional meaning to our reading of each. A prolonged audio overlap of “anything but Shas” leads Page 174 →from the first scene in this sequence to the second. Thereby, not only does Barak's apology in the earlier scene seem hypocritical, but, in turn, the anti-Shas sentiments are understood within the prolonged ethnic divisions that the apology attempted to obfuscate or lay to rest. Ancient Winds’s ascription of this 1999 demonstration to racist stands becomes blatantly clear when Deri, Shas's leader until later that year, suggests that had the demonstrators called “anything but Yisrael Ba'aliya” (a party of and for Russian/FSU newcomers), the Russian immigrants would have turned to the UN to condemn Israel for its racism. But whereas the film unabashedly resorts to victimhood predicated on originary essentialist positions (best illustrated in the film's structuring around the stories of six Israeli Jews, all of whom are of Moroccan descent) and dwells on past events, its agenda lies elsewhere; as I will illustrate later, the film calls for swift, radical, and revolutionary sociopolitical changes. In concluding this discussion of victimhood and consciousness, it bears noting that Eli Hamo, Nissim Mossek, and David Benchetrit—the filmmakers whose works are discussed here—conveyed in my interviews with them that they eschewed notions of Mizrahiness (and thereby of ethnic struggle) predicated on origins. Instead, they deemed Mizrahiness a state of mind, awareness, and sensitivity that are also open to Ashkenazim, and they maintained that Ashkenazim with “Mizrahi consciousness” can and should participate in the Mizrahi struggle.42 Conversely, they suggested, Mizrahim who lack this awareness and do not protest the Mizrahi predicament are either active “collaborators” with the oppressive hegemony or acquiesce and reveal servile compliance with it; either way, they are not to be the soldiers of the ethnopolitical fight the filmmakers envision. By undermining Mizrahiness as an imposed identity and marginality as a passive condition, these filmmakers averred the claim in this section's epigraph—their works illustrate that victimhood is always already agentive and is not “before” or “beyond” politics. Protest Films In accordance with film producer and social and political activist Osnat Trabelsi, I approach protest films as a particular group within the broader corpus of films about protest to which this chapter attends.43 The subsequent discussion of Mizrahi protest films is not meant to propose that there is a quintessential protest film nor that protest films are more likely to effect change than, for example, “attenuated protest” films. Rather, it is designed to explore this particular effort for empowerment and evaluate Page 175 →it in light of theoretical scholarship on the struggle and resistance of subaltern collectives. I offer the following characterizations of a protest film in the context of Mizrahi cinema. (1) The film's focalization44—a narrative mode (like perspective, not only point of view) from which the story is told—is anchored in a disempowered Mizrahi group; (2) the film explicitly contests Ashkenazi-Zionist hegemony, and, relatedly, protest is a constitutive element of the film; (3) in accordance with the last section, in order to challenge the Ashkenazi-Zionist dominance, the film has to articulate aspects of the Mizrahi dilemma where victimization and the sense of victimhood need to be imbued in the action and agentive changes the film depicts and promotes; and (4) the filmmaker is personally invested in the film's sociopolitical agenda. In this context, Linda Alcoff's (1991/1992: 23) preference for “speaking with” over “speaking for” is relevant and useful. In addition, in evaluating protest films we should ask what a film does, not only what it

contains. This was precisely my argument in the discussion of Desperado Square in the previous chapter; it is not only the elision of the Ashkenazi center that signifies Mizrahi protest in this otherwise restrained and nonpugnacious film, but, as important, it is our knowledge about the filmmaker's purpose and own experiences that transpires as protest in the extradiegetic realm of Desperado Square. Guided then by John Downing's (2001) assertion that in defining radical alternative media “context and consequences must be our primary guides” (x), in my analysis I will explore the reception and framing of Mizrahi protest films among critics, social activists, and the general public. Ancient Winds and The Black Panthers Speak stand out unquestionably as protest films. As we have seen, these films depict the Mizrahi predicament and relate it (even if by allusion) to an exigent course of action. Based on my conversations with Benchetrit, Hamo, and Chetrit, and on numerous materials published by and about them, it is clear that their films engage with a cause and struggle they fully share with their filmic subjects. Furthermore, these films offer a radical alternative to the “traditional Israeli Left.” In the peculiarity of Israel's political semiotics, “the Left” is defined and measured mostly by its relatively dovish position vis-à-vis the Arab (Palestinian)/Israeli conflict and not, as is often the case elsewhere in the world, by this body politic's stand on social issues. It is largely in this context that we should understand Shemesh's assertion, quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, that the Zionist Left's enterprise has failed. His pithy statement is congruent with the title of Chetrit's 1999 collection of essays The Ashkenazi Revolution Is Dead.45 Shemesh's Page 176 →and Chetrit's “eulogy” for the Ashkenazi-Zionist or socialist-“leftist” revolution, therefore, is meant not only to spark social protest and even revolution but also to attest to their conviction about the interconnectedness between the ethnic dilemma and the broader radical leftist politics vis-à-vis the Palestinian issue.46 Indeed, in a challenge to prevailing public and political sentiments, The Black Panthers Speak suggests that in their heyday, the Panthers understood that one dilemma—the ethnic and social discrimination against Mizrahim—stems from the same ideological pool that allows for the oppression of the Palestinians. Black Panther Sa'adia Marciano professes in this film that waving the social and the political flags together has been essential. Former Black Panther Shemesh recalls that he used to encounter people who suggested that he and his fellow activists needed to avoid politics and focus instead on ethnic and social issues, a plea that is encoded in the attempt to wrest the social away from the political. His response to them was, “Why not [engage in politics]? Is it an Ashkenazi privilege?” Haim Hanegbi of Matzpen expresses similar sentiments in the film. For him, the history of Israel is rife with instances in which social issues had to give way to “security emergencies.” (Notably, the Black Panthers movement dissolved with the start of the 1973 War.) Also, in Benchetrit's Ancient Winds, former government minister Ben-Ami decries what he deems the fiction that the social is Mizrahi and the political is Ashkenazi. Although he held various portfolios during his political career, Ben-Ami maintains that in years past, the expectation from him as a Mizrahi government minister was “to distribute [lealek, which also means “to divide”] free meals to the poor, not to divide Jerusalem” (in the eventuality of a peace treaty). The language used in the films discussed here often proffers a specific form of agency and collective identity by conjuring up an incendiary struggle tantamount to a civil war or a coup where Mizrahim ought to forcefully grab power rather than comply with the present social and ethnic order. Participants in these films employ “outburst,” “explosion,” and “uprising” in their allusions to the change they solicit. Former Black Panther Victor Alush angrily cries in The Black Panthers Speak, “You [as in ‘one should’] take your rights; you don't receive them.” It is along these lines that the Hebrew title of Benchetrit's film (literally, “Eastern Wind”) is taken from Ezekiel's (chapter 19) dirge about destruction and death.47 The images and juxtapositions employed in Ancient Winds further the participants’ ominous tone. The film opens with a dedication to David Ben-Harush, the leader and instigator of the Wadi Salib riots.48 Following Page 177 →the dedication is the above-mentioned sequence of the protest against Deri's impending imprisonment where David Yosef cries, “Remember this day, friends…. The revolution day,” and then repeats “The Bastille Day of Sephardic Jewry” twice. Deri has the last say in Benchetrit's film. Over images of fire burning to venerate the grave of Baba Sali—a Sephardi saint and one of the leaders of Moroccan Jewry in the past—Arieh Deri, a former government minister and Knesset member, prophesies “I have no doubt that, eventually, a great explosion will take place here.” PROTEST FILMS AS

defined here may be thought of as the distilled form and centerpiece of subversive or resistance

political films. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, my analysis of Mizrahi protest films reveals that what they offer is hardly congruent with the formulations of struggle and the construction of alternative narratives as articulated in the aforementioned works of Laura Marks, Bill Ashcroft, and bell hooks. Ancient Winds and The Black Panthers Speak have no interest in proffering one more version of truth as Marks formulates minority cinema; in advocating a community of resistance that chooses marginality, as hooks proposes; or in writing history back rather than rewriting it, which Ashcroft champions. Opting for a unitary voice that denies a dialectical discourse, David Benchetrit, Eli Hamo, and Sami Shalom Chetrit resort to an array of cinematic strategies so that their narratives completely displace the Ashkenazi-Zionist prevailing discourse and supplant it with a definitive alternative narrative.49 Indeed, film reviewers of Ancient Winds generally underscored (whether critically or not) the filmmaker's effort to do away, once and for all, with the deception embedded in the Zionist discourse, and they noted that the film is not simply an effort to mend Israel's historiography, but an enterprise to rewrite it.50 Quotations from Zionist leaders’ degrading statements about Mizrahim in The Black Panthers Speak51 (mostly from the pre-State period or immediately following the creation of the State) are used as exemplars of the Zionist discourse at large to encourage shunning that enterprise altogether. Of course, we may suggest that this rejection of the regnant Zionist discourse is exactly in line with what Marks and Deleuze advocate in “destroy[ing] myths from the inside,” yet, the point I am making here is that it is the films’ inversion of the hegemonic tenets that is in disaccord with the scholarship I have outlined. Arguably, these films are mostly reactive and derivative; it is precisely the hegemonic Ashkenazi-Zionist discourse that is the conceptual core around which these films are structured. Similarly, against the postmodernist and poststructuralist conceptualization Page 178 →about the contingency of individual and group identities (and notwithstanding the films’ nonessentialist stand), Ancient Winds and Desperado Square champion relatively stable, distinct, and welldefined identities. Finally, both Ancient Winds and The Black Panthers Speak often resort to dichotomous constructions of “us versus them,” with little regard to intraethnic differences or Jewish interethnic commonalities. The gaps between discourses and strategies in Mizrahi protest films and the scholarship about political struggle discussed earlier should not necessarily be attributed to the latter's superfluousness and irrelevancy to the analysis of Mizrahi cinema or resistance cinema at large. Indeed, as should be patent at this point, a rather significant number of Israeli films about Mizrahi protest fashion their resistance to the hegemonic narrative in manners more congruent with the aforementioned scholarship on ethnic and political struggle. In contrast to the protest films Ancient Winds and The Black Panthers Speak, such films as The Ringworm Children, Don't Touch My Holocaust, the two-part series “A Matter of Time,” and Edges (which I will discuss in the next chapter) are not poised to render an ultimately unitary story of the Mizrahi struggle and predicament. Yet, one should also wonder whether the discrepancy between that scholarship on subalterns’ resistance and what transpires in Mizrahi protest films should serve as a cautionary sign. One is rather tempted to interpret Marks's aforementioned “power of the false” (or for that matter, Homi Bhabha's “intervention” and bell hooks's “community of resistance”) as her preference for the route subalterns’ struggles should take. Interestingly, Marks and other poststructuralist and postcolonial scholars often resort to subjunctive pronouncements in their analyses of radical social changes. In other words, their writings are mostly prescriptive rather than descriptive of people's struggles. This issue is evocative of a broader dilemma, namely, whether cinematic practice lags behind theoretical advances or, alternatively, whether theory or, in our case, theories of struggle and identity operate on a level somewhat detached from people's praxis and preferences, at least as they are cast in cinema.

Sderot Cinematheque It is all too easy in a work that focuses on textual analysis to overlook aspects of cultural policy and political economy. In the last chapter I attended to the allocations of public film funds; in this section, I choose to focus on a single institution—Sderot Cinematheque—to explore how its vision, operation, and accomplishments inform our inquiry about the Page 179 →power of the margins and the radical alternatives they may forge. The following discussion reflects the workings and activities of the Cinematheque in 2004 and points to some changes that took place in the following years.52

Sderot is a development town of about twenty thousand residents, located one mile east of the northern tip of the Gaza Strip. Although the town is less than forty miles away from either Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, it is often perceived in the minds of many Israelis as a place (or a nonplace) “at the end of the world.”53 Sderot Cinematheque, a nonprofit organization, launched its full operation in 2001. Its vision has been to provide a cultural and artistic venue to a place that has had only scant cultural options and, more important, to utilize what is considered the town's weakness—its marginality—precisely as a leverage and opportunity to offer films and cinema-related activities that are not likely to be offered or be as relevant elsewhere. Preference in selecting the Cinematheque's offering is given to Israeli films, “Third Cinema,”54 and films with an emphasis on socioeconomic problems and struggles.55 Page 180 → A case in point is the yearly Festival Darom (literally, Festival South)—the highlight of the Cinematheque's film programming. According to Noam Peretz, the first Cinematheque general manager (1999–2006), two main factors motivated the festival organizers to focus on alternative cinema or, in his words, “the cinema of the other”: the particularity of Sderot as a development town, and the desire and need for the festival/Cinematheque to distinguish itself from others in the country.56 In June 2004, Sderot hosted the third Festival Darom, and the theme chosen for that year's event was “daring.” Peretz found it most natural to expect “daring” to be carried out specifically from the margins. The first page of the festival's 2004 brochure further explains the festival's theme. “We chose this term intuitively, we thought it can express our position that there is always a sliver of hope even in the hardest and most desperate situations. We think ‘daring’ is needed in order to identify and materialize opportunities that are at the heart of every condition, to turn misfortune into a blessing.”57 The Hebrew word for “daring”—heaza—is also associated with “gathering in” or “aggregating.” We imagined a light or laser beam, that…if focused, can be used to dissect, open, and to move forward. The gathering in of our physical and mental powers is essential for those who seek to change, found, and create…. Gathering in, in order to enhance hope and possibilities. Gathering in, in order to identify a hidden opening, to burst into one which has been blocked, to invent that which has been forgotten or perhaps never existed. Considering the relevancy of the films to the local population's actual conditions, dilemmas, and possibly needs, it is not surprising then that Peretz (interview, June 20, 2004) referred to this institution as a “social Cinematheque.” Another compatibility can be found between the Cinematheque's ideological agenda and various financial realities and considerations. Like others in Israel, this Cinematheque relies on funding from the Israeli Film Council (under the auspices of the Ministry of Science, Culture, and Sports), and on nongovernment funds, advertising, and ticket sales.58 One of the main criteria the Council set for the level of support it provides is based on the number of Israeli films a cinematheque screens over a yearlong period. This stipulation, which is meant to boost the Israeli film endeavor, is not taken as a constraint in the case of Cinematheque Sderot; rather, it is seized upon as an opportunity for the Cinematheque to distinguish itself at the same time that it offers a cultural venue suitable for the local community. Similarly, the Cinematheque has been Page 181 →collaborating with Sapir Academic College, which is located nearby. Other than the social agenda Sapir's heads of the Department of Cinema and Television Arts and the Cinematheque's management share, in practical terms, the collaboration between the two institutions has provided the Cinematheque with much-needed money and visibility, and, in return, Sapir film students enjoy an established public venue to screen their works and be engaged in the Cinematheque's activities. Some of the operations and, specifically, the Cinematheque's admission policies seem to defy the rampant logic of a market-driven endeavor. All the screening and events associated with Festival Darom are open to the public free of charge. Furthermore, it is one of the Cinematheque's main goals to make membership affordable; “there should not be a situation where someone would want to watch a film but is denied due to financial hardships” (interview with Peretz, June 20, 2004). Accordingly, for locals, annual membership, which carries unlimited admission to the Cinematheque, was relatively inexpensive in 2004—approximately $45 per year (but reached $92 in 2010). For audiences who are affiliated with one of the town's small clubs (moadoniyot), whose members are mostly socially disadvantaged residents, annual Cinematheque membership was only $10 in 2004, half of which was paid by the

club. (Today membership for these people is free of charge.) Similarly, Benny Cohen (interview, September 27, 2010), general manager since January 2006, took pride in his initiative to bring schoolchildren from adjacent areas to the Cinematheque for screenings, discussions, and educational programs and in making child annual membership highly affordable—only $13 and even free of charge for about two hundred local children. Most significantly, Sderot Cinematheque impels us to rethink hackneyed formulations about margins and center in Israel. Sderot is turning into a hub of sorts for some of the satellite communities in southern Israel. One of the projects the Cinematheque shouldered under Peretz's tutelage was “The Wandering Cinematheque” where teenagers were responsible for hauling the films shown in Sderot and screening them in other development towns in the south.59 In accordance with the commitment to make films available to all, Peretz suggested, “if people cannot come to the Cinematheque it would come to them” (interview, June 20, 2004). This took a literal turn in periods when Qassam rockets were fired almost daily from the Gaza Strip onto Sderot and the Western Negev region. The Qassam attacks intensified in the years leading to 2008, and then in December of that year, Israel launched a massive military campaign to strike back at Gaza. In December 2008 Benny Cohen (interview, Page 182 →September 27, 2010) led the initiative to screen films in the town's public shelters, where many sought refuge during that war. The success of Cinematheque Sderot inspired the opening of another cinematheque in the development town of Dimona, also located in southern Israel. (The operations of Cinematheque Dimona are on a rather small scale in comparison to those of other cinematheques in Israel.) Likewise, the International Student Festival, whose location formerly alternated yearly between Tel Aviv and a city abroad, also took place in Sderot in June 2004. Finally, not only has the Cinematheque been successful in (re)defining the town's cultural space, but, as Peretz (interview, September 27, 2010) suggested, one of its significant impacts has been to define or confer a certain image onto the films shown there. That was the case when Doron Tsabari and Julie Shles chose Sderot Cinematheque to premiere their film/television series Southward (Daroma, 2002)—a story of women workers’ struggle after the only sewing workshop in their development town of Mitzpe Ramon closed down. It is precisely because the issues that the film tackles echo economic problems Sderot has been facing, and because the Cinematheque has a reputation for focusing on “Third World” dilemmas and social cinema, that the premiere of Southward had the aura of a unique social happening.

The Remaking of Identities Thus far, the discussions in this chapter have revolved around the different sites in Israeli cinema where the marginalized Mizrahi collective becomes agentive and challenges the regnant Ashkenazi-Zionist discourse. We also ought to inquire how heightened consciousness about social and ethnic discrimination and the struggle it evokes may, in turn, effectuate the redesign of group identities. I will point to two areas this inquiry involves—the influence of struggle on the subaltern group, on the one hand, and the pressure that protest exerts on the hegemonic group to reassess its identity, on the other hand. Such impact on the remaking of self and others’ identities reveals yet another dimension of the power of marginality. In his effort to identify the turn the construction of contemporary identities in “network society” has taken in comparison to the manner it transpired in the bygone eras of “modernity and late modernity,” Manuel Castells (1997/2010) proposes, “Subjects, if and when constructed, are not built any longer on the basis of civil societies, which are in the process of disintegration, but as prolongation of communal resistance…. This is the actual Page 183 →meaning of the new primacy of identity politics in the network society” (11–12). In a radically different context, Chetrit construes Mizrahi resistance along similar lines. In his conclusion to Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel (2010), Chetrit employs the American civil rights movement to summarize his historical analysis of Mizrahi resistance. At first the content is the actual struggle; that is, culture is a culture of struggle, and identity is a struggle identity. Later on the struggle creates solidarity and social and cultural networks that constantly regenerate content out of life experiences and the collective memory of movement members. (228)

For Chetrit, this solidarity pertains directly to self-identity. In previous chapters, I addressed the plurality suggested by adot ha-Mizra (the Mizrahi ethnic groups)—a term created by the Ashkenazi hegemony to spite intraethnic commonalities. Chetrit maintains that the succession of ethnic confrontations and struggles the Mizrahi has experienced left their mark and engendered a collective (i.e., Mizrahi, rather than, say, Moroccan) group identity. In other words, it is not only that identity (or identity politics) can inspire a struggle; struggle, in turn, might redefine identity. Accordingly, Mizrahiness should not be understood as “vulgar essentialism”60 attesting to biology or ethnic roots, but rather as a collective identity based on cultural and experiential commonalities. A case in point is Ancient Winds, whose text seemingly challenges notions of a collective Mizrahi identity. In this film, Benchetrit deliberately focuses only on the story of Moroccan immigrants—one community whose predicament is said to surpass that of all others. Notably though, film critics and reviewers often read Ancient Winds as a pan-Mizrahi protest.61 At least for some of those writers, as a protest film, the chronicles of the Moroccan community are seen as synecdochic of the story/history of all Mizrahi Jews, and thereby, Ancient Winds can inspire formulations of and possibly contribute to the formation of a collective Mizrahi identity. As suggested in an earlier reference to Downing's (2001) analysis of radical media, in assessing a Mizrahi film's subversive power, the impact and residue left by this and other protest films are as important as the text itself or the filmmakers’ intentions. Mizrahi protest cinema has operated in the context of a particular cultural ambience. The emergence in the late 1980s and 1990s of groups and organizations such as Hila, Kedma, the Mizrahi Feminist Forum, the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, and Ahoti62 forced the Mizrahi issue into the Israeli public awareness. As part of a broader phenomenon regarding Page 184 →the increasing visibility of the Mizrahi in academic studies and the arts, Mizrahi protest films have urged the dominant groups to respond to these new challenges (e.g., the films’ explicit calls for uprising or the blunt charges against Ashkenazi racism). In Rachel Leah Jones and Osnat Trabelsi's Ashkenaz (2007), after interviewees fumble over the question of what it means to be an Ashkenazi, thus revealing the unmarked and normative nature of Ashkenaziness in Israel, the filmmakers turn their attention to a newly formed group—the Movement for Ashkenazi Identity. After one of the group's activists reads out the proposed platform, a discussion ensues. Participant A: In this day and age, Ashkenazi Jews are in a state of defeat, inferiority, and poverty of sorts, be it cultural, experiential, political, or social. They need some kind of what's called in English “uprising.” Participant B: Ashkenaziness is pale today; it needs some color. Later, a mature Ashkenazi woman passerby responds to the rise of this Ashkenazi movement; “I say it's good they're reviving Yiddish so that the Ashkenazim can also have their corner, because since Mizrahim and Sephardim began to claim that we are supposedly above them, I think we have been discriminated against.” The marking of the hitherto “unmarked” Ashkenazi identity is furthered in consideration of Shohat's (2010: 270) assessment of the film, namely, that “Ashkenaziness” in this film is examined not only from an Ashkenazi perspective but also from the standpoint of Zionism's others—Mizrahim and Palestinians. “Ashkenazim from the Bunker” (Omri Dolev)—the elaborate newspaper article that triggered much public debate when published in 1998—articulates the position that now it is the Ashkenazim who sense that they are under siege or a sustained Mizrahi attack (hence the article's title).63 Ronen Zaretzki, one of the contributors to the article, maintains, “We, Ashkenazim, ignore reality, we look in the mirror and we believe that what we see are the masters of this land. This is a mistake. The power is with the Mizrahim” (46). His argument is that the Mizrahim (a slight majority at the time of the article) are determining the election results and have the power to influence social policies that, Zaretzki intimates, now discriminate against the Ashkenazim. Dolev's introductory comments in this article render an intriguing deposition. The original purpose of this article was to return to the basics. To try to figure out what the word “Ashkenazi” means today. What is your Page 185 →first response when somebody utters it?…[We didn't] seek comparisons with the Mizrahi emancipation or inquire what it says about me that my

parents are from Poland or Germany, [but] the Moroccans are the ones at home now. (34)

What Dolev is offering here is nothing short of the need for the Ashkenazim to define themselves and, as important, that this definition ought not be derivative of the “Mizrahi emancipation.” A number of times in this work I referred to the power of the hegemonic, “unmarked” group to mark the other. The radical Mizrahi protest, then, not only undermines the neatly dichotomous Ashkenazi/Mizrahi divisions where the former is putatively educated, politically progressive, and unfazed while the latter is passive, needy, traditional, and incomplete (i.e., in need of change), but it compels the Ashkenazim to pursue their cultural traditions in search for a collective ethnic identity.64 IBA's The Ashkenazim Are Coming; The Ashkenazim Are Coming (2003)65 also has repeated references to the prospects that now it is the Ashkenazi whose culture and identity are at risk. The program quotes former Israeli minister Tommy Lapid's controversial aphorism, “More than we conquered Tul Karem [a Palestinian West Bank town], Tul Karem conquered us”—a reference to the prevalence of a Mizrahi/Arab mentality and traditions that, in his view, have been polluting the putatively original Israeli culture. Importantly, Lapid was then the party leader of Shinui whose platform and agenda, as many political analysts have suggested, was to mobilize people around their aversion to the Orthodox Sephardi/Mizrahi party of Shas, its political clout, and the threat it posed to the secular Ashkenazi hegemony. Similarly, the program refers to a song by the Ashkenazi singer Eran Tzur, who, even in his only “Mizrahi” song, laments Israel's dismantling of cultural and social values, and attributes this decline to its levantization. Finally, Ashkenazi journalist Sahara Blau states in this program, “[We] lost the battle; the Mizrahi revolution is getting us.” Pace Omri Dolev's argument that the Ashkenazi search for identity should be nonderivative, the persistence of the Ashkenazi pursuit for identity as a reaction to its Mizrahi predecessor is patent in The Ashkenazim Are Coming; The Ashkenazim Are Coming. Journalist and writer Nir Bar'am states in the program that the Ashkenazim now take a position implicated by both concession and a new demand—“if you [Mizrahim] already dismantled our hegemonic position, at least also set us free from the designation of the ‘eternal victimizer.’…Since you are now free, free us as well.” Likewise, “I am proud that the Mizrahim have started Page 186 →their struggle and, thanks to them, now attention is also given to us,” Shmulik Atzmon, a veteran of Israeli theater and the founder of the Yiddishpiel Theater, states in this program.66 One venue proposed by participants in The Ashkenazim Are Coming; The Ashkenazim Are Coming as a starting point for their pursuit of Ashkenazi identity is the pre-Zionist Eastern European Jewish culture. Like many others in Israel, Atzmon claims that Zionism has eradicated not only the Mizrahi culture but the Ashkenazi one as well—“The Ashkenazi, Eastern European Jews, assimilated into the sabra,” or Israeliness.67 Atzmon attests that he added back to his surname the original, Eastern European surname “Virtzer” the family used to have. Similarly, young actor Tzahi Moskowitz, who claims he did not even know he was Ashkenazi in his childhood, relays in this program how he is now connecting to his Ashkenazi forefathers’ tradition by reading and using Yiddish. Even a cursory address of these statements by Ashkenazi activists calls to mind my discussion in chapter 2 of the Mizrahi effort to construct an identity encoded by the pursuit of a “lost” past and what transpires in Mizrahi films as salvage cinema. MIZRAHI EMPOWERMENT,

as we have seen, is multifaceted and conjectural. Agency in Mizrahi films can transpire in protest that seeks to invert the terms of the Ashkenazi-Zionist discourse and to destroy its hegemony or, alternatively, it may opt for the broadening of that discourse so that the Mizrahi is recognized as integral to the Zionist enterprise. Likewise, agency and intervention are found not only in the films’ texts and the public debates about them but also in the institutions that nourish ethnic cinema. Finally, not only does Mizrahi empowerment affect its agents, but its ripples are also felt at the centers of Israeli society. If the subjugation of minority groups is a condition imposed by other more powerful collectives, then we have also seen that agency involves an awareness of these conditions, which one hopes would lead to a challenge to these very conditions. Reflecting on intragroup dynamics and intergroup coalitions, the topic of the next chapter, is one such challenge.

NOTES 1. Interview with Eli Hamo, June 2, 2004. 2. The ascription of sociopolitical motivations to films in which their pro-filmic materials seem virtually apolitical is rather evident in consideration of the commendation Yosef-Joseph Dadoune's obtrusive works have received (see, for example, Yosef-Joseph Page 187 →Dadoune: Sion, A Cinematic Trilogy [Drorit Gur Arie 2008] and “Regarding Sion: Yosef-Joseph Dadoune” [2008–9]). However, it would have been practically impossible to decipher Dadoune's artifact and broach these insights about the films’ political potency without relying on Dadoune's biography, activism, and his reflections on his work. 3. Homi Bhabha expresses a similar position in his discussion of minority discourse in “DissemiNation” (1990a): “There is no reason to believe that such marks of difference [heterogeneity and the ‘living perplexity’] cannot inscribe a ‘history’ of the people or become the gathering points of political solidarity. They will not, however, celebrate the monumentality of historicist memory, the sociological solidarity and totality of society, or the homogeneity of cultural experience” (307–8). 4. Laura Marks's (1994) reference here is specifically to the tension between the visual and verbal aspects of cinema. 5. Attending to the same theme, albeit not specifically in the context of cinema, Judith Butler argues in Bodies that Matter (1993) that interpellation is doomed to fail because it signifies more than it intended; there is always the performative excess. The slippage between, on the one hand, the discursive economy and command and, on the other hand, its actual rendering (citation) and effect open up a space for disobedience. 6. On a strictly textual level, the excess—the woman the mother wants to eliminate from her son's life—in this sh’ur ritual is meant to be repelled to restore order rather than to threaten it. Ironically though, this sh’ur does fail; despite the mother's wishes, Shlomo will marry the woman he dishonored/deflowered and will give up his plan to study at the Sorbonne. Interestingly, Ronit Elkabetz, who was mentioned earlier in her role in Sion (2007), also plays Pnina, Heli's bewitched sister in Sh'hur. The emphatic references to women's body fluids are as conspicuous in Dadoune's Sion as they are in Hanna Azoulai-Hasfari's Sh'hur. 7. Some of the most obvious examples of the use of Middle Eastern languages and dialects in Mizrahi cinema are found in Aisha, Cinema Egypt, Citizen Nawi, Come Mother, Got No Jeep and My Camel Died, Mama Faiza, Mirrors, Queen Khantarisha, Seven Days, Sh'hur, Stone Flower, Taqasim, To Take a Wife, and Until Tomorrow Comes. 8. Relevantly, Yamin Messika became a social activist for Mizrahi/social causes already in the early 1970s when he helped create the community-based social protest movement Haohalim (“the tents”). 9. It is noteworthy in this context that most critics have disparagingly dismissed Messika's films, inter alia, for the recurrent representation of Mizrahi as criminals and destitute, which, they claim, perpetuates negative ethnic stereotypes (see references in Yuval Yoaz 1997, Zohar Vagner 1997, and Assaf Gefen 1996). Conversely, Messika repeatedly refers to his films as a social critique. This is evident in the statements he made in our interviews, June 24, 2004, and June 8, 2005, and on his website http://www.hamizrah.com. 10. Information is based on my interviews with Messika (June 24, 2004, and June 8, 2005.) 11. The “cassette” singers produced a limited number of audiocassette master copies of their recordings and sold them to owners of music stands in marketplaces and areas adjacent to central bus stations (hereby the derogatory term that stuck to Page 188 →it—“central bus station music”) where these cassettes were then dubbed locally in quantities determined by customers’ demand. See discussion in Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi's (2004) Part IV, “Musiqa Mizrahit” (189–212), and Amy Horowitz (2010: 20–30). In our interviews (June 24, 2004, and June 8, 2005), Messika made it clear that, indeed, his unorthodox method of bringing his films to the public was inspired by the Mizrahi music revolution of the 1970s that challenged the hitherto Ashkenazi hegemony and complete control of music production, broadcasting, and distribution. 12. Among “attenuated protest” films that I do not discuss in this work are Zohar: Mediterranean Blues (Zohar, Eran Riklis, 1993), a film about the rise and fall of the “King” of Mizrahi music, Zohar Argov; George Ovadia: Merchant of Feelings (Mokher ha-regashot, Ran Tal, 1992), which reveals the disparaging treatment Ovadia's melodramas received by film critics who thought his films are more suitable for the Arab

/Muslim Middle East (from which he emigrated) than for “Westernized” Israel; and The Submarine Children (Yalde ha-tzolelet, Amir Gera, 1998), which tells the story of students in the Mae Boyer high school in Jerusalem. (Although not mentioned by name, this is the same school that Rahel/Heli attends in Sh'hur). The film implies that this school's curriculum, with its emphasis on Ashkenazi culture and history, serves to stamp out the young students’ traditions. About half the students in this rather prestigious school (and in each class) are local Jerusalemites; for the nonlocal students, mostly Mizrahim, Boyer is a boarding school. 13. The Quarry (ha-Matzeva, Roni Ninio, 1990) renders a strikingly similar dynamic—on the surface, and clearly in the film's first half, the story seems to delve into a social/ethnic dilemma where the quarry workers are exploited by the Ashkenazi management until at one point the brawny Mizrahi Nissim Levi, the workers’ leader, stirs a mini-riot (“only the workers should decide who the manager is”) and becomes the quarry's new manager. However, the quarry as a front stage for workers’ unison turns out to be the backdrop in a romantic drama in the feud between Nissim and his subordinate Moshe over the woman (now Nissim's wife) these two men have loved since the time they lived in Casablanca. 14. A more recent version of the film includes materials from Vanunu's release, a topic to which I will return later in my discussion. 15. Suspiciously, this kidnapping, an illegal act according to international law, was never officially contested by the Italian government. 16. Vanunu was nominated twelve times for the Nobel Peace Prize and won the alternative Nobel Prize once. Harold Pinter and Susannah York were among his supporters, and Pink Floyd dedicated a song to him. 17. In the in-progress edited version of Who Is Mordechai Vanunu? that Nissim Mossek showed me during my interview session with him (May 14, 2004), the film included shots of this group and the signs it carried; peculiarly, they were edited out in the final version. Mati Shemoelof indicated to me that some anti-Vanunu demonstrators grabbed the sign from him and tore it (interview, May 29, 2005). 18. In the film's opening sequence, Mossek reveals similar sentiments to those expressed in the Rainbow's meeting; he divulges his own admiration for Vanunu: “I've been following Mr. Vanunu's story for 18 years. For me, he was a myth. A lovely and brave man who acted out of pure motives.” Vanunu never expressed regrets for his Page 189 →deeds, and, in almost every opportunity he has had, he condemned Israel's nuclear policy. One of the first statements Vanunu made upon his release was, “Vanunu Mordechai says we don't need a Jewish state.” 19. I employ this film not for its rendering of “historical facts” but for its design and purpose. In online debates about the film there have been various references to the film's factual inaccuracies and suggestions that even its filmmakers regret some of the statements they made in their film. And yet, recent scholarship generally supports the film's main allegations. For example, Nadav Davidovitch and Avital Margalit (2008) state unequivocally in their medical-1egal study, “The ringworm irradiation can serve as a case study to understand the racial construction of illness and its treatment, and the elasticity of race and ethnicity as medical and social categories…. [It shows how] the ‘high risk’ target of intervention moved from the dirty Ostjuden [Eastern European Jews] to Jews arriving from Arab countries” (523). This study confirms that most of the victims are immigrants of North African and Middle Eastern origins (526). 20. For a lack of a better term, I use “pogrom,” which is usually associated with the afflictions European Jews suffered under the hands of their Christian neighbors. In the Iraqi-Arabic dialect, the literal meaning of farhud is “looting.” 21. The figures for those Jews murdered in the farhud vary in different sources, ranging from 110 in Nissim Rejwan's account (2004: 127) to 187 in Violette Shamash's (2008: 209). In a most comprehensive study of the farhud by Shmuel Moreh and Zvi Yehuda, the latter lists the names of 145 Jews killed, 137 of whom were Baghdadi (Moreh and Yehuda 2010: 250–55). 22. For more on the farhud and Jewish life in Baghdad in the period leading to the 1941 events, see “The Colonial Legacy” (chapter 2) in Abbas Shiblak's The Lure of Zion (1986), Al-Farhud: The 1941 Pogrom in Iraq (Shmuel Moreh and Zvi Yehuda 2010), “Farhud,” in Violette Shamash's Memories of Eden (2008: 195–209), “Rashid ‘Ali's Coup and its Aftermath,” in Nissim Rejwan's The Last Jews of Baghdad (2004: 126–38), and chapter 4 “Friends, Neighbors, and Enemies: Fascism, Anti-Semitism, and the Farhud,” in Orit Bashkin's New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (2012: 100–40). On the farhud in Basra,

see David Sagiv's The Jewish Community of Basrah (2004: 89–116). 23. Clearly, the connection between and concurrence of Arab nationalism and pro-Nazi sentiments in Iraq is not baseless (e.g., the enthusiastic welcome in Iraq of the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husayni, who propagated Nazi propaganda during his stay there). For more on the links between Arab nationalism (mostly in Palestine and Iraq) and pro-Nazi/anti-Jewish tendencies leading to the farhud, see Shmuel Moreh's “The Role of Palestinian Incitement and the Attitude of Arab Intellectuals to the Farhud” (2010: 119–50). 24. The inclusion of documents pertaining to the farhud in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, illustrates the Israeli/Zionist effort to subsume the Mizrahi or Arab-Jewish experience in Arab lands within the European-Jewish memory of the Holocaust in Europe. (See Bashkin, 2012: 102.) 25. In “The Mizrahi Memory and the Zionist Dominance” (2008), Merav Alush-Levron illustrates how also The Ringworm Children assiduously, albeit not explicitly, equates the tragedy of the North African children with that of Holocaust suffering—Page 190 →“In fact the myth of the Holocaust becomes a pivotal constitutive device of the Mizrahi narrative on the aesthetic and thematic levels” (144). Alush-Levron notes that the film employs black-and-white photographs of the X-rayed ringworm children that are mnemonic of the pictures of children in concentration camps in Europe, and, likewise, the film ends with a reference to this affair as the “holocaust of the ringworm children.” 26. It is noteworthy in this context that Pigtails was produced by Israeli Educational Television under the auspices of the Ministry of Education and The Farhud is the production of the Center for the Heritage of Iraqi Jews, an organization known for its agenda of containing the history of Iraqi Jewry, both ideologically and temporally, within Zionist boundaries. 27. Historically, the films’ rendering of a facile equivalence between the Arab and Nazi is highly problematic. For example, in his study Among the Righteous, Robert Satloff (2006) reveals the extent to which many Muslim Arabs were willing to risk themselves in an effort to rescue Jews during the time in World War II when North Africa was under Nazi and Fascist rule. 28. Laura Jeffery and Matei Candea, “The Politics of Victimhood” (2006: 289). 29. Addressing the concern that postmodernist critique of essentialism would rob African-Americans of their “specific history” (including racism and victimization) and “unique sensibilities,” bell hooks (1990) offers, “An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while emphasizing the significance of ‘the authority of experience’” (29, emphasis added). 30. For an elaborate discussion of Zionism's position on and treatment of Holocaust victims and survivors and the construction of the latter in terms diametrically opposite those associated with the sabra, see Tom Segev's The Seventh Million (1991/2000) and, particularly, the chapter “A Barrier of Blood and Silence”; Amos Elon's “An Open Wound,” in The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971); and Idith Zertal's From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel (1998). 31. For the centrality in the Israeli psyche of people's readiness to sacrifice themselves, at least in years past, see Elihu Katz and Michael Gurevitch (1976: 256). In their study of culture and communication in Israel, these researchers provided their respondents with twenty-two different characteristics and asked them to rank these features according to what they believed best defined the Jewish/Israeli people at the time (the study began in 1970); “self-sacrifice for the ideals of the people” was ranked second. 32. Interestingly, from a strictly linguistic perspective, Hebrew interrelates victimhood, sacrifice, and action /agency. When the root k.r.v. is used to form a causative or transitive verb (hikriv), the word means “to sacrifice” (someone, something, or one's self), one noun using the same root means “victim(s)” (korban/ot), and another noun (krav) with the k.r.v. root is the equivalent of “battle” or “fight.” 33. See Yaron Shemer (2007) for a detailed discussion of victimhood, victimization, and agency in the context of the Mizrahi in Israeli cinema. 34. Although with a rather different agenda than Gideon Samet's, in Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen Yosefa Loshitzky (2001) expresses similar sentiments and maintains that, in contemporary Israel, “the former pride in making sacrifice for the state has been replaced by charges of being victimized by the state” (68). 35. “Matzpen,” literally, “compass,” is related to the Hebrew word for conscience. The movement was established in the early 1960s.Page 191 → 36. After the completion of the Black Panthers, the film received a grant from the Israeli Makor Foundation.

37. Diana Fuss (1989) points out that the terms used in reference to essentialism—“lapsing into” and “falling into” versus “deploying” and “activating”—allude to a polarity in our articulation of “essentialism”; whereas the former pair “implies that essentialism is inherently reactionary,” the latter suggests that “essentialism may have some strategic or interventionary value” (20). In her view, since essentialism needs to always be contextualized and since “essentialism” is a polysemic signifier, it is imprudent to use this term in contradistinctions and binary constructions. 38. Wadi Salib is a neighborhood in Haifa that was populated at the time of the riots mostly by North African Jews who had been brought there to take the place of its former Arab residents. Due to problems of overcrowded housing, poverty, and unemployment, tensions between residents and authorities ran high even prior to July 9, 1959. On that day, a police officer shot a drunken and unruly denizen of a local café after failing to subdue him. What started as an orderly protest, led by David Ben-Harush the following day, turned into violent riots where demonstrators destroyed and burned public and private property. The police reacted with harsh force, but the riots spread to other parts of the country and lasted several weeks (I employ the term “riots” here, but depending on the position one takes, “uprising,” “rebellion,” “events,” and “revolt” have also been used to depict these developments). For a more complete account of the events and the terms used to describe them, see Henriette Dahan-Kalev (1999) and Sami Shalom Chetrit (2010: 65–73). 39. An example of that disdainful treatment of the Black Panthers is Golda Meir's well-known (and often mocked) reference to the Panthers—“they are not nice boys” (“hem lo baurim nemadim”). This is doubly troubling considering that approximately at that time, with the arrival of Russian immigrants in Israel, “Golda Meir rushed to Lod [now Ben-Gurion] Airport on Mondays and Thursdays [an expression that means ‘on a regular basis’] with tear-filled eyes and a voice cracked with emotion to welcome them: ‘You are the real Jews. We have been waiting for you for 25 years. You speak Yiddish!…You are a superior breed—you will provide us with heroes’” (G. N. Giladi 1990: 255). 40. The original film had never been screened and was considered lost. But then, some years ago, a second copy of the film was found in the archives of the Jerusalem Cinematheque. 41. Due to its length—270 minutes—Ancient Winds was shown on television as a mini-series. 42. Interviews with Hamo, June 2, 2004, Mossek, May 14, 2004, and Benchetrit, June 24, 2004. 43. Interview with Osnat Trabelsi on June 8, 2004. Trabelsi also maintained this distinction in her presentation at the Van Leer Institute, which was then published as “Mizrahi Self-Erasure in the Van Leer Institute,” Kedma (Portal), January 16, 2003. 44. See Gérard Genette's Narrative Discourse (1972: 189–94). 45. The title of Chetrit's 1999 essay collection is a direct reference to Zionist Kalman Katznelson's The Ashkenazi Revolution (1964), which renders the Zionist movement a noble Ashkenazi enterprise. The book is rampant with extreme racist Page 192 →addresses regarding the Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews, and its publication was eventually outlawed. 46. The Black Panthers’ contacts with the PLO in the early 1970s, a time when the Israeli governments outlawed such contacts, and Charlie Bitton's membership in the Arab-Jewish Hadash communist party are but a few indications of the movement leaders’ position regarding the Palestinian issue. 47. “East wind” appears in Ezekiel 19, verse 12: “But she was plucked up in fury, She was cast down to the ground, And the east wind dried up her fruit.” Although the specific reference is to Hamutal, the mother of the Judean kings Jehoahaz and Zedekiah at the time of the destruction of the temple, within the context of the book of Ezekiel's previous and following chapters, this dirge can be also interpreted as a prophetic doom for the Israelites if they do not change their sinful ways. 48. Similarly, Mossek dedicates his film Have You Heard about the Panthers? to Haim Turgeman, a recalcitrant and bold former Panther, who passed away after the filming was finished. 49. “His Own Canton” (“Canton mi-shelo,” Lily Galili, August 2, 1998), an article published at the time Benchetrit was filming Ancient Winds, broaches the issue of the film's single voice. Benchetrit states that when he and filmmaker Seniora Bar-David submitted a film proposal about Yalde Teiman (literally, “The children of Yemen,” an affair concerning the alleged kidnapping of Jewish Yemenite babies from public hospitals in order to transfer them to Ashkenazi families [see Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber 2009]), they were rejected on the grounds that the script was considered unbalanced. His response was, “What should they [seven old women crying for the loss of their babies] be balanced with? When people make films about the Holocaust, do they balance it with the Nazi [view]?” (B3).

50. Some press references to the film in this context include: “The history that was never told” (Poria Gal 2002: 24) and “The Bridge that Hasn't Been Built” (Gal Ohovski 2002); and in what he regards a contradistinction between Benchetrit's film and previous works on the Mizrahi community, Roggel Alfer (2002) maintains that “Ancient Winds is the conclusive series of the Moroccan narrative, in particular, and of the Mizrahi, in general. This is its myth” (A-16). A notable exception to this trend is Uri Klein's (2002) “The Dark Side of the Melting Pot” with the subhead “…Ancient Winds reminds (us) that history is multifaceted” (D3). In Klein's article, the focus is not on the film's power to invert or replace the Zionist (meta)narrative, but on its potential to add an important layer to it. 51. Some of the film's most notable quotations in this context are, “A European Jew is worth twice a Kurdish Jew” (Nahum Goldman, late chairperson of the World Zionist Organization) and “The divine presence has deserted the Mizrahi Jews, and their influence on the Jewish people has ceased” (Ben-Gurion). Citations also appear in Chetrit (2010: 36). 52. Information in this discussion is based on interviews with Noam Peretz (June 20, 2004) and Benny Cohen (September 27, 2010), former and present Sderot Cinematheque general managers, and is also culled from publicity materials and literature about the various programs the Cinematheque offers. 53. This false perception was one of the themes that Peretz underscored in our interview (June 20, 2004).Page 193 → 54. See, for example, Teshome Gabriel's Third Cinema in the Third World (1982). 55. This trend was more emphatic under the leadership of Peretz. 56. Interview with Peretz (June 20, 2004). 57. Avner Faingulernt and Daphna Saring, Festival Darom program (2004). 58. In 2010, the Israeli Film Council allotted NIS 333,000 to Sderot Cinematheque, about 18.5 percent of the Cinematheque's total budget of NIS 1.8 million (approximately $473,000). 59. Interview with Peretz (June 20, 2004). 60. I employ “vulgar essentialism” after Kimberlé Crenshaw's (1991: 1296) coinage “vulgar constructionism.” 61. It is sufficient to indicate the relatively large number of newspaper articles’ titles where “Mizrahi/m” supplants “Moroccan,” e.g., “The Ashkenazi Did What They Did and Ancient Winds: Moroccan Chronicle Is the Mizrahi Right to Respond” (David Shalit 2002: 39); “Ancient Winds Is Asking If We Can Take in the Story of the Mizrahi Discrimination” (Ktzia Alon 2002: 6); “The Ghost of Israeli Culture: Why Is the ‘Enlightened Left’ Capable of Recognizing Palestinian Suffering, But Has to Be Insensitive to and Repress and Deny Mizrahi Suffering?” (Dror Misha'ani 2002: B7); “The Bridge that Hasn't Been Built: Ancient Winds Should Ask Why Mizrahi Jews (adot ha-Mizra) Are Sensitive to Their Suffering Only?” (Gal Ohovski, September 18, 2002: 7); “The Mizrahi Answer to Pillar of Fire” (an unabashedly Zionist television program about the history of Israel) (Shosh Mimoun 2002: 22); and “Channel 2 Presents: The Mizrahi Cry” (Ya'el Gvirtz 2002: 19). 62. The NGO Kedma, founded in 1993, and Hila, established in 1987, advocate equal educational opportunities. The Mizrahi Feminist Forum, which had its first assembly in 1996, and Ahoti (literally, “my sister”), which was founded in 2000, were designed to provide Mizrahi (and other disempowered Israeli and Palestinian) women with a voice of their own. 63. The subhead of Omri Dolev's “Ashkenazim from the Bunker” (1998) is “Three Tel-Avivians, Ashkenazim in Their Thirties, Feel under Siege.” Dolev's introductory comments are followed by short essays by various contributors, Mizrahim included. 64. In my first research period of seven months in Israel in 2004, there were several events focusing on the Ashkenazim, largely an unprecedented phenomenon in earlier years. Notable among them is “The Ashkenazim” conference, which included presentations such as Karin Amit's “Indeed Ashkenazim?”; Neta Amar's “A Look at the Ashkenaziness in the Israeli Judicial System”; and Miri Freilich's “Various Aspects of Ashkenazi Identity.” (The conference was held in the Beit Berl College, June 3, 2004, and sponsored by the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow and the Beit Berl College. The event was in memory of Vicky Shiran, who for years played a pivotal role in the Mizrahi and feminist struggles and mobilized people for these causes.) In accordance with her film Ashkenaz, Rachel Leah Jones's presentation at the conference “From the Other of Europe to the Europe of the Other,” which included unedited vignettes from the film, employed “whiteness” as her conceptual framework to problematize the transparency of Ashkenaziness.

65. The program is a part of the series I Called/Named You (Karati lakh), presenter and producer Arieh Yas. It was aired on Channel 33, September 15, 2003.Page 194 → 66. Interestingly, the Israeli Parliament paid its respect to Yiddish by marking May 26, 2009, a day of Yiddish Language and Culture. See http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/news/oy-vey-it-s-yiddish-cultureday-1.276749. 67. For an elaborate affirmation of this assertion, see Nurith Gertz's Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature (Mak’ hela aeret, 2004) and Miri Paz's “We Live in a Culture of Erasure” (2004), a review of Gertz's book and her interview with the author.

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FIVE Intersectionality and Alliances In the effort to pursue the particular conditions of women of color or women in the “Third World,” and to draw differences between them and middle-class white Western women, intersectionality points to the importance of attending to the convergence of gender with ethnicity, race, and class in considerations about women's subjugation. In my use of “intersectionality,” I do not explore the confluence of all these components; instead, the discussion here will address the juncture between ethnicity and, in turn, gender, class, and faith. In previous chapters, emphasis was given to the collective nature of Mizrahiness, but Mizrahi intersectionality suggests that Mizrahiness is neither homogeneous nor unitary nor distinct. We will find that in Mizrahi cinema, when the issue of ethnicity lends itself to relevant articulations of gender or class dilemmas, the former is either sidelined or drawn in parallel, rather than intersecting lines with the latter issues. In contrast, I identify an emerging trend in Mizrahi cinema where ethnicity is explored closely in the context of faith in what amounts to a rather unique positioning of the masorti (religiously traditional)1 Sephardi/Mizrahi in the prolonged sociopolitical rift in Israel between secularism and religion. Intersectionality as conceptualized here is, ipso facto, both exclusive and inclusive. Thereby, we ought to complement our inward look into intragroup differences with an outward look at intergroup similarities, namely, at the intervention of the Mizrahi in proffering subalterns’ coalitions, the focus of which will be the alliance or solidarity with the Palestinian in contemporary Mizrahi cinema. The importance intersectionality assigns to subgroups’ identities, dilemmas, Page 196 →and activism is imbricated with the advocacy of identity politics. As we have seen, identity politics in Israel has been interjected as a challenge to the all-encompassing Zionist discourse of am ead (one people). Its emergence in discourse and practice has been imbued with the attempts to wrest ethnic, religious, or gender-related intragroup commonalities away from the unitary Israeli identity. Although, as a result, that unifying national master narrative has been losing its appeal and sway, it still resonates in contemporary scholarship in Israel Studies; I alluded earlier to the concerns authors such as Elihu Katz (1999), Gideon Doron (1998), Gadi Taub (2004), and Nissim Calderon (2000) express about the risk involved in adopting extreme forms of identity politics, where a national core identity and shared goals give way to a multiplicity of often-distinct and irreconcilable group values. It is against this backdrop of the anxieties about the disintegration of the putatively shared national values and of subgroups’ efforts to vie for power that one should examine not only the general category “Mizrahi” but particularly differentiations within it and the alliances these fissures in a collective Israeli-Jewish identity nurture.

The Mizrahi Woman The employment of “intersectionality” in scholarship by global, Third World, and critical race feminists provides us with analytical tools to investigate the unique positioning of women in their societies and attests precisely to the need to articulate women's condition, status, and struggle not in terms of the broad category of gender alone, but in consideration of race and class. Intersectionality, therefore, is often meant to point to the double or multiple levels of “otherizations” of women in many societies. The fragmentation of the general category or group identity of women is most conspicuous in black feminists’ emphasis on the unique modalities of the experiences of working-class women of color compared to those of middle- and upper-class white women. As bell hooks (quoted in Nira Yuval-Davis 1997) suggests in her analysis of race and gender, “The vision of sisterhood evoked by women liberationists was based on the idea of common oppression—a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women's varied and complex social reality” (125). Likewise, in her work on domestic abuse or rape, black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) coined the term “structural intersectionality” to address the qualitatively different experiences of women of color compared with those of other women; in her view, the victimization Page 197 →of women has particular features regarding black women, and, therefore, the remedies should be tailored to their needs. Just as relevant to our discussion is Crenshaw's (1991) “political intersectionality”; the term refers to the potential

for the disempowerment of women of color if their agenda is subsumed within the platforms of two broader (subordinated) groups to which they belong—black people and women. For Crenshaw, traditionally, women of color have had to divide their political energies between these two groups, whereas black men or, alternatively, white women are spared this specific burden. Crenshaw therefore unabashedly advocates identity politics that involves the breaking down of the broader categories of race and gender: “Because women of color experience racism in ways not always the same as those experienced by men of color and sexism in ways not always parallel to experiences of white women, antiracism and feminism are limited, even on their own terms” (1252). The positionality of Mizrahi women—as women, different from Mizrahi men, and as Mizrahim, different from Ashkenazi women—is the focus of my discussion here. One mode of this examination is the Mizrahi women's discourse vis-à-vis the mainstays of Zionism; we have seen that the Zionist narrative is inherently gendered and ethnicized and is epitomized by the promethean figure of the sabra—the native-born Israeli, who in actuality is pronouncedly a European-Ashkenazi male. Given this double-otherization, in my analysis of some of the films in this section, I will attend to the relations between Mizrahi women's agency and the challenge it poses to the hegemonic Ashkenazi-Zionist male discourse. Ultimately, in exploring Mizrahi women's intersectionality I am interested in discerning whether their position is primarily gender- or ethnicity-based; put differently, I will ask whether the emphatic markers of Mizrahi women's identity in Israeli cinema differentiate them largely from Mizrahi men or from non-Mizrahi women. The intersectionality of gender and ethnicity is best illustrated in Jacky, Queen Khantarisha, and The Buganas. In Jacky (Rachel Esterkin, 1990), the title character of this short film is a young Mizrahi woman who lives in a rundown neighborhood, possibly in a development town. She deals soft drugs along with her boyfriend David (whom she declines to marry), but she is later approached by a kibbutz member who asks her to supply heroin for him. Her boyfriend leaves her when she resolutely refuses to hand over the transaction to him, thus making it necessary for her to move from the familiar/familial territory into the harsh masculine milieu of hard drug dealers. To carry out the transaction and buy Page 198 →the heroin, Jacky deceitfully tells local pushers that she was sent by her brother-in-law Eli (also a hustler) to get the drugs. The transaction falls through, and, in a violent face-off, her ex-boyfriend is stabbed by Eli. The film concludes with Jacky's tantalizing solo dance in the local café, a space she now occupies alone. As Orly Lubin (1999a) points out, Jacky transgresses both gender and ethnic boundaries in carving out her own space. Jacky wants her Mizrahi boyfriend to get some education and enhance his professional prospects, which, Lubin reminds us, are regretfully uncommon undertakings for many Mizrahim in development towns. On the gender front, Jacky seeks financial, “professional,” and personal independence, all of which challenge the customary role women in this environment are expected to have and the space they habitually occupy. Her gender transgression becomes most blatant when she moves to dealing hard drugs in an exclusively male-dominated domain. Guided by Lubin's analysis, I maintain that Jacky embodies a genuine intersectionality; attending to gender issues or ethnic dilemmas separately is insufficient in expounding Jacky's conduct or the film. Jacky's independence as a Mizrahi woman is congruent with the film's disregard for the traditional national Zionist dictates that stipulate the otherization of both women and Mizrahim. This becomes abundantly clear considering that “Zionism privileges the working body over the sexual body; the public, communal sphere over the private, intimate sphere; the professional individual over the non-professional, luft gesheft (non-working) money-maker” (179)2—all of which are gendered and ethnically marked since Ashkenazi/sabra men are often associated with the first in each of these binary constructions and women and Mizrahim with the second. Arguably, to an extent, Jacky assumes agency that is otherwise typically associated with the Ashkenazi man /sabra; this reversal and, consequently, the film's subversive power become all too clear in the scene in which Jacky interacts with the kibbutznik who seeks heroin. No longer is the kibbutz (the crowning achievement of the Zionist enterprise) represented as the savior of the needy Mizrahi (as in Sallah); here, a Mizrahi woman is the supplier (of hard drugs!) for the feeble Ashkenazi man. When the kibbutznik thanks Jacky for the high-quality (soft) drugs she had previously provided him, she retorts slyly, “[This is] my contribution to the ‘drought’ in the kibbutz”; literally the reference is to the implied shortage of drugs in the kibbutz, but it also alludes to the kibbutz's ideological bankruptcy and to its overall financial decline in the last decades. In Lubin's (1999a) view,

the emplacement of Jacky at the center of the narrative, coupled Page 199 →with her strength to turn domesticated domains into public ones, earn Jacky the distinction of being the only Israeli film to transcend a mere subversion; ultimately, this film seeks to posit a bold “critique of Israeli society on several scores: gender, ethnicity, class, and social structure” (180). Queen Khantarisha (ha-Malka khantarisha, Israela Shaer-Meoded, 2009) gives a voice to Naomi Amrani and Bracha Seri, two religious female writers of Yemenite origin who are now in their senior years. The film punctuates interviews with these women with scenes of Yemenite dancing and professional Yemenite women mourners. In Yemen, Amrani married her husband in an arranged marriage when she was nine years old and then established a family with him in Israel. In the film, she reflects on her poetry, marriage, pregnancies (the first one at the age of thirteen), sex, and menstruation, which amount to rare confessions considering her religious habitus. Seri's life, writing, and tales are even more heterodox than Amrani's. The film takes its title from her feminist rewriting of the Book of Esther, which Jews read on the Purim holiday. In this rendition Khantarisha replaces King Ahasuerus and allusions to sex and genitalia are rampant. (In Hebrew, khantarish [m.]/khantarishit [f.] is a slang word to belittle a person for not being serious or committed enough.) Generally, Seri is recognized as a Yemenite feminist and is often compared to the irreverent (Ashkenazi) poetess Yonah Volach in her employment of explicit references to carnal desires and in sexualizing sacred religious motifs and objects. For both Amrani and Seri, their articulation of womanhood is inseparable from their experiences as Mizrahi. Queen Khantarisha exemplifies an enriching and genuine intersectionality precisely because the stories of these women would have been greatly flattened and diluted had the film not attended to Amrani's and Seri's particular ethnoreligious traditions (to which I will return later) in its exploration of the meaning of womanhood in their lives. Already at the beginning of The Buganas (ha-Buganim, 2006), filmmaker Etty Bugana-Bachar reveals playfully the pressure her Tunisian family is exerting on her, a spinster, to marry and have a large family. Although she resorts to what in her own milieu is considered an unconventional way of seeking a potential husband—she subscribes to Dosi Date, an online dating service for the religious sector—Bugana-Bachar eventually abides by all the religiotraditional customs pertaining to engagement (e.g., the henna ceremony) and wedding (e.g., exposing to family members the bloodstained wedding night sheet) that her patriarchic family has ordained. The Buganas is hardly what many would consider a feminist film. My argument though is that to better understand Page 200 →Bugana-Bachar's condition as a young woman, one needs to attend to the film's elaborate context of the ethnic. As we shall see though, The Buganas, Queen Khantarisha, Jacky, and Sh'hur (which I discussed in detail elsewhere in this work) stand out in resisting a more prominent trend in which gender considerations overwhelm ethnic ones. Filmmaker Orly Malessa was born in Ethiopia in 1978, and at the age of two she moved with her parents to a transient camp in Sudan where the family spent three years before immigrating to Israel.3 The immigrant experience features centrally in her short fiction film Mirrors (Mar'ot, 2004). Narratively, Malessa intercuts between her heroine Elmaz's story in Ethiopia and her present life in Israel. In Ethiopia, Elmaz is having a happy and unperturbed life, but then two momentous events change her life: the family prepares to immigrate to Israel, and her parents plot an arranged marriage for her. In Israel, Elmaz (given the Hebrew name Zehavit), her husband, whom she was forced to marry twenty years earlier, and her daughter live in a small apartment. It seems that Zehavit, who is working evenings as a janitor in a local school, is the breadwinner. Unlike the husband, who feels alienated from everything Israeli, Zehavit cherishes her second homeland and aspires to master Hebrew and to immerse herself in the new culture. After some trepidation on her part and gentle prodding from a (female) teacher, Zehavit decides to join an adult Hebrew class in her school after she finishes her cleaning routine there. Her husband mistakes her coming home late and the cosmetics he finds in her bag as signs that she is having an affair, and he slaps her in a moment of fury. Zehavit slaps him back and then alludes to the Hebrew class she has been taking. The film's conclusion offers a measure of reconciliation between the two as Zehavit, lifting a kerchief made to look like a wedding veil, asks her husband to see her anew, to recognize her as he has never done—an independent and proud person. Notwithstanding the film's putatively personal and intimate features, I would suggest that the Zionist ethos lurks below the film's surface, providing the main narrational framework. Once again we find the new country that

rescues the ignorant Mizrahim, and again we have to resign to the idea that the Ashkenazi (represented by the teacher) is their savior. If Ethiopia is ultimately marked in the film as a dead end, Israel offers a new beginning. In the classroom Zehavit mops, a big sign reads, “One for all and all for one,” and later, in the classroom where she studies Hebrew, the sign above the chalkboard quotes the biblical fiat “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). These “signs Page 201 →on the wall” allude to the communal (socialist) responsibility Zionism proclaims, and, in this film, they are devoid of any irony. The film's emphasis on the main character's desire to learn Hebrew furthers the centrality of the Zionist discourse in the film. Again, even those opposed to the Zionist enterprise often concede that one of the movement's most distinguished accomplishments is the revival of the Hebrew language. For the immigrants, acquiring the new language, often at the price of alienating themselves from their mother tongue, is the crucible for their integration into Israeli society. In Mirrors, not only is this linguistic/cultural/political issue not problematized, but the mother's infatuation with the Hebrew language verges on a fetishist obsession—in one scene Zehavit sensually moves her fingers over the Hebrew words on the chalkboard, in another, she is gratified when she writes her name in Hebrew, and ultimately, we learn that she prepares herself for the Hebrew lessons as a woman would prepare herself before seeing her lover. It is not surprising then that when the husband accuses Zehavit of unfaithfulness, she retorts that she was “having an affair with papers” (the Hebrew texts). Importantly, Zehavit's gender dilemma is attributed solely to her husband's patriarchic traditions that he brought with him from Ethiopia and not to the overall inferior status of women in Israeli society or to the socioeconomic condition that has disempowered Mizrahi men (which could have put her husband's deportment in context). There is, therefore, a marked discursive difference between Mirrors and Jacky. Whereas the latter offers a social critique encoded in the intersection of gender and ethnicity, Mirrors brushes aside the Israeli ethnic dilemma and opts to internalize the regnant cooptating Israeli-Zionist creed. To wit, to the extent that Zehavit is granted agency, it is at the price of oppressing her ethnicity. Seniora [Sini] Bar-David's poetic documentary The South: Alice Never Lived Here (ha-Darom, Alice lo gara kan af pa am, 1998) focuses on the stories of three generations of Mizrahi/Sephardi women. Grandmother Ida Reuben grew up in Didimoticho, a Greek town bordering Turkey. At an early age, Ida left by herself for Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and later, in 1948, moved with her husband to Israel. Ida's granddaughter, filmmaker Bar-David, who was born in the Ajami neighborhood, a backwater southern suburb of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, personifies the film's middle generation. Bar-David includes in her film the articulate fifteen-year-old Elinor, who lives in the neighborhood where BarDavid grew up, and she attempts “to find the girl I was once” through her conversations with this teenager. In Page 202 →stark contrast to Mirrors, Bar-David's documentary poses harsh criticism of the Zionist project, directed mainly at its social and educational blunders regarding the Mizrahi community. Within the film's mosaic of locations in Israel and abroad, Tel Kabbir, the neighborhood in southern Tel Aviv where Elinor lives and where Bar-David grew up, looms large. In a Foucauldian fashion, the filmmaker defines the boundaries of the neighborhood by its panoptic institutions: “On the east side there is the jail, in the south the hospital, in the west the soccer stadium, and in the north the pathological institute [morgue].” The history of the place amounts to an “archeology” of displacement, where the erasure of the old/past is constitutive of the new /present; Tel Kabbir was first an Arab village (Abu Kabbir), then, after 1948, an immigrant transient camp, and later, a slum inhabited mostly by Mizrahim. Again, the “south” in this film is not only a geographical reference but a psychic one as well, a topos denoting poverty, crime, and stalled time. Indeed, in this journey “southward” into her childhood neighborhood, Bar-David is dismayed to realize that little has changed since she left the place over a decade earlier. The filmmaker's “double,” Elinor, is facing the same hurdles and dilemmas known to Bar-David from her own past—lack of opportunities, a failing educational system, and diffidence. In one of the early encounters between the two, Elinor commiserates, “What hurts the most is that a poor person is not just one who has no money, it is a person who is poor/deprived of everything, [of] a sense of confidence…to be able to say ‘I will succeed, it will be all right.’ This sets off immense anger and aversion, and if I, a 15-year-old girl, am angry, all the more so are the grown-ups of this neighborhood whose anger has been boiling up all these years.” The Integration Program—a government endeavor that was putatively aimed at raising the educational level of students in the periphery by

transferring them to schools in more affluent and prestigious neighborhoods—failed Bar-David when she was young and frustrates Elinor now. The stigma placed on the “southern” students by the “northerners” is best captured by Elinor's Ashkenazi teacher, who admits to the yawning gap between the two groups and, unflinchingly, attributes the low achievements of the “southerners” to their lack of “motivation to excel,” which, he claims, “starts at home.” In the case of Elinor, the shame involved in one's social status and ethnic origin is experienced on a daily basis; on the one hand, she attests to loving and respecting her mother, but on the other hand, she has been ashamed of her mother ever since Page 203 →she realized that she works as a housemaid for the grandmother of one of her “northern” classmates. The South provides an intricate case of the relations between gender and ethnicity. In this feature-length film, there is not a single direct reference to gender-based imbalances and oppression. And yet, a closer analysis of The South will reveal that gender issues constitute the film's structural undercurrent. Importantly, this story of three generations of women diverges from the conventional grandmother/mother/daughter dynasty tale. The connections between Ida, granddaughter Seniora, and Elinor (who is not a part of the filmmaker's family) are inherently thematic rather than familial (or, in Hamid Naficy's formulation, nativist); put differently, the seemingly individual story of these three women is meant to exceed the boundaries of a single familial narrative. Importantly though, the following discussion reveals that the film's reflection on women's condition transpires from a poetic-existential rather than concrete social position. The film's opening reveals its main motif: the fugitive, rootless, and even ephemeral being of women. First, there is the long black-and-white tracking shot alongside a solid stone wall that, by the very constant camera movement, establishes the onlooker's (filmmaker's) fleeting view. Then, still in black and white, the camera freezes on a wall against which a young unidentifiable girl is dissolved into the scene. The girl, playing hopscotch, is shown in slow motion, an effect that creates a slight sense of floatation, and then she is dissolved out as a ghost image. Indeed, all three women in the film are best characterized by their fleeing or their desire to move elsewhere. This is evident in the women's tales: the refugee grandmother whose chain of displacements started in 1923–24 when she was subjected to the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey; Elinor, who, because of the social and cultural irreconcilability of home and school, wishes to abandon the former; and finally the filmmaker, who confesses in voice-over during the opening scene with the girl playing, “I have always wanted to get lost, to find myself in a place that knows nothing about me.” Bar-David's personal-cinematic journeys to the places where her grandmother once lived and into her own past, along with the repeated mentions in the film of words such as “fleeting,” “loss,” “evasive,” and “elusive” are thematic elements that fully concur with the film's figurative play with the presence-absence of the girl in the opening scene. Indeed, the film offers an intriguing and somewhat unconventional Page 204 →feminist position: the three strong female characters are defined more by their inferred psychic-existential state than by their actual presence. Importantly, the filmmaker is rarely shown in the film, and so it is mostly her voice-over that implies her presence. The film's name—Alice Never Lived Here—and its thematic and titular reference to Scorsese's American road film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore further prod us to focus on women's absence or their symbolic journeys. Likewise, the film's title and themes evoke Alice in Wonderland, which features yet another figure whose story is marked by the play of presence and absence. (Elinor makes this reference to Lewis Carroll's tale explicit when she ventures that she can envision Alice as a little girl living in Tel Kabbir and, like herself, wishing to run away from home: “Had she [Alice] been living in north Tel Aviv, she would have not been compelled to run away.”) The film's use of the Jefferson Airplane's “White Rabbit” is yet another device constituting the psychological elements discussed here. This 1960s song has direct allusions to Alice in Wonderland–inspired Go Ask Alice—the controversial diary by an American teenager, concerning implied rape and drug addiction (from which the writer is believed to have died shortly after she had decided to discontinue her writing). The inclusion of this multireferential song already in the beginning of the film accentuates Bar-David's above-mentioned voice-over about loss and her reflections on the fleeting nature of life. In feminist articulations about the relations between place (cinematic or “real” space) and gender, women's corporeal presence often figures centrally. Earlier, I concurred with Orly Lubin's (1999a) analysis of Jacky's feminist position, where she claims that the woman's physical presence is constitutive of the space the titular

heroine occupies. However, whereas Lubin (1998) employs the same agentive argument regarding the female characters in The South, my contention here is that the film's voice-over, aesthetics, and main theme, to which I attended, construct spaces that are formative of their characters and their relationships, not the other way around. Men, playing only a peripheral role in The South, often possess qualities the reverse of those which women bear in the film; instead of loss and wandering, they exhibit rootedness and ties to their place of residence, and, in contrast to women's existential perplexity, they are marked by certainty and discipline. In the aforementioned opening voice-over, Bar-David tells of her abortive attempt to “get lost” when she was a young girl and of her father who slapped her for this misconduct; consequently, she says, “Since then I could never again get lost.” When Elinor reveals to her parents her sense of shame at the place where they Page 205 →all live and her desire to run away, her father, a construction laborer who is fully attached to his neighborhood of Tel Kabbir, maintains, “I would leave it only if Peres [Shimon Peres, the prime minister at the time] hands it down to Arafat.” To Elinor's argument about the detrimental effect of their neighborhood, he responds that it is her ethnic origin (“as long as you're a blackie…”) that determines how people treat her, not her place of residence.4 Arguably then, to an extent, men's domineering power coexists with some “feminine” qualities as the film's male characters—Elinor's father, but also Elinor's teacher and a group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men5—are associated with home (the private sphere), rootedness, and place. The emphasis given in The South to the aforementioned towering institutions of Tel Kabbir further attests to the film's peculiar construction of “masculinity.” (Significantly, in Hebrew, the nominals for these four places—[pathological] institute, hospital, jail, and stadium—all take the masculine form.) Even though these locales are symbols of male might, they also demarcate the neighborhood territory (home), as the voice-over indicates, and are part of it. Returning to my initial argument where I proposed that the women of the film are subjected to, not constitutive of their environment, we can now add that this is precisely because the men in The South define both private and public spaces, and their presence in these locales is more integral than the women's. As we shall see, ultimately, in the film's gender economy—the neat division it establishes between men and women—gender issues overwhelm reflections on ethnicity and, thereby, they sideline the implied intersectionality in being a Mizrahi woman. The filmic tendency in which gender issues override rather than intersect with ethnic dilemmas is also rather patent in Your Younger Daughter Rachel, Jenny and Jenny, Hide and Seek, Stone Flower, Until Tomorrow Comes, Three Mothers, and Or, My Treasure.6 Naturally, a single film reveals but a slice of reality and can attend to only a limited range of topics. My critique of the lopsided approach that Mizrahi films featuring women's stories and characters take in their subordination of ethnic realities to gender dilemmas is not meant to point to a weakness of any particular film or to a certain structuring absence within one film; what I find worth noticing though is the paradigmatic persistence of deficient reflection on the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity in the corpus of contemporary Mizrahi cinema even in films where, clearly, the two ought to be intertwined and interrelated. This is also rather conspicuous in the Elkabetzs’ films, which stirred much public interest when released. Page 206 → To Take a Wife (ve-Lakata lekha isha, Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz, 2004) is set in 1974 in the city of Haifa in northern Israel and is the first in the Elkabetz siblings’ trilogy; it is followed by the 2008 film Seven Days, which takes place in a suburb of Haifa during the 1991 Gulf War. (The final film in this trilogy has not been made yet.) To Take a Wife not only helps crystallize the trends I have been delineating regarding the construction of gender relations in Mizrahi cinema, but it offers an exceptional opportunity to examine the concurrence between the diegetic tropes concerning the Mizrahi woman and the extradiegetic discourse about her in Israeli film reviews. To Take a Wife opens with a long close-up shot of Viviane's pale and pained face. Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) does not utter a word, but we hear her siblings swarming around her as they try to cajole her to make up with her husband Eliyahu. Yielding to the pressure the brothers exert on her, she goes back to her husband. But still,

Viviane despises her insipid, insensitive, and stern husband. In his view, he has been fulfilling his duties as a husband and does not deserve Viviane's relentless derision. (Viviane's brothers say of him, “It's not like he ever did anything to you…. What do you want from him? [He] doesn't hit you, doesn't drink, doesn't Page 207 →gamble, and doesn't fool around, [he] helps around the house, goes to work every day, gives you his paycheck every month. He loves you.”) She desires a passionate husband with whom she can travel and go out, but citing their shoestring budget, a religious prohibition against travel on Shabbat, and the demands of his work in the post office, he dismisses her wishes. Matters keep deteriorating, and Viviane's four children witness wrenching confrontations when their mother hurtles accusations against their father, hitting him, and then imploring him to divorce her. Girded by the privilege whereby Jewish rabbinical law in Israel affords only men the right to divorce their spouses, Eliyahu refuses to grant his wife the get (divorce decree). Seemingly, the film locates Viviane's predicament in the intersection of her oppressive patriarchal Moroccan family and in being a woman in the Jewish-Israeli society, namely, in the meeting place of ethnicity and gender. The former, as we have seen, is established already in the opening shot—the six brothers who intervene in their sister's private affairs, most of whom resort to tradition in admonishing Viviane. However, one brother who supports his sister's intransigence challenges the others and protests, “We're not in Morocco anymore.” The verbal exchanges that rapidly move between Moroccan-Arabic, French, and Hebrew accentuate the specificity of a Mizrahi space. However, as the film progresses, the ethnic predicament is sidelined, and the focus turns almost exclusively on Viviane's condition as a downtrodden woman/wife who cracks under the pressure exerted by her children's needs, her husband's demands and coldness, and her work at home as a hairdresser. Viviane pines for love, gentle touch, and passion. In the midst of shampooing the hair of one of her women clients, Viviane slips into day-dreaming about an idyllic scene from the past where she and Albert, her loving companion then, coo in the park as her daughter is sitting by. The audiochromatic qualities of the flashback stand in stark contrast to the cinematic depiction of the present. In this scene, soft piano music supplants the sounds of a boisterous household, and saturated blue and green hues replace the typically dull colors of the scenes in Viviane and Eliyahu's apartment. We later realize that she was ready to elope with Albert then and take the children with her, but Albert bowed out at the last minute. Now, he reappears and calls Viviane to ask her to meet him. In their rendezvous in a restaurant, she declines his offer to join him abroad. To punctuate the tenderness of the moment and to give the verbal exchange a distinction vis-à-vis all other conversations we witnessed thus far, this dialogue between Viviane and Albert is delivered as a voice-over; Page 208 →for the most part, we do not see them speak, and when we do, their conversation is inaudible. The digression in this scene from the film's highly realistic mode allows the camera to dwell on Viviane's and Albert's tormented faces, and silence and subtle gestures vanquish words. Outside, over solemn violin music in the background, they kiss passionately and say their good-byes. In these pivotal scenes with Albert there is no longer a trace of the ethnic dilemma; the film turns into an inexorably painful tale of two lovers. It is not in response to the allegedly oppressive Mizrahi patriarchy that she wanted to elope then (Albert seems to be a North-African Jew himself), nor is it this tradition that factors in now in the decision to reject Albert's offer to join him. Remarkably, the disciplining Viviane is suffering from as a woman is duplicated in various Israeli film reviews (written mostly by men) that attend to Ronit Elkabetz's role as a female director/actress. The terms used to critique these roles are virtually identical. Uri Klein (2005: 3) opens his review in “Beginners’ Overkill” with “Ronit Elkabetz is a good actress…. But her expressive, exotic and largely eccentric presence…is precisely why Elkabetz needs someone to guide and especially to restrain her” (all bold emphases in this paragraph are mine). Klein expresses similar sentiments about the film in “Hysteria and Discomfiture” (2004a); “[Elkabetz's] unrestrained performance oscillates between rare moments of self-control to shrilling showy displays” (A-2). Dvorit Shargal (2005) volunteers her advice: “People should know their limitations. Elkabetz is a very dramatic actress who needs to be restrained and held back” (96). “The major shortcoming of this film is in what it does not have: a director with a firm hand…the drama in this film overflows and spills all over.…The film is progressively trounced by Elkabetz's unrestrained performance” is Yehuda Stav's account of Ronit Elkabetz's performance (“Not to Take a Director,” 2005: 15; a title that plays on the film's name). Yakir Elkariv, who along the same lines titles his review “To Take a Director” (2005), levels similar criticism at Elkabetz's acting. In “A Woman and Man

Under Influence,” Gidi Orsher7 suggests, “Elkabetz the director wants to be the Gena Rowlands of A Woman under the Influence…but what comes out is Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction—A devouring, shrilling, vulgar, and hysterical vulture.…In the case of Elkabetz…there can happen an ecological disaster.” Meir Schnitzer (2005) also uses Cassavetes's film title to ridicule Elkabetz—in “Woman under Influence” he cautions the viewer that an hour after the beginning of the film, “For long 11 minutes, she [Elkabetz] screams, whispers, groans, suffers, twists, begs, contorts, twitches her fingers, rolls her heavily mascaraed Page 209 →eyes. Some might call it acting” (50). Similarly, Schnitzer's other film review (2004a) is titled simply, “Caution, a Typhoon Is Approaching” (5). Interestingly, Ronit Elkabetz's performance in this film was, overall, well received in screenings in Europe, and the film won some important awards and prizes there.8 My point is not to assess the value of her skills as an actress or director, but to attend to the specific language and tone Israeli film critics employed in their reviews. The repetition of “(un) restrained,” “hysteria,” “temperament,” “shrills,” “spilling over,” and the patronizing advice and admonishments are striking. Significantly, these references all have specific gender connotations within the context of the patriarchal hierarchy of power.9 The brothers who also raise their voices and behave hysterically are not faulted by these critics for their comportment. As it happens, Ronit Elkabetz is subjected in these film reviews to the same gender-related disciplining forces her siblings exert against her in her role as Viviane—they all try to censure this woman's habitual conduct and desires. But also relevant to our discussion here is that the overall disregard of the ethnic issue in To Take a Wife persists and goes mostly unnoticed in the film reviews about it. Seven Days (Shiv a, 2008), the second film in the trilogy, shifts the focus from the story of Viviane to the tale of her Moroccan family—the Ohayons. This family is on the cusp of crumbling due to the death of the brother who apparently has held the family together, the pressure from a bankrupt family business, being under the threat of the Iraqi Scud missile attacks, and long-seated grudges among the Ohayons. In the seven days of mourning (shiv a), when according to Jewish tradition the kin gather and stay in the house of the deceased, the family—Viviane and her six brothers, sister (Hanna Azoulai-Hasfari), mother, the estranged husband Eliyahu, and in-laws—engage in rounds of arguments, disparagements, and occasionally, appeasement. With the exception of the film's opening and last shot that take place at the cemetery (as well as a few shots by the side entrance to the house), the whole film is set indoors, in the house of the deceased's wife. Tonally, the film has an almost monochromatic look, accomplished mostly by the black clothing against the light walls of the house. The frame is static and almost constantly cramped with several (at times, more than a dozen) characters. With the use of long takes, all these elements accentuate the film's heavy and solemn mood, and its austere and claustrophobic qualities force the viewer to focus on the richly textured familial dynamics. I concur with Pablo Utin's (2009) insightful observation about the Page 210 →lack of a unifying center in the frame—“Some of the compositions in the film fill with people only the edges of the cinemascopic frame while they leave the center empty…‘The center’ of the drama bifurcates to the edges of the frame and creates a disjuncture” (24). This is precisely the aesthetic equivalent of the film's main theme—the tensions and schisms within the family regarding traditional values that are challenged, wealth and status differences, and generational gaps. Yet again, like To Take a Wife, the diegetic materials in Seven Days do not bring to the fore the imbrication of ethnicity and gender. While the former film accentuates a woman's predicament in her marriage, mostly disregarding her ethnicity, the latter focuses on the crumbling of the Mizrahi family unit with little attention to gender dilemmas. discussion of the relations between gender and ethnicity in contemporary Mizrahi cinema, it is noteworthy that most of the films discussed in this section feature an array of strong women—Jacky; The South's Elinor, grandmother Ida, and filmmaker Bar-David; Zehavit in Mirrors; mother and daughters in Sh'hur; in Turn Left, Nicole, Simone, Sarah, Jeannette (the Moroccan mother), and Rahel (the Indian mother); and Viviane in To Take a Wife and Seven Days. Notwithstanding the previous allusions to the women's lack of rootedness and even their ephemeral presence in The South, generally, within the films’ narratives and aesthetics (e.g., point of view), not only are these women the stories’ motivating force, but occasionally their significance transcends the confines of an individual tale. Like the treatment of the woman's death in Israeli classics such as They Were Ten (Hem hayu asara, Baruch Dienar, 1960) and Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (Giv a esrim ve-arba ena ona, Thorold Dickinson, TO ADVANCE MY

1955),10 in Turn Left the death of the Moroccan mother gains special meaning as it becomes a marker of a new era. As stated earlier, the Apollo moon landing is meant to relate the incident of death—an end of an era—to the beginning of a new chapter in human history, as captured in Armstrong's adage “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” In Turn Left and the two aforementioned films from 1955 and 1960 (all of which feature at least as many men as women), it is the woman who has the symbolic power (ironically granted to her only upon her death) to transform history or, at the very least, to be associated with historic events. Yet, a closer analysis will reveal that the celebratory empowerment of Mizrahi women in the films I have discussed here is problematic and misguided. With the few exceptions I have mentioned, the empowerment Page 211 →or centrality of the Mizrahi women in contemporary cinema operates along gender lines alone. More acutely, oftentimes, this women's empowerment entails the degradation of their Mizrahi male counterparts. Significantly, women rarely stand alongside their Mizrahi husbands, fathers, or siblings to resist the social/ethnic predicament to which they are all subjected. In fact, the “man” of the family is generally either absent or reduced to a dysfunctional and insipid figure (again, with the exception of The South), which amounts to the same thing.11 Some of the most conspicuous examples for the absence or feebleness of the Mizrahi father/husband include the fathers/husbands in Turn Left; the death of Heli's father at the beginning of Sh'hur; Shlomi's banished father in Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi; the absconding father in Jenny and Jenny; Rahamim of Asmar who admits to his daughter/filmmaker that he has been a big disappointment to his wife Noga; and Zehavit's spouse in Mirrors. Noticeably, there is not a single shot in Mirrors of the daughter Miriam and her father together, a directorial choice that furthers the centrality of the mother and her narrational power. Furthermore, time and again Mizrahi women and girls are pitted against Mizrahi men—spouses, partners, or fathers—and often, these films’ central conflicts revolve around the war between the sexes. For example, Eli is an abusive father in Your Younger Daughter Rachel; in Asmar, for the sake of virtue and woman's honor, early in their marriage Rahamim prohibited his wife from joining the Israeli military and demanded that she dress modestly—in his words, “I shut her in”; Jacky struggles against the domineering power of Eli, her brother-in-law, and David, her boyfriend; and in Mirrors, Zehavit's spouse slaps her when he mistakes her late arrival home, because of her Hebrew lessons, to be due to an extramarital affair. Azoulai-Hasfari's Sh'hur is the crudest in its pitting of men against women within the Mizrahi community. Concurrently with Pnina's rape by an acquaintance outside her house (Pnina stands with her back to the attacker), the blind father whips Rahel with his belt (she stands with her back to him) for damaging the ceremonial ark he was building. As Kobi Niv (1999) observes, the intercutting between the two similar images, Rahel's attention to her sister being raped as she is being whipped, and the intermeshing of the crying sounds of the two sisters, imply Rahel's own rape by her father (158–59).12 To conclude our discussion of the relations between ethnicity and gender, in the films discussed here, the Mizrahi woman's plight is often reduced to a critique of patriarchal hegemony. In turn, overlooking the structural origins of the ethnic dilemma facilitates the circulation of negative Page 212 →stereotypes about the Mizrahi community and, specifically, about Mizrahi men. Put differently, these films largely fail to relate the Mizrahi man's alleged chauvinism and violence, or, alternatively, his emasculation and insipidity, to the broader socioeconomic predicament of high unemployment, an inadequate education system, and limited entrepreneurial opportunities. Returning to the questions I posed at the beginning of this section, it is then clear that, instead of advancing notions of enriching conscious intersectionality as advocated by Crenshaw and hooks, the films discussed here acquiesce to a breach between ethnicity and gender. Specifically, the promise that the intersection between gender and race (or ethnicity) can open up a space for advancing the struggle of the group as a whole (e.g., women in general, not only women of color, and, in our case, the Mizrahi collective, both men and women), which Crenshaw (1991) points to expectantly, cannot be realized in these films. Since we find the preponderance of gender over ethnicity and, likewise, the emphasis on the oppression of women while belittling the marginalization of the Mizrahi as a collective, I would propose that the Mizrahi woman's predicament in contemporary Mizrahi cinema is derivative of her gender rather than ethnicity and, thereby, her dilemmas resonate more with those of Ashkenazi women than with those of fellow Mizrahi men.13

The Ethnoclass Dilemma

In his study of contemporary Jewish ethnicity in Israeli society, Sami Smooha (2004) employs the sociological distinction between real ethnicity (elementary choices and limitations regarding occupation, areas of residence, etc.) and symbolic ethnicity (secondary, folkloristic elements). For Smooha, considering housing, occupation, and intraethnic versus interethnic marriage patterns in the context of the Mizrahi community, it is imprudent to suggest that real ethnicity has dissolved into a symbolic one. Along these lines, what Smooha (1995) alludes to in his essay on Sh'hur is precisely the problematic disassociation between the social and the ethnic; he faults the film for implying that “the Israeli discourse is socially not ethnically-based…. In this non-ethnic social discourse there are no real conflicts nor conflicts of interests, hostility, or exploitation” (62–63). In other words, whereas it is fully acceptable for Israelis to broach and even encourage and celebrate symbolic Mizrahi ethnicity—its customs, food, and music—the structural conflation of ethnicity and class is deemed a rather controversial proposition. Similarly, Page 213 →sociologist Yehouda Shenhav (2003, 2006) deliberately employs the term “ethno-class” in his discussion of the Mizrahi group in order to point to the overlap between a low social status/class and Mizrahi ethnicity. Granted, Israel has undergone drastic socioeconomic changes in the last few decades—I already addressed the relative social mobility of Mizrahim after the 1967 War, the influx of immigrants, mostly from the former Soviet Union, but also from Ethiopia, the employment of foreign laborers (often to take the place of Palestinian workers), and the detrimental social effects of rampant privatization. Yet, what Smooha, Shenhav, and other scholars such as Efraim Ben-Zadok (1993) and Sami Shalom Chetrit (2004a, 2010) underscore is the structural, rather than fluctuant or circumstantial lower social status of the Mizrahim. As Chetrit (2010) intimates, notwithstanding that the Palestinians and foreign laborers now populate the very bottom of the social strata, within the Jewish population of Israel, the socioeconomic and educational gaps between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim have widened (199–202). Affirming the persistence of class disparity flies in the face of the socialist-Zionist ethos, whereas the acknowledgment of differences prescribed by symbolic ethnicity or presumed cultural gaps is often merely tantamount, to use Shlomo Swirski's (1989: 27) critique, to pointing to the need for the Mizrahi to undergo a “cultural upgrade.” The significance and implications of these articulations where the ethnoclass dilemma is elided are then twofold: first, we encounter here the “blaming the victim” strategy (i.e., it is the Mizrahim's putative cultural inferiority that should be blamed for their “lagging” behind) and, second, this position turns a structural ethnoclass issue into a generational one; according to this discourse, the second or third generation of Mizrahi immigrants will have acquired the necessary skills and mentality that would enable them to be fully coopted into “first Israel.”14 If indeed ethnicity and class are a recto/verso twosome that should be explored in relation to each other, then, in our film analysis, it is not simply a matter of identifying whether ethnicity is broached, but also of the context in which it is couched and its positioning in relation to class dilemmas, considerations that will guide our probe below of The King of Ratings and White Gold/Black Labor. I will suggest that whereas the former film draws ethnic and class issues in two parallel tracks and, thus, does not make the connection explicit, White Gold/Black Labor strives to attend to class issues only. However, my analysis would also reveal that in both films the uncoupling of “ethnoclass” is bound to fail. The King of Ratings (Melekh ha-reting, Doron Tsabari, 2001) features Page 214 →Dudu Topaz, whose television program “Harishon Babidur” (literally, “The First in Entertainment”) enjoyed the top rating spot for nearly six consecutive years. The film follows Topaz in his public appearances and in the privacy of his home and family over a five-year period; it attends to his marriage, divorce, an intense weeklong spiritual purification program he undergoes, and his unsettling relationships with his two children from a previous marriage. The film, which sets out to explore the pompous designation “Dudu is the people of Israel” (a reference to both his popularity and to his supposed representativeness of Israeli mentality), ends up portraying such a disturbing image of Topaz that this powerful television star exerted his influence to forestall the scheduled screening of the film on Israeli television.15 Early on, the film reminds us of Topaz's demeaning reference to Mizrahim (specifically, Mizrahi supporters of the right-wing Likud party) as riffraff (chachaim) during his political campaign for the Labor party in 1981.16 Topaz recalls the resultant Mizrahi hostility that hounded him for years, and he refers to those who bore the grudge

against him as “zeroes.” Topaz flatly admits, “I'm a racist…. It is a fact,” and he then elaborates on the childhood trauma that triggered his anti-Mizrahi sentiments—when he was about ten years old, a young Mizrahi man, whose family had just moved to the neighborhood where the Topaz family lived, made up an excuse to hit and humiliate Dudu Topaz's father. “A Godzilla,” “an Arab,” “a terrorist,” and “a ‘Hamasnick’” is how he now remembers that young Mizrahi man, and Topaz concludes emphatically, “All Mizrahim hate the Ashkenazim.” Relating his racist views to his life choices, Topaz allows that it is because he is aware of his irrational racist sentiments toward Mizrahim that he tries to counterbalance or neutralize them by choosing Mizrahim to work with and, more important, by getting married to a Mizrahi (Bukharian) woman. (The marriage fell apart six months later.) This cluster of references to Topaz's position vis-à-vis the ethnic problem early in the film seems to delineate the direction the film will follow, but the rest of The King of Ratings pursues other themes that are only tangentially related to the Mizrahi issue. The King of Ratings puts into sharp relief the social plight of rich versus poor17 and center versus periphery; these themes culminate in Topaz's trip to the southern development town of Ofakim. The trip is designed to be included in “Harishon Babidur” and is revealed to be a ratings scheme. Topaz's staff identified a newspaper article telling the story of Shlomo Da'i, a landscaper for Ofakim's municipality, who is about to be laid off. Shlomo, who earns minimum wage, is the breadwinner of Page 215 →a family that includes two handicapped children. Topaz shows up with his crew at the Da'i house and starts showering the family with presents, gift certificates, money, and eventually a promise from the mayor to maintain Shlomo's employment. (To be sure, the corporate donors are emphasized just as much as the donated items.) At some point Shlomo declines a money gift, and he later candidly tells Topaz that his family has lived happily and in a dignified manner even with the limited means they have had.18 Tsabari's camera does not flinch in this disturbing scene; it accentuates the uneasiness, even humiliation involved in this putative act of goodwill, and accordingly, the sequence concludes with the sarcastic caption “TV's exploitation of Shlomo Da'i received 25.5 percent rating” (and made “Harishon Babidur” the most watched program that week). Considering then that initially the focus in this film is on the Mizrahi issue, and that later it shifts swiftly to social dilemmas of employment and status, we are pressed to believe that this bifurcation in The King of Ratings indeed amounts to compartmentalizing the ethnic away from the broader class issues. And yet, we need to examine two elements that, at the very least, allude to the ethnoclass confluence. First, the “goodwill” trip to the Mizrahi family in the development town of Ofakim is tinged from the outset by our knowledge of Topaz's view of Mizrahim from the opening scenes. We are actually encouraged to read this filmed visit as an encounter between the Ashkenazi Topaz and the Mizrahi Da'i family. (Is the Da'i family among the “zeroes” to whom Topaz has previously referred? Do they, like all Mizrahim, hate Ashkenazim?) Second and more important, the visit at the family's house in southern Israel is mnemonic of the paradigmatic orientalist journey to the “East.” Specifically, the images and the verbal exchanges in this scene immediately conjure up all the tropes of Mizrahi representation in early Israeli cinema and in today's media coverage of Mizrahi communities with its emphasis on poverty, lack of education, an “iconography of backwardness,” and the episodic rather than contextual and structural addressing of the community predicament.19 The camera follows Topaz so that the scene is depicted from his point of view—he has the power of exploring a new territory and people “stuck in time.” (Importantly, Topaz arranged with Tsabari to have only one crew—Tsabari's—film the whole visit and to allow each party to use the footage for its purposes. Considering that, to a large extent, the crew followed Topaz's directions further supports my argument about the “imperial gaze” of the scene at the Da'i family.)20 Topaz, then, is the present-day Zionist savior/benefactor of the Mizrahim.21 In accordance with Edward Said's (1978) conceptualizations of imperialPage 216 → or colonial knowledge and power, Topaz has the ultimate knowledge of and about the “natives”; after he introduces himself to the Da'i family, Topaz “guesses” who they are, boasts about knowing their ages, and then adds haughtily, “You see, I know everything about you.” White Gold/Black Labor (Zahav lavan/avoda sh'ora, Tali Shemesh, 2004) is set in the town of Dimona and the Dead Sea Plant—Israel's highly reputable and profitable industry that for years has been associated with one of the most ambitious Zionist/Israeli industrial enterprises.22 As part of the sweeping privatization trend of the last decades, the state sold the plant in 1996 to private entrepreneurs. In 1999, the buyers offered the plant for sale, and

it took the Ofer brothers, whose wealth ranks them the second richest family in Israel, only twenty-four hours to seal a deal and purchase it.23 White Gold/Black Labor exposes what has mostly been a hushed undercurrent in some sectors of the Israeli labor market—the hiring of low-skilled outsourced laborers (ovde kablan) to perform some of the most labor-intensive and hazardous tasks. In the Dead Sea Plant, these nonunionized workers do not enjoy most of the social and financial benefits (e.g., retirement funds and overtime pay) employees in other sectors of Israeli society do. In stark contrast to the poor employment conditions and the extremely low wages earned by the outsourced laborers (OLs), there are two other strata of workers in the plant, referred to as Generation A and Generation B, both unionized. Generation A workers are the most senior employees of the Dead Sea Plant, and they enjoy extraordinarily high wages and benefits. The film suggests that Generation A constitutes a class of its own; neither Generation B nor the OLs can join this privileged group. To demonstrate the internal status divisions, the film addresses the separation between Generation A workers and the OLs inside the workplace and outside, a separation that extends even to the workers’ children at school.24 If all of this seems merely unfortunate but not necessarily appalling, then one needs to consider the management's extreme exploitation of some loopholes in employment laws (e.g., the hiring of some workers for periods as long as thirty years where, for the purpose of benefits or, actually, lack thereof, they are still considered by their employers to be “special project” hires or temporary workers). Furthermore, OLs have been threatened time and again by their employers not to unionize or make their conditions known to the public. Early on, Shemesh documents her failed attempts to interview the plant's OLs, and the film reveals that they decline to speak with her out of fear that they would Page 217 →never be able to be hired again or receive their last month's paycheck if they told their stories to the camera. People's desperate need to work at the plant and the OLs’ willingness to acquiesce to their humiliating socioeconomic conditions should be understood in the context of the limited work opportunities in many development towns. As indicated in earlier discussions, towns such as Dimona are often dependent on only one major plant, and therefore, being barred from employment there is likely to entail prolonged unemployment. A few OLs eventually agree to portray their horrifying employment conditions, and, with the exception of three of them, they conceal their identity by wearing white masks, and the interviews take place in the darkness of night. It is precisely this reality whereby OLs are shunned by their employers and many in Dimona that justifies the filmmaker's use of these specially made masks; they reveal the need to hide, but as importantly, they attest to the OLs’ condition as “present absentees” who have no face in the community in which they live. Due to his close ties with the management, Armond Lankri, the plant's union chairman and a member of Generation A, is obliged to defend his employers and initially denies that the plant hires any OLs.25 His convoluted rationale for that assertion hardly redeems him—he claims that since these workers do not appear in the rosters the plant keeps, practically speaking, they are nonexistent. When Lankri finally concedes that he is aware of the presence of the OLs and that the plant deals with subcontractors to supply the OLs, he belittles the significance of this practice by minimizing its scale in terms of both the number of OLs and the duration of their employment. To explain this subcontracting arrangement with OLs, Lankri maintains that Generation A and B plant employees will not be willing to undertake OLs’ jobs, and as for the possibility of hiring them as regular employees, he suggests that, due to high hiring standards the plant maintains, OLs are unlikely to qualify. Despite repeated attempts by the filmmaker, the management, for its part, declines to respond: “[The Ofer brothers] are surrounded by cohorts of PR people, spokesmen, and lawyers,” the filmmaker says in voice-over.26 So far, my discussion here has elided any mention of ethnicity. Seemingly, White Gold/Black Labor is solely about class and social issues both in the narrow sense of discriminatory practices and degrading employment conditions within this one plant and in consideration of the broader social dilemma regarding the polarizing effects of privatization in Israel. It is significant, though, that the film is set in Dimona, a town populated then mostly by Moroccan Jews, and that at the time of filming half of this town's workforce was employed in the plant. Likewise, it is noteworthy that, based on names, appearance (of those unmasked), and accent, along with the filmmaker's attestations (interviews on June 18, 2004, and June 4, 2005), a large majority of the OLs are of Moroccan/Mizrahi descent.27 What are we to make then of this structuring absence of ethnicity as such? I shared this quandary with

Shemesh who, in response, relayed to me a conceptual debate she had had with her film editor. The latter believed the ethnic issue should be addressed head-on, whereas Shemesh thought it would diffuse the message and divert the film away from its main course. Furthermore, Shemesh suggested that most viewers will not mistake the ethnic origins of the OLs (nor, we should add, will they fail to identify the Ofers as Ashkenazi). Page 218 → As we have seen, a structuring absence keeps returning (albeit in a disguised form) by alluding to that which an author or a society at large deems taboo or radically incongruent with their beliefs, namely, with what they wish to repress. I would argue that Shemesh's allusions to race and racism in the non-Israeli context forces Mizrahi ethnicity with a vengeance back into the filmic realm. Do not the dark-skinned Mizrahi with a white mask as well as the film's title conjure up Frantz Fanon's (1967) Black Skin, White Masks? The issue of blackness lurks time and again in this film, but it becomes explicit only once. A masked OL conveys the way the management and privileged workers at the plant perceive him: Page 219 →“First and foremost, OL is not a man [Fanon again? —“the black is not a man”]; he is a blackie-Negro (kushi shaor); we are the whites.” Remembering that “blacks” (sh'orim or, in Yiddish, schwarze) used to be a derogatory word referring to Mizrahi Jews, arguably, the film utilizes the general white-versus-black race issue to metonymically displace (and, thereby, also indirectly evoke) the specific ethnic reality in Israel. Following this contention, other, seemingly peculiar elements the film contains (read “contains” also as related to containment and confinement) become more legible and significant. Clearly, the film's title conjures up notions of slavery, and the white/black dyad alludes to the whites’ exploitation of blacks in America and elsewhere.28 Yet, it is worth noting that, notwithstanding its origin, in Hebrew “black labor” is a common term for menial work, not an address of people's ethnicity or color. Again then, the film obscures its own references to ethnicity; this wizardly “hide and seek” play involving the revealed and the concealed is most apparent in the inclusion of “Strange Fruit,” a song about blacks’ lynching in the slavery era. Over shots of an impassive local neighborhood of Dimona at sunrise and burning-red bare trees with a few cotton seedpods hanging down, the song is played in the background.29 This harshest denouncement the film posits can no longer be read as related to class exploitation only; “Strange Fruit” is about race/color and therefore its inclusion implies the role of the ethnic in the construction of the film, despite the filmmaker's overt intention to attend to the social issue of class only. Yet again, this bold allusion to race/ethnicity is broached in a non-Israeli context, and thus it further obfuscates the confluence between ethnic (racial) dilemmas and class gaps.30 ethnoclass dilemma are comparisons drawn between the immigration from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and the Mizrahi immigration of the 1950s and 1960s. At its core, considering that upon their arrival in Israel the Ashkenazim constituted the large majority of the local Jewish population, the implied conundrum is whether the marginalization of the Mizrahi has been ethnically/racially based or a matter of seniority. If the latter, so just as the Mizrahim were assigned to the lower rungs of Israeli society at that time, then FSU immigrants are expected to have taken over this low stratum upon their settlement in Israel.31 In Tarab (a term for an ecstatic state related to Arab music), Boris Maftsir (2009) compares these two groups of immigrants within the broader context of the place of cultural heritage.32 Maftsir, who was Page 220 →born in Riga (in what is now Latvia), immigrated to Israel in the 1970s. In the encounters with his longtime friend and neighbor, Israeli writer Eli Amir who emigrated from Iraq in the 1950s, they challenge each other in reflecting on cultural origins, immigrants’ identity, and acculturation into Israeli society. RELATED TO THE

In one of the scenes, filmmaker Maftsir invites Amir to join him on a trip to Ashdod, a coastal city south of Tel Aviv that used to be populated predominantly by Mizrahi Jews but, since the immigration of the 1990s, added more than 60,000 people from the FSU who now constitute about 30 percent of the total population of the city. Maftsir and Amir stroll around a neighborhood of FSU immigrants where Russian culture and language are visible everywhere. This follows several scenes in which Amir bemoans the erasure of Arab/Arab-Jewish culture in Israel in the past and the scant presence it has in the present. Against this backdrop of the humming Russian neighborhood in Ashdod, Maftsir teases Amir, “Are you envious of what you see around here?,” to which Amir responds, “I am not envious of this [the proliferation and preservation of the immigrants’ home culture]…. I envy people's perseverance; that the Israeli sabras, the Israeli old-timers fell short of instilling in them [the FSU

immigrants] a sense of inferiority as they managed to do to most of us [Mizrahim] upon our immigration.”33 Arguably then, in contrast to The King of Ratings and White Gold/Black Labor, which strive to disassociate between class- and ethnicity-related dilemmas (mostly, as we have seen, by sidelining the latter even when called for), Maftsir's film focuses on ethnicity but supplants the broader socioeconomic dilemmas of class with the issue of societal repute, distinction (à la Bourdieu 1984), and culture. Put differently, Tarab resorts precisely to what I referred to earlier as Aleksandra Ålund's (1995) warning against the “culturalisation of social disparities” (317) and “representing ethnic relations exclusively in terms of culture” (315).

The Ethnoreligious Juncture When they [the establishment or authorities] shut all doors closed for the Mizrahim, they forgot to close one door—the door to the synagogue…. IRIS MIZRAHI (JOURNALIST AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST)34

As I implied earlier, articulations about intersectionality in cultural studies revolve primarily around the genderethnic/race-class axes. Religious or mystical traditions in the lives of Jewish communities from Arab and Page 221 →Muslim lands are highly embedded in the formulation of Mizrahiness, and this particular coupling of faith and ethnic identity merits some reflection. Considering the centrality of these traditions, one may wonder about the scant attention the ethnoreligious juncture has received in Mizrahi films and the absence of scholarship about the relatively few films that do attend to this topic.35 To begin with, the reason “film studies and cultural studies have typically shown very little interest in religion” (Gordon Lynch 2009: 275) may well be the difficult translatability of religion, faith, or spirituality to the screen. In the academic works that do contend with issues of religion and cinema (and Gordon Lynch's is no exception), the focus has been on films’ representation of spirituality, afterlife, redemption, apocalypse, ethics, or religious fundamentalism,36 not on the socioeconomic aspects pertaining to the religious followers who are the subjects of those films. Furthermore, to the extent that the social context is broached in these academic works, the emphasis tends to be on extradiegetic issues of affect (e.g., film viewing as a religious experience) and effect.37 Regarding Israeli cinema, until the late 1980s, it attended repeatedly to war and the Arab-Israeli conflict with little treatment of the place of religion in society. Likewise, the vast majority of filmmakers and film scholars, Mizrahi or otherwise, hold secular and liberal positions that are likely to clash with religious tenets and practices. Oftentimes, this particular secular worldview translates into a general leeriness about the increasing presence and influence of religion in Israel. Clearly, I am not suggesting that filmmakers and scholars focus only on attitudes and groups of their liking or that they ought to represent individuals and collectives in an affirmative manner; however, as an example, it is telling in this context that Yosefa Loshitzky's important and comprehensive book Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (2001) includes only fleeting notes about faith-based identity politics. Although this cultural ambience is hardly conducive to a thorough and nuanced cinematic exploration of religious practices in Israel, the last two decades have witnessed an awakening of sorts where a significant number of documentaries and feature films about religious communities and individuals in Israel have been made.38 Likewise, there has recently been a growing number of Mizrahi films that attend to the issue of religion and, more specifically, some that engage the ethnoreligious juncture, albeit often only sketchily rather than as a central theme.39 Usually, these films either depict Mizrahi characters’ continuous practice of masorti customs that their families brought with them from their countries of origin, or, otherwise, they Page 222 →employ secular or moderately religious Mizrahi personas who, at some point in their adult lives, decide to embrace the Orthodox religious fold. In the narrative films Seven Days, To Take a Wife, and Honor (Kavod, Haim Bouzaglo, 2009, a film about the Marciano and Bardugo Moroccan organized crime families), and in the documentaries Queen Khantarisha and The Buganas, religious tradition is strongly embedded in these Mizrahi people's habitus, and, therefore, these practices elicit little reflection by either the characters or the filmmakers. This embedment of the ethnic and the religious/mystical is patent in Chetrit's Come Mother. As his mother Yakut Chetrit-Edri prepares the traditional North African couscous dish at the beginning of the film, Chetrit ventures in voice-over, “Of course, Mother is not

just couscous, not just [the saint] Baba Sali.40 And yet, Mother is first of all couscous and always the Baba Sali. Love and faith come first.” These films accentuate the naturalness of traditional practices. This stands in stark contrast to the portrayal of the new way of life those “born again” (ozrim bi-tshuva or ba ale-tshuva—returnees to the religious fold)41 Mizrahi characters choose in entering ultra-Orthodoxy, a form of religious practice that had previously been mostly alien to the more lenient Sephardi-Mizrahi religious tradition.42 Moshe Balanga in the above-mentioned narrative film Ushpizin is such a Mizrahi “born again.” After his release from jail, he joins the Ashkenazi Orthodox yeshiva of Breslau Hassidim in Jerusalem. Also, Jenny Swissa, of the documentary Jenny and Jenny, has a stint with a return to religious practices, but she retracts when she realizes that, consequently, as a religious young woman, she would need to forgo military service. In these films, and even in Travels with My Brother, which is dedicated to filmmaker Kimchi's “born-again” brother Roni and which attends to the Mizrahi predicament as experienced by the brother, there is no attempt to conceptualize this phenomenon of returning to the fold within the particular ethnic dilemma in Israel. Conversely, Nissim Mossek's follow-up on the former Black Panthers in Have You Heard about the Panthers? intimates that it is the socioeconomic void—the dissolution (if not failure) of the Black Panthers’ struggle and the oppressive economic conditions—that is largely responsible for the return to religion of some Mizrahim. Edges (Ktzavot, Tal Avitan, 2010), which chronicles the emotionally vexing story of the filmmaker's family in Sderot, alludes to a similar connection between the religious alternative and socioeconomic conditions of this Mizrahi family. The head of the family, Tal's father, committed suicide three years earlier while serving time in jail, and Tal's mother Aliza, who holds a menial job in a local factory, lives mostly alone. Likely due to Page 223 →hardship at home, Tal's youngest brothers Shai and Or are sent to a religious boarding school in Bnei Brak, just east of Tel Aviv. Another sibling, Guy, moves to a yeshiva in the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox community of Me'a She arim in Jerusalem where he thereupon changes his name from the secular “Guy” to the biblical “Amnon.” Shlomi, the oldest of Aliza's children, is released from jail, and, to stay away from drugs and crime, he decides to join an Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem as a helper in the kitchen there. In a euphoric and somewhat frantic state, he bursts into the camera his brother Tal is holding: “Thank God now I'm ‘black,’ haredi (ultra-Orthodox),43 (I) can see God. I love God. I am a king. I am the son of the King.” At the end of the film Shlomi leaves the yeshiva, and, back in Sderot, he relapses into drugs. This social phenomenon of Mizrahi children and youth from non-Orthodox families who are sent to yeshiva or religious boarding schools (referenced also in Sh'hur and in Who Is Mordechai Vanunu?) and, relatedly, of the mit'azkim—Mizrahi men and women who become gradually more strictly observant in their adult life—is most noticeable among the followers of the Sephardi Orthodox, politically conservative party of Shas.44 In recent elections, the party has lost some of the parliamentary clout it had in the past (at its peak, in the 1999 general elections, it came in third with seventeen seats in the Knesset, only two seats fewer than the Likud party had), and, as implied earlier, outside its constituency, the public has been rather wary of its operations and achievements.45 And yet, Shas still has a strong representation in local municipalities,46 and party representatives and volunteers provide, at least in their view, a safety net of social and educational services (the best known of which is Hama'ayan)47 in poor Mizrahi neighborhoods throughout the country where state and local authorities have failed.48 Ramleh, a town about halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, is known for its high crime rate, poverty, and crumbling schools. Michal Aviad's Ramleh (Lev ha-aretz, 2001) attends to the uneasy coexistence between the Arabs and Jews of this town, to the subjugation of women in both societies, and to the large support Shas enjoys among the town's Jewish residents. The film features four local women, two of whom, Sima and Orly, are Mizrahi.49 According to the film, in the 1999 elections, one-third of the voters cast their vote for this party, and, considering the town's demographic makeup, it is very likely that, like Sima and Orly, most of them were Mizrahi Jews. As the election results become known (Labor defeats Likud, but Shas is a strong third), Shas crowds, which include Sima and Orly, express openly and unequivocally anti-Arab sentiments. Page 224 →Given the political context and the town's demography, the film implies that the popularity of Shas in Ramleh is due to the combination of the traditional bedrock it offers and of its hawkish position vis-à-vis the Arabs/Palestinians. Scholars have enumerated various reasons for the support Shas has enjoyed among the Mizrahim, which, in turn,

further contextualize those broached in the film: (1) The party emphasizes an ethno-Jewish nationality that provides a foundational common denominator to all Israeli Jews and entails winnowing the Arab citizens of Israel away from the Mizrahi/Arab-Jew. The party's design, therefore, is to put the Mizrahim on par with their Ashkenazi counterparts;50 (2) It seeks to restore Sephardi/Mizrahi honor and respect.51 The party's dictum is leha azir atara le-yoshna (“to restore [the Sephardi] past glory/crown”),52 not a petty matter for many Mizrahim who have experienced their marginalization in Israeli society and politics; (3) Many Mizrahim have cast their votes for Shas not out of party loyalty or political conviction, but as a protest vote, namely, to express dismay and disappointment with the two historically established political blocs—Labor and Likud—which, for those voters, did not deliver on past promises; and (4) For most Mizrahi Jews, including the less observant among them, Jewish tradition is an important part of their upbringing and even habitus in the present. In their countries of origin, they were mostly masortiyim and, generally, did not have to experience the strong schism between modern/secular enlightenment and religious Orthodoxy that have characterized European Jewish communities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Therefore, unlike the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox and modern Orthodox parties, which can cater only to the religious sector, Shas can appeal to the masorti and even secular Mizrahim. More specifically, only one-fourth of Shas's voters are Mizrahi haredi/ultra-Orthodox compared with an exclusively haredi constituency voting for the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox parties.53 Taken together, these explanations for the Mizrahi support of Shas challenge facile ascriptions of that voting pattern to the putatively anti-Arab sentiments among the Mizrahi populace, and in turn, they shed light on the ethnoreligious juncture. In the overall secular-liberal Israeli film milieu, the increasing presence of young religious and masorti filmmakers is rather conspicuous and significant. This emerging trend can be attributed to some relatively new film schools that provide alternatives to the well-established and strongly secular film programs at Tel Aviv University and the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem. These include the Ma'aleh School of Television, Film, and the Arts, which caters to religious students and encourages Page 225 →film works pertaining to Jewish culture and traditions;54 the Television and Film Studies program in the School of Communications in Ariel in the West Bank;55 and the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at Sapir Academic College, which, although unequivocally not a religious school, attracts Mizrahi students from the surrounding towns in the northwestern region of the Negev desert, some of whom as indicated below are masortiyim.56 These film student harbingers of new cinema attend to Sephardi/Mizrahi (or Ashkenazi) traditions of religion and faith from within the fold. Edges's closing credits start with B.S.D (be-siata di-shmaya, in Aramaic, “with God's help”), an acronym religious and masorti Jews use in written texts, and it also appears on the film's DVD cover. Similarly, Bugana-Bachar's concludes her film The Buganas with “Thanks to GOD.” These religious markings, quite uncommon sights in the firmament of Israeli cinema, are not merely formal or illustrative; rather, they are indicative of the films’ themes where religion and religious traditions play a significant role in the lives of their Mizrahi characters. Considering the increasing visibility and acclaim of film schools such as Sapir and Ma'aleh, one can safely anticipate that the burgeoning interest paid to faith and religious practices by Mizrahi filmmakers who come from religious or masorti homes will only solidify. Specifically, in the Mizrahi context, it is likely that the exploration of the juncture of religion and ethnicity will gradually gain more cinematic attention. It remains to be seen when scholarly work about this new phenomenon will also partake in this development.57

Alliances and Inspirations Despite the emphasis Third World, global, and critical race feminists have placed on intragroup differences and on the unique conditions of various subgroups, scholarship on intersectionality is not meant to advocate internal schisms within groups, nor is the articulation of differences predicated on identity politics a goal in itself. It is not surprising then that (as implied earlier), according to Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), intersectionality can open up a space for advancing the struggle of the group as a whole (e.g., women in general, not only women of color) and even for social and political alliances with other subaltern groups. In their different ways, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Rosemarie Tong (1989), Chela Sandoval (2000),58 and Nira Yuval-Davis (1997)59 do not ask to reify subgroup identities or to demarcate a distinct space where gender, race, and class intersect, but to identify the strategic importance of intersectionality. Page 226 →

In Yearnings “Postmodern Blackness” (1990), bell hooks provides a comprehensive account of the space our contemporary era enables for subaltern groups to coalesce around common goals and to challenge oppressive forces such as racism. She suggests that it is precisely the postmodern experience that enables these bonds. The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries of class, gender, race, etc., that could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy—ties that would promote recognition of common commitments, and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition. (27) Employing that scholarship on intersectionality and alliances, my focus is on the modalities of such coalitions in Mizrahi cinema and the historical and political spaces the films carve out to contextualize them. As I have done with my inquiry into the Arab-Jew hybrid, in applying the aforementioned works on alliances I would propose that one also needs to differentiate between (the often celebratory) subalterns’ agentive connections and subalterns’ propinquities that are proffered or imposed by the dominant group. Didactically, the following discussions should be read as a continuation of those presented in chapter 2 where I addressed the complex relations between Mizrahi identity and Arabness, namely, between the Arab-Jew or Mizrahi and his or her Arab cultural and historical roots. In contradistinction to an argument I made in that chapter about the compartmentalization of the nostalgic past away from the current Israeli/Palestinian issues, here I center on Mizrahi-Arab alliances. Put differently, I shift the focus from cultural nostalgia to activism and politics (and to the politics of culture) and from the Mizrahi experience in the Arab world to the relations between the conditions of the Mizrahi and those of the Palestinian in Israel/Palestine. The motivation for this reintroduction of the Mizrahi/Arab issue is the emergence of substantial scholarship and the relatively large number of recent films addressing commonalities and connections between the two groups. These works often articulate causes the two communities share, based, inter alia, on their otherization or oppression by the hegemonic Ashkenazi Zionism.60 Either by association and semblance or, paradoxically, by the Zionist effort to pull the Mizrahi away (indeed, to rescue this group) from Page 227 →the Orient, Mizrahi and Arab collectives have been intertwined in official discourse even before the creation of Israel. In The Arab Jews (2003, 2006), Yehouda Shenhav identifies several milestones in the history of the Zionist movement when the Sephardi/Mizrahi and Palestinian Arab misfortunes were cynically exploited by its leaders and agents.61 A case in point is the deliberations the Israeli government of Ben-Gurion had in the early 1950s about a linkage between the confiscated property of the Palestinians who left or were expelled from the country during the 1948 War of Independence (or Nakba—catastrophe, in Palestinian terms) and that of the fleeing Iraqi Jews whose property was frozen by the Iraqi government of Nuri Said in 1951 in connection with their emigration and the forfeiting of Iraqi citizenship. To resist the pressure on Israel to compensate Palestinian refugees for their dispossession—having their land and belongings confiscated in the aftermath of the war—the Israeli government posited that compensation would not take place as long as the Iraqi government did not compensate for the Jewish property it had seized. Therefore, as Shenhav implies, the Israeli government became a trustee of sorts, acting on behalf of both Iraqi Jews and the Palestinians. For Shenhav (2003), equally relevant is the consignment of many Mizrahi Jews to Israel's border zone development towns and villages where they were expected to defend the borders against the Arab Palestinian infiltrators (fida'iyyun) from Egypt and Jordan who often wanted to reclaim back the very villages now populated by the new immigrants (153).62 Importantly, by making both groups hostages to the Zionist praxis, their fates became interdependent. The link between the two groups extends to labor issues—from the relative advanced social mobility Mizrahim enjoyed following the 1967 War when Palestinians from the territories took their place at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy, to housing policies where Mizrahim were settled in what had been Palestinian villages and neighborhoods before the 1948 War,63 and to administrative, intelligence, and military practices, as in the recruitment of a significant number of Mizrahim, based on their knowledge of Arabic, to posts that required daily contact with local Arab/Palestinian populations.64 The association between the Mizrahi and the Arab, as we have seen, was predicated mostly on inverse relations—one group's gain was the other's loss—which, therefore, resulted in pitting the two against each other

and ultimately effected a rift (hence the designation of the Mizrahim as “Arab-haters”), not cooperation between the two subjugated Page 228 →groups. Yet, G. N. Giladi (1990: 252–337), who provides a detailed account of the imbrications of Sephardi/Mizrahi protest with raised awareness and concern for the Palestinian predicament, indicates that Mizrahi solidarity with Palestinians had its beginnings as early as the mid-1920s.65 It is precisely this empathy and cooperation that many “new Mizrahim” attempt to advance in their academic, institutional, and community grassroots work. Ideologically, the “new Mizrahim” take a radical liberal-leftist stance, opposing not only ethnosocial policies but, just as important, the Labor, Kadima, and Likud governments’ stances toward the Palestinian issue. The involvement and desire of the “new Mizrahim” to interrelate the Mizrahi and Palestinian dilemmas is unmistakable if we consider their affiliations with groups and NGOs (oftentimes, as founders), such as the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow66 and the Edva Center for the Study of Equality in Israel, which strive to raise consciousness and effect change regarding unjust sociopolitical realities in Israel's judicial, executive, and legislative branches of government.67 It is not surprising then that Ella Shohat (1988) titles her essay on Mizrahi oppression—“Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims”—to echo Edward Said's (1979) “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” where he offers a historical narrative of the conflict from the Palestinian perspective. Indeed, as I alluded to in my references to Shohat's work, her various publications often attend to the interrelations between the Arab/Palestinian dilemma and that of the Mizrahim, probably most noticeably so in her Israeli Cinema (1989). For Shohat, the hegemonic Zionist view “refuses to see that the same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands, and national-political rights was linked to the process that dispossessed Sephardim [Mizrahim] of their property, lands, and rootedness in Arab countries (and, within Israel itself, of their history and culture)” (267–68). One of the most significant interventions in Shohat's (1989) study of Israeli cinema is her critique of the “Political Wave” filmmakers, who, while they were often considered dovish on the Palestinian/Israeli front, in her view failed to relate their political agenda or expand it to address the Mizrahi/Ashkenazi strife. In her discussion of this cinematic period and genre of the 1980s, Shohat observes, The films, in continuity with the general liberal discourse, now make a step forward recognizing a Palestinian entity, but in fact focus on Sabra ambivalence in relation to that question while hermetically shutting off the Sephardi [Mizrahi] issue as an “internal social problem” to be solved after peace is achieved. The intrinsic relations between Page 229 →the Palestinian and the Sephardi questions form, in the “Palestinian Wave” of films, a “structuring absence.” (267) The cinematic harbinger of the view that interrelates the Palestinian and the Mizrahi plight is Igaal Niddam's film We Are All Arab Jews in Israel (1977), which I adumbrated in chapter 2. The oddity of his thesis at the time the film was made is best captured in an interview with Patricia Erens (Niddam 1979/1980). Although she was sympathetic to the film, Erens commented, “For me, you really have two films: one on the situation of the Sepharadim [sic] in Israel and the other on the solution to peace in the Middle East.” Niddam's called-for response was, “I have the right to decide these two issues are connected” (38).68 Leaping into the present, the following will then explore the self-chosen imbrication of the Palestinian and Mizrahi dilemmas and also the opportunities these connections offer as they are rendered in the narratives, casting, and iconography of contemporary Mizrahi films. Asher de Bentolila Tlalim's Don't Touch My Holocaust and Galoot render an affirmative stand on the Israeli /Palestinian issue, and their implicit or explicit critique of Zionism transpires precisely from relating the oppression of the Palestinians to the history of Mizrahi Jews in Arab lands and then in Israel. Don't Touch My Holocaust (Al tig u li ba-Shoah, 1994) centers around Arbeit Macht Frei vom Toitland Europa (Work Frees from the Death Land of Europe), a play that offers a total theatrical experience. The theatrical performance by the Acre Theater group consists of interactions with the audience, art installations, actors’ confessions and tales from their past, and guided tours by Palestinian and Israeli actors. The text of the play changes constantly since it is interlaced with references to political current affairs, including news items regarding the Israeli occupation. At times, even within one scene, there are quick transitions between various languages (mostly Hebrew, English,

German, and Yiddish). The “stage” includes indoor and outdoor spaces such as the Acre Theater and the Holocaust Museum in Kibbutz Lohame Hageta'ot. Don't Touch My Holocaust casts these experiential and experimental elements not only by capturing on camera what unfolds before it in the play, but also by adding the filmmaker's reflections on his past and the place of Mizrahiness in the national memory of the Holocaust. In the film's section titled “What Does a Moroccan Have to Do with the Holocaust?” Tlalim travels to Casablanca to see the house where playwright Dudi Ma'ayan's parents used to live, and then to Tangier, where he, Tlalim, was born. As Yosefa Loshitzky (2001) observes, the link the film draws between Mizrahim and Palestinians challenges the Zionist attempt to have Page 230 →exclusive ownership over the narrative of the Holocaust (30). Ultimately, if the title Don't Touch My Holocaust is the filmmaker's rendering of the Ashkenazi-Zionist/Israeli fiat, he then retorts in this film by demanding what can be recast as “don't exploit, monopolize, or appropriate the Holocaust.”69 In Galoot (Hebrew for “exile”), Tlalim (2003), who emigrated with his family from Morocco to Spain and then to Israel in the 1960s, moves to London for the duration of his wife's work on her PhD. Away from what he now considers home—Israel—he contemplates the meaning of life in exile, and at some point he travels back to Morocco and films inside his family house in Tangier. In London, he befriends two Palestinians—Khaled and Amjad—who, although not among the some 750,000 refugees of the 1948 War, still perceive the Nakba and the ensuing exilic Palestinian existence as formative experiences in their lives. Later, he also visits the places where Khaled's and Amjad's families used to reside in Palestine. I concur with Shmulik Duvdevani (2010: 143) that Tlalim's interpretation of the experiences of uprooting—of Jews in Morocco and of Arabs in Palestine—forms the basis for his strong ties with Khaled and Amjad and that the filmmaker's formulation of exile entails a critique of Ashkenazi-Zionism. (As I discussed in previous chapters, historically, there is no doubt that the mass immigration of Mizrahi Jews from Arab/Muslim lands to Palestine /Israel in the 1940s through the 1960s would not have happened had the Jewish-Arab strife over Palestine/Israel not deteriorated to the point it did, which, in turn, made peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa nearly impossible.) Relying on the work of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, which I discussed in chapter 3, Duvdevani proposes that the charging of Jewish exile with positive elements (in contrast to the Zionist's dictum “the negation of exile”) in Galoot facilitates the recognition that exilic life (inter alia, among Arabs) can be the discursive locus for “responsibility, partnership, and change” (147). But Duvdevani also attends to the film's problematic rendering of the Mizrahi-Palestinian alliance that attenuates its critical dint. As Tlalim explores the theme of uprooting (for him, from Morocco; for his friends, from Palestine), he also reflects on his stay in London as an exilic experience. Clearly, this position is fraught with irony since Tlalim's present exile is temporal and voluntary, unlike Khaled and Amjad's (141, 144). More to the point, Duvdevani intimates that the position Tlalim is taking vis-à-vis the Palestinian issue is meant to exonerate him as an Israeli leftist by suggesting to the Palestinians that Page 231 →he, too, is a victim of Zionism, not their victimizer. Put differently, the Sephardi/Mizrahi exile in Arab lands functions then as an exculpating space since it preceded guilt about the violation of the Palestinians.70 Duvdevani (2010: 147–59) identifies a similar paradigm of connecting the uprooting of the Jews in Arab lands to that of the uprooting of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine in Amit Goren's Another Land. The film starts with a juxtaposition of images of the Goren/Gormezano house in Alexandria, which the filmmaker's Sephardi family had to hurriedly abandon in 1951, and images of an Israeli bulldozer leveling a Palestinian house (likely of suspected terrorists) during the first Palestinian uprising (intifada). For Duvdevani, Goren, like Tlalim, seeks to relate the two experiences to express empathy toward the Palestinian precisely from the Mizrahi locus as a victim. However, as I have previously suggested, the bifurcated prism through which Another Land reflects on home and uprooting projects two parallel rather than conjunctive narratives; other than that juxtaposition, the past or exile in Egypt is never related to the political reality regarding the Arab-Palestinian/Israeli conflict in the present or, specifically, the Palestinian exile. Arguably then, in contrast to Tlalim's Galoot and Don't Touch My Holocaust, in Goren's film the promise in the juxtaposition of the uprooting “there and then” with the uprooting “here and now” in the beginning of the film never develops into a critical articulation of the unique positioning of the Mizrahi vis-à-vis the Palestinian dilemma today, let alone into a Mizrahi critique of the tenets of Zionism. To wit, in Goren's

Another Land (and ’66 Was a Good Year for Tourism) the Arab/Mizrahi connection is mostly prescribed (e.g., the formative experience of uprooting that the two peoples share) rather than agentive. In Benchetrit's Samir, a film that as implied earlier is explicitly critical of Zionism's colonial character, the possibility of a Mizrahi-Palestinian coalition comes into much sharper focus. In his conversations with writers Emile Habibi, an Israeli Palestinian, and the Egyptian Ali Salem, renowned Jewish-Israeli writer Sami Michael71 (aka Samir) draws a clear analogy between his inferior status in Iraq as a member of the minority Jewish group there and the predicament of Israeli Palestinians for having been considered a disloyal minority in Israel. When he reminisces with Habibi on the years they spent together in the communist party in Israel, Michael decries the harsh treatment both Israeli Palestinians and Mizrahim have suffered at the hands of the Israeli authorities. Michael elaborates on the brutality with which the Israeli government in the late 1950s crushed all Mizrahi attempts to organize politically and socially, Page 232 →and on the ensuing sense of estrangement in one's own country. But the film goes beyond a shared sense of victimhood. This personal closeness and attestations to Mizrahi-Palestinian common political ground in Samir amount, according to Chetrit (1996), to a “film of forbidden encounters” (49); for him, these possible coalitions, which are predicated on the elision of the Ashkenazi-Zionist hegemony, are the authorities’ biggest fear. In my discussion of the Political Cinema /Palestinian Wave in chapter 1, I suggested that the bond the Mizrahi established in those films from the 1980s with their Palestinian counterparts and their subsequent cooperation were not based on the Mizrahi-heightened political consciousness but on circumstance, physical semblance, and shared cultural (often folkloric) features. Conversely, in contemporary Mizrahi films such as Samir, the affinity between the two parties is encoded first and foremost on the basis of mutual recognition and a shared agenda vis-à-vis the regnant Zionist ethos, in general, and Israel's sociopolitical policies, in particular.72 Forbidden Mizrahi/Palestinian encounters are at the heart of Nissim Mossek's Citizen Nawi (Ezra Nawi, 2007). Ezra Nawi is a Mizrahi leftist activist and homosexual. In his apartment in Jerusalem he shelters Fuad, his Palestinian partner from the West Bank and later, after their separation, does the same with Nimmer, his new Palestinian boyfriend. In the eyes of Israeli law, Fuad and Nimmer are illegal aliens, and Nawi has repeatedly been hassled and arraigned by the police for sheltering them. Although the film's broader theme is the connection between nationalist sentiments and homophobia where “the forbidden encounter” between Nawi and his Palestinian partners entails a transgression of both sexual and national boundaries, Citizen Nawi pays special attention to the interrelated predicament of and collaboration between Palestinians and Mizrahim. Defying Israeli military prohibitions to build a medical clinic in the Palestinian village of Twannie, Nawi assists the locals there to proceed with the building plan. In his confrontations with Israeli soldiers, Nawi's harangue (spiced up with Marxist principles) inveighs Zionism for compelling the Mizrahim to turn into “Arab-haters” so that they can be included in the Jewish ethnonational collective—“The worse and the toughest guys in their treatment of the Arabs [Palestinians] are the Druze, the Ethiopians,…and the Mizrahim. It's something one should reflect on…I am Iraqi. Why did they bring our parents [from Arab lands to Israel]? Because six million people were murdered in Europe. They had no laborers here…. Now they [the Mizrahim] take it out on the Arabs.” Later, when Nawi awaits his trial for giving a ride to Nimmer, he reads off the sign on the courtroom door the listed cases that will be brought before the judges, and he joshes about the recurrence of names like Muhammad, Mahmud, and Mizrahi, but not one Ashkenazi last name like Leibowitz.73 Page 233 → For Osnat Trabelsi, the producer of numerous television programs and documentaries on Israel's unrelenting occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, it is her work with and about Palestinians that led her to connect with her own past and, more generally, with the Mizrahi cause, not the other way around.74 Trabelsi, an Israeli-born daughter of an Iraqi mother and a Tunisian father, embraces the Arab identity she had previously shunned and was ashamed of (e.g., when her mother listened to Arabic songs on the radio, Trabelsi would turn it off and growl, “We are not Arabs here!”).75 Trabelsi's positions, which echo the above-mentioned critiques of Zionism on grounds of its European racist and colonial nature, reiterate that the erasure of the Arab culture of the Mizrahim in the past is intrinsically embedded in the ongoing oppression of Arabs/Palestinians. Her understanding of these issues led Trabelsi to be one of the cofounders of “Films from the Black Side” in 2003, a forum whose goal is to

accentuate and further the ties between Mizrahim and Palestinians in the arena of cinema. Adding to Raymond Williams's coinage “structures Page 234 →of feeling” (1977), Ella Shohat (1995) advocates “analogical structures of feeling” (169, 177)—shared experiences and similar sensibilities across class, gender, race, and different locales that make intercommunal alliances possible. It is precisely these “analogical structures of feeling” Trabelsi attests to in her suggestion that, when Mizrahim (defined by sociopolitical consciousness, not origins) make films about Palestinians, there is no sense of otherness or superiority between the filmmaker and his or her subject.76 It is, therefore, all the more interesting to investigate the reverse perspective—the way a Palestinian filmmaker would articulate these relations between the Arab (Palestinian) suffering and the Mizrahi problem. In Cut (2000), the Israeli Palestinian Nizar Hassan follows the story of Kurdish- and Iraqi-Jewish families to reveal the connection between the predicament of these immigrants—their forced settlement in what used to be, prior to the 1948 War, the Arab village Ajur77—and the Palestinian Nakba. The “cut” signifies then both the displacement/expulsion of Palestinians and the uprooting of Mizrahim, who, as we have seen, oftentimes were not inclined to leave their Arab/Muslim homelands and immigrate to Israel. From the outset, the film blames the Ashkenazi establishment for these groups’ conditions, and, in this sense, Cut may be interpreted as a cinematic space enabling the camaraderie of the oppressed. Yet, considerations of diegetic and extradiegetic elements in Cut challenge that congenial interpretation of the film. Within the film's diegesis, it is implicit that a few of its main subjects (some of whom are also committed right-wing Zionists) are somewhat reluctant to participate as they gradually begin to suspect that Hassan's motivation for entering their lives is to make a Palestinian nationalistic (read anti-Israeli) film. Also, Cut's apparent cinematic transparency, which derives from its emphatic reflexive style—crew members are part of the mise-en-scène and address the camera, the microphone is often seen in the frame, and shots occasionally start with a visible slate—should not be mistaken for a frank “baring all” or an egalitarian directorial stand. Ultimately, Hassan reverses common power relations in Israel's political reality—the filmmaker is the one who now “calls the shots”—and his authority over his subjects is unmistakable; his subjects eventually admit, just as the (Jewish) film's coproducer does, that they don't really know what this film is all about. My argument here is not meant simply as a reiteration of the truism that the very setting in documentary filmmaking implies that the people in front of the camera are devoid of the power the makers of the film have. Rather, since in Cut the filmmaker becomes a representative Page 235 →or symbol of Palestinian nationalism, the mistrust and confusion developing among his subjects signify the broader near-impossibility of reciprocal recognition or the formation of coalitions between the two groups. In short, despite Cut's overt purpose to relate the sufferings of one group to the other's, this film reinforces the mutual sense of suspicion and otherness between Mizrahim and Palestinians. Indeed, in my interview with Hassan, he expressed little sympathy for the Mizrahim, who, he argued, desire to be fully co-opted into the Ashkenazi society and tend only to their victimhood instead of promulgating a radical anti-Zionist alternative.78 As an indication of this quiescence, Hassan cited the little interest that Mizrahim, mostly second generation, have had in cultivating Arab culture among themselves.79 My analysis here is not intended to censure Hassan's film or to suggest that, in general, Palestinian filmmakers share his stand regarding the Mizrahi. (Hassan's film is actually the only one I could identify where a Palestinian filmmaker focuses on the Mizrahi community.) Rather, what needs to be underscored here is an argument I alluded to at the beginning of this section, namely, that coalitions are always contingent and should be studied in reference to their particular contexts. Specifically, one ought to acknowledge that there are markedly different implications for Palestinians to enter a coalition with Mizrahim than for the latter to pursue such an alliance; whereas the Mizrahim risk very little in forging these ties, for the Palestinians, the same act might be interpreted (in their eyes or in the view of their community) as sheer acquiescence with and submission to the occupier. BY ITS VERY DEFINITION,

acting is constituted on a peculiar duality between the actor and the character she or he plays; on the one hand, it necessitates the mimetic separation between the persona (role) and the actor, and, on the other hand, it involves some suitability, affinity, or resemblance between the two. Casting Palestinian actors as Mizrahi characters, including Muhammad Bakri, Makram Khouri, and Salim Daw who play Mizrahi roles in, respectively, Desperado Square, The Barbecue People, and James’ Journey to Jerusalem, provides yet another perspective on our inquiry into Mizrahi/Palestinian relations. It can be argued that these casting choices may signify Mizrahi/Palestinian interchangeability. Moving beyond the issue of representational “passing,” we ought

to address casting considerations in the broader context of language, iconography, and discourse. Casting the Palestinian actor Makram Khouri in The Barbecue People as Page 236 →the scheming businessman /lover Ezra Tawil, who usurps the story of his Iraqi-Jewish fellow—Haim Ida—about the Zionist underground cell in Iraq, is multivalent. On one level, Tawil's claim of a false identity (that he is the revered underground oud player) amounts to an act of displacement, only this time the Arab (in a Jewish role) is the perpetrator. Consequently, this scene about competing historical narratives within the film diegesis has a mnemonic effect in referencing another struggle over historiography and narratives—the irreconcilable Palestinian versus Israeli accounts of the conflict. This connection becomes even more plausible if we consider that the rivalry between Ida and Tawil directly engages the Zionist endeavor; in a way, they contend for the fame of being the resolute or true Zionist. On another level, quite compatible with the last, yet allowing some room for Palestinian/Mizrahi commonalities, we may propose that the interjection of a Palestinian (actor) into a Mizrahi story is intended to obscure difference rather than underscore contentions. Desperado Square, which focuses exclusively on a Mizrahi community, calls our attention to another bold “miscast.” Avram, the brother of the deceased Morris, is played by the well-known Palestinian actor and filmmaker Muhammad Bakri, whose presence in this film immediately imparts to the film political dimensions; Bakri is known to Israeli audiences for his political consciousness and activism for the Palestinian cause.80 In his first appearance in the film, Bakri carries an old suitcase (seen also toward the end of the film) as he visits the neighborhood he left years ago. Significantly, the suitcase, just like the olive tree and the house key, has a synecdochic virtue in Palestinian nationalism; all these tropes attest to the longing, bond, and desire to return to the homeland. Therefore, from the outset, Bakri/Avram invokes a hybrid Palestinian/Mizrahi refugee-type, a daring proposition if understood also to stand in contrast to the iconic Wandering (Ashkenazi) Jew. When Aharon, the projectionist in Desperado Square, asks Avram if he may borrow the only available film print of Sangam, which has been in Avram's possession since he left the neighborhood twenty-five years earlier, he appeals to Avram, “Let's relive our old dreams.” Avram retorts with an Arabic expression (at times used by Jewish Israelis): “Illi fat mat”—“What Page 237 →has passed is dead”—and then, for emphatic purposes, he repeats it. This exchange accretes special meaning since within the film's diegesis, Avram is a Mizrahi, but a Palestinian/Arab in the extradiegetic context, whereas his interlocutor, Aharon, is played by the actor Uri Gavriel, who is easily recognizable as Mizrahi. The proposal to relive the old dreams of the past can be interpreted then as an impossibility (“what has passed is dead”) implicated by the Zionist vision that has mostly been encoded on the eradication of the Palestinian national ambitions and Mizrahi culture. Conversely, it can be construed affirmatively as alluding to the cultural-language commonalities between Mizrahim and Arabs and to the space the two groups can share. Eventually, Avram does allow Aharon to screen the film, and, in turn, he enjoys with Seniora the special screening that Aharon arranges. In a narrational sense, then, the film's conclusion supports this affirmative reading—against all odds, Avram, Seniora, and the community at large do relive their old dreams, which have been suspended by the closing of the movie house; they now come together (“sangam,” in Hindi). section, we should also address suggestions in Mizrahi cinema about inspirations and similarities between the ethnic struggle in Israel, and racial and social struggles elsewhere in the world.81 Arguably, allusions in films to other social movements involve more than simply broaching common ground; they can be construed as subversive acts in themselves. As we have seen, one facet of the Mizrahi subjugation has been based on the construction of the ethnic dilemma as an internal Israeli issue predicated on the conditions Israel had to withstand due to mass immigration shortly after the creation of the state. These broader connections point then to an inveterate human oppression that manifests itself differently in various societies and times, and, therefore, the Mizrahi predicament cannot be written off as simply an internal anomaly caused by circumstance. TO CONCLUDE THIS

In his analysis of Beni Torati's Desperado Square, Chetrit (2001a) employs the semi-oxymoronic term “the universal neighborhood” to address the film's astute ability to make connections between the specific Israeli and general global social issues. For Chetrit, the film implicitly proposes, if not actual coalitions between Third World /repressed people, then at least unity based on solidarity and shared experiences: “There is such a thing as a universal neighborhood, here, in Italy, in Egypt, in India…and in many other ‘southern’ corners of our

civilization…. In this era of fascist global economy, the inversion of this trend [of globalization] is the universalization of the neighborhood” (21). The imbrication of the local with the universal becomes evident in Chetrit's own film (with Eli Hamo) The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak. Over the sound of a rhythmic African drum beating, the film intersperses fast-paced montage sequences that include black-and-white still pictures of Israeli and American Black Panther protests, Malcolm X's rallies, the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, Page 238 →Fidel Castro, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King Jr. The effect of the rapid succession of images—each still picture is on the screen for approximately a third of a second, barely enough time to cognitively process the information presented in each image individually—with the accompanying sound is the fusion of all the components of the montage into one compound, thus again alluding to the structural (rather than specific) semblances between the struggles of various marginalized groups that rise up against their oppression. intersectionality and alliances in this chapter was mostly an inquiry into Mizrahi intragroup boundaries and intergroup connections. Alternatively, in other chapters in this work, my analysis of contemporary Mizrahi cinema engaged in boundaries that set the Mizrahi group apart from others. Chapter 2 explored the cultural commonalities the Mizrahim share, chapter 3 delineated the epistemic and spatial boundaries inside which the Mizrahi is emplaced, and the agentive characteristics of the Mizrahi group were chapter 4's main focus. All these chapters have skirted around the pivotal question about boundaries: What, if any, are the features that distinguish the corpus of Mizrahi films? OUR DISCUSSION OF

NOTES 1. Masorti (plural masortiyim) is a person who is moderately religious. I use “masorti” in reference to faith-related practices that do not strictly adhere to the Orthodox decrees of Jewish Rabbinical/Helachic law. For more on masorti communities and on their estimated representation in the overall population figures in Israel, see “The Many Faces of Jewishness in Israel” (Shlomit Levy, Hanna Levinsohn, and Elihu Katz 2004) and Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled's “The Wages of Legitimation: Zionist and non-Zionist Orthodox Jews” (2002: 137–55). 2. In stark contrast to a common trend in Israeli films, Jacky does not sell her body as her poor Mizrahi young women counterparts often did in early Israeli cinema. See Orly Lubin (1999a) for a more elaborate discussion of Jacky's refusal to objectify its protagonist. 3. Interviews with Orly Malessa on June 27, 2004, and May 29, 2005. 4. In this conversation, the father turns his daughter's suggestion about the backwardness of the place on its head; for him, it is precisely her upbringing in the periphery that motivates her to excel and to prove to the more fortunate students her ability to succeed. 5. When the teacher discusses with his students the conspicuous gaps between the “northerners” and the “southerners,” he implicitly challenges the prudence of transferring students away from their neighborhoods. Immediately following this sequence, Page 239 →a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews (Hasidim) are shown on their “missionary” trip to the southern suburbs of Tel Aviv. Before they deliver candies to the neighborhood kids, these Hasidim are heard from the van's loudspeakers citing the fiat “every woman and daughter should light Shabbat candles.” This scene amounts to another facet of men's regime of power and discipline, but also points to their (religious) rootedness. 6. The short narrative film Your Younger Daughter Rachel (be-Rahel bitkha ha-ktana, Efrat Corem, 2006) tells the story of Rahel, who lives with an alcoholic mother and an abusive unemployed father. Although markers of a Mizrahi place and community are conspicuous in this film, the gender dilemmas are not tied in with the broader ethnic predicament. The documentary Jenny and Jenny (Jenny ve-Jenny, Michal Aviad, 1997) depicts two cousins—Jenny Swissa and Jenny Guetta. These two Mizrahi high school students express their thoughts about marriage, absconding fathers, patriarchy, love, sex, and religious faith, but ethnicity is largely elided here. The tale of three women (two of whom are clearly Mizrahi) who join a theater workshop in Jaffa and participate in a woman's play there is the focus of the short documentary Hide and Seek (Mabo'im, Iris Rubin, 1992). Again, the film and the play that lends the film its name attend to personal dilemmas of women's experiences, with only scant and inconsequential references to their positionality as Mizrahi women. The aforementioned documentary Stone Flower and the television drama

Until Tomorrow Comes only minimally relate Mizrahi dilemmas to their female characters’ concern and reflections about sex relations, abuse, arranged early marriages, and divorce. Three Mothers (Shalosh imahot, Dina Zvi-Riklis, 2006) is a narrative film about three sisters who grew up in Alexandria, Egypt, during the 1940s and then immigrated to Israel and started families there. The film focuses on motherhood and sisterhood, whereas ethnic aspects function mostly as the film's décor. Likewise, the bleak narrative film Or, My Treasure (Or, Keren Yedaya, 2004) portrays the drudging reality of Or, a precocious teenage daughter who lives in the shadow of her mother's prostitution (Ronit Elkabetz). Eventually, the daughter, too, turns to prostitution. Although these women's Mizrahi descent is never in doubt, their predicament is not contextualized within the ethnic dilemma. In line with my argument here, Yedaya's discussion of her filmic choices in Or (The New Israeli Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers, Pablo Utin 2008: 97–117) focuses on gender issues; other than a fleeting comment on a possible influence of the Egyptian cinema on her films and the similarity she finds between her work and that of the late Mizrahi filmmaker George Ovadia, ethnicity as such or its relationship to gender dilemmas is virtually absent in this elaborate interview. 7. See http://glz.co.il/NewsIndexSub.aspx?NewsCatId=37. 8. To Take a Wife won the Critics Award—Special Mention in the 2004 Hamburg Film Festival and the Audience Award in the 2004 Venice Film Festival, and in 2005, Ronit Elkabetz won the best actress award in the Mons International Festival of Love Films in Belgium for her role in this film. 9. Notably, Freud's study of hysteria pertained to women only. Also, in the previous chapter, I attended to Julia Kristeva's and Elizabeth Grosz's articulations of excess—the abject (e.g., menstruation blood)—the quality of the uncontained that instills fear in men and, conversely, allows for woman's subversion and challenging of social and cultural boundaries and order.Page 240 → 10. In They Were Ten, a film about the early Jewish settlement in Palestine, Manya lives with her husband and eight other men (hence the title) in a desolate hilltop in the Galilee region. As Ella Shohat (1989: 48, 51) suggests, the death of Manya has mythical and national dimensions; it coincides with heavy rain falling after a long drought, and, more important, Manya dies as she gives birth to a new sabra, thereby marking an end of an era and the commencement of a new one—the age of the new breed of Jew. Hill 24 Doesn't Answer is a (fictive) story of four soldiers capturing a strategic hill in the outskirts of Jerusalem on the eve of the UN announcement of ceasefire between Jordan and the nascent state of Israel. All four die, but their sacrifice ensures safe passage to Jerusalem in years to come. Whereas the film is structured around the narratives of the three male characters and elides the female soldier's voice, her death is endowed with special honor. In the film's conclusion, the camera climbs from the body of the heroine clenching the Israeli flag (which, for the UN team, determines that Hill 24 belongs to Israel) to a dynamic aerial view of the country. To mythicize her death, the closing title reads “The Beginning,” again, to signify that the sacrificial death of the woman is what facilitates the creation of a new life/a new state. 11. Clearly, my analyses of the films in this section hardly concur with Raz Yosef's (2010: 144–63) conclusion, based on his reading of Desperado Square and Cinema Egypt and of the hypermasculine images Mizrahi protest movements have projected, regarding the Mizrahi man's desire to restore the Phallus. (See my discussion in chapter 2.) In Yosef's view, since Ashkenazi-Zionism emasculated the Mizrahi patriarchs, now some second-generation filmmakers cast a fantasy whereby they identify with the father figure specifically in order to reinstate the dominance of a strong masculine heterosexuality. Yosef's exclusive focus on two films by Mizrahi males might account for our incongruent interpretations of the gender dilemma in contemporary Mizrahi films. 12. Ayelet Menahemi's episode Get (from Hebrew, “divorce decree”) in Tel Aviv Stories (1992), a film that is often considered the harbinger of Israeli feminist cinema, deviates somewhat from the trend described here. In Get, police officer Tikva catches her estranged husband. Since his disappearance years ago, she has lived as aguna (literally, a fettered woman), who, according to Jewish rabbinical law, is prohibited from remarrying as long as her husband does not grant her divorce or is presumed to be alive. Get does not attend to the intersection of gender and ethnicity, but the Mizrahi male character there, Menashe (Sasson Gabai), stands out as a rather liberal man who is attuned to Tikva's predicament as a wife, mother, and woman. In his comportment and views, Menashe is cast in contrast to the heartless Ashkenazi husband (also Menashe) who refuses to grant his wife the divorce decree, and he exhibits male sensitivity to women that is absent in the fierceness and machismo mentality of the police force (ironically, epitomized by a Mizrahi officer). See

discussion of Menashe's role in Get in Moshe Zimerman's The Israeli Invisible Movies (2007: 112–13). 13. This is a somewhat surprising finding considering that, for the above-mentioned organizations of the Mizrahi Feminist Forum and Ahoti, the implied separation between the ethnic and the gender issue is unacceptable; the Forum was created by Mizrahi feminists (led by Tikva Levy, Mizra Eliezer, and Ella Shohat) after a split in 1994 from the general/Ashkenazi feminist movement in order to establish Page 241 →their own Mizrahi group, and, likewise, “Ahoti” has maintained close ties with the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow. Also, the book publisher Bimat Kedem, which specializes in the writing of Mizrahi authors, dedicated issue no. 11 “To Read As a Mizrahi Woman” (“Likro ke-isha Mizrait,” 2006) of its journal Hakivun Mizrakh to Mizrahi women's writing and critiquing; the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity is the discursive and experiential backdrop for the contributors to this issue. 14. See Shlomo Swirski (1989: 27–28). 15. The film was shown in Israel's major cinematheques. Also, the film is available in the Israeli “The Third Ear” video store chain free of charge; the filmmaker opted for this arrangement to protect himself against a possible lawsuit by Dudu Topaz on grounds of profiting from the star's “slandering” in the film (interviews with Doron Tsabari, May 12, 2004, and July 27, 2005). 16. The late prime minister Menahem Begin fully exploited Topaz's slur later in that year's election campaign to sway Mizrahi voters to support his Likud party. 17. Various scenes reveal the exuberant wealth of Topaz and his milieu of friends, which is contrasted with the depravity in Ofakim. 18. Later in the film, this statement by Shlomo Da'i accrues additional meaning; when Topaz admits that his life is becoming miserable, we are compelled to think of this analogy between the two men in terms of the miserable millionaire versus the contented poor. In August 2009, years after the completion of the film and the airing of “Harishon Babidur,” Topaz hanged himself in prison after being charged with plotting to attack some prominent Israeli media figures. 19. See my discussion in chapter 1 of Eli Avraham's (1993/2000) studies on the coverage of the periphery in Israeli media. 20. Interview with Tsabari, July 27, 2005. 21. There is a strikingly similar reference to Topaz in White Gold/Black Labor. In one of the scenes, the television star is laying the cornerstone for the Topaz Center in the southern development town of Dimona. In his speech there, Topaz envisions vast economic growth resulting from his Center's initiative (including a shopping center, a theme park, museums, etc.), and he spices up his Zionist harangue with a few catchy phrases from President Kennedy's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches. Three months later it was announced that the plans for the Center were shelved. 22. The Dead Sea Plant is located in the southern tip of the Dead Sea (in Hebrew, literally, “the Salt Sea”); it produces potash, bromine, and magnesium. 23. Information provided in the film. 24. For a discussion of the scope of subcontracting and its socially pernicious effects in the context of privatization and polarization in Israel, see Uri Ram's The Globalization of Israel (2008: 104–5). The diminishing influence of some unions in their struggle against major corporations figures centrally both in White Gold/Black Labor and in Strike. 25. In her voice-over, filmmaker Tali Shemesh clarifies, “We need to understand that Lankri is playing the role that the management has given him. They provide him and his people with relatively good employment conditions and in return, he gives them ‘industrial calmness.’” 26. The subject of the pernicious connection between fortune or money and political power (hon ve-shilton) has become a prominent issue for the critics of privatization Page 242 →and neoliberalism, a trend best exemplified in Israel by Benjamin Netanyahu's policies as prime minister and minister of finance. In focusing on the Ofers, The Shakshuka System (Shitat ha-shakshuka, Ilan Abudi, 2008) renders a harsh critique of the corruptive effect of the entanglement of politics and money. White Gold/Black Labor adumbrates this connection, but it underscores a related detrimental connection between fortune and the academia in Israel. Ben-Gurion University postponed indefinitely the scheduled screening of this film due to pressure apparently exerted by one of the Ofers—Yuli (or his proxies)—who is on this institution's board of directors. “Reciprocally,” Avishai Braverman, president of Ben-Gurion University, was at the time the film was made on the board of directors of the Ofers’ corporation “Hahevra Leyisrael.” (Information is

based on Shelly Yachimovich's television news program “Gilui Da'at” and on my interviews with Shemesh, June 18, 2004, and June 4, 2005.) 27. My discussion here is not suggesting that the Mizrahi workers at the Plant in Dimona are all OLs; actually, many of Generation A and B employees, including Lankri, are Mizrahim. 28. The allusion to the workers’ slavery-like conditions cannot be mistaken. One scene focuses on the preparations made by Dimona's residents for Passover (e.g., burning the leavened bread), and the filmmaker's voice-over refers to the holiday by its less common name “The Holiday of Liberation” (ag haerut). Since the holiday commemorates the escape of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt into freedom in the Land of Israel, the association between these two forms of slavery/oppression (sans redemption in the case of the OLs) is rather blatant. 29. The translation of the lyrics below is based on Billie Holiday's original version. White Gold/Black Labor includes the following lines. Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze… Pastoral scene of the gallant south… 30. Strike (Shvita, Asaf Sudry and Amir Tausinger, 2005) reveals a remarkably similar story of the exploitation of workers in the nonunionized Haifa Chemicals Ltd. South plant in Dimona, which is owned by an American-Israeli entrepreneur—the millionaire Arieh Genger. In the film, workers testify about the inhumane working conditions and the humiliating treatment by the plant's management. Strike focuses on an attempt by some forty workers to unionize, on the ensuing strike, and the brutality with which the strike was crushed not by lawful police forces but by security fellows hired by the management specifically for the purpose of breaking the strike. To an extent, in its stark portrayal and harsh critique of the predicament of the strikers, of the connection between political clout and money (Genger had close ties with then–prime minister Ariel Sharon), and of privatization, the film offers a gloomier picture of Dimona's blue-collar workers than the one depicted in White Gold/Black Labor. Already at the beginning of the film, workers reflect on the failure of their struggle; it is as if the film (like the workers) suggests that, in the rampant capitalist socioeconomic mode that prevails today, a struggle against the wealthy few in control is doomed to fail from the outset. Again, the film sidelines ethnic issues, preferring to attend to those of class and labor, and, like White Gold/Black Labor, the Mizrahi Page 243 →dilemma eventually creeps up. This is most noticeable in a statement by one of the workers in a television interview during the strike: “We are the little people, the slaves, the blackies, here, I'm also black (pointing to the color of his skin); they (the management) don't like it.” Ultimately, what is most striking about the commonalities between the two films is that when ethnicity is broached, it ought to be racialized, namely, to the extent that the Mizrahi dilemma is alluded to, it is along the lines of racial articulations about the subjugation and enslavement of blacks elsewhere, rather than in reference to concrete ethnic realities in Israel. 31. For more on the FSU immigrants see Dina Siegel's The Great Immigration: Russian Jews in Israel (1998), and particularly her discussion of Russian immigrants’ relationship with other ethnic groups (116–42); Allan S. Galper's From Bolshoi to Beer Sheva, Scientists to Streetsweepers (1995); Tamar Horowitz's Children of Perestroika in Israel (1999); Majid Al-Haj's Immigration and Ethnic Formation in a Deeply Divided Society: The Case of the 1990s Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel (2004); and Elazar Leshem and Moshe Sicron's “The Soviet Immigrant Community in Israel” (2004). For an analysis of Russian immigrant cinema in Israel, see Olga Gershenson's “Immigrant Cinema: Russian Israelis on Screens and behind the Cameras” (2011). 32. Unlike Tarab, Michal Aviad's documentary Ramleh (2001) and Mushon Salmona's narrative film Vasermil (2007) depict Mizrahim and members of the FSU without attending to differentiation or comparisons between the two in the context of ethnicity/race, group identity, and status, as Maftsir's film does. Aviad's film focuses on four women who live in the impoverished town of Ramleh. The three Jewish women in this film—two “old-timer” Mizrahi immigrants and a more recent Bukharian immigrant—are

subjected to the same economic hardship and apparently hold similar political views. Likewise, Vasermil depicts a plain lower-middle-class neighborhood in the southern city of Beer Sheva. Crime and the struggle to make ends meet are affecting equally the Ethiopian, FSU, and the more veteran Mizrahi families in this film. 33. Arnon Zadok, a Mizrahi actor, filmmaker, and chairperson of the Periphery Committee at the Israeli Film Council conveyed similar sentiments; he emphasized that he is jealous of the ability of the Ashkenazim (not specifically Russian/FSU immigrants) to maintain power as a group and to support its members and representatives in the realms of Israeli culture and politics. To his dismay, the Mizrahi community has not yet risen to this task (interview, September 27, 2010). 34. Quoted in the epigraph to Yoav Peled's “‘A Lion Has Roared, Who Can But Fear?’: Shas and the Struggle over Israeliness” (2002: 272) and in Sami Shalom Chetrit's Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel (2004a: 252). 35. The only scholarly allusion to the ethnoreligious dilemma in contemporary Mizrahi cinema that I could identify is in Zimerman's analysis of Lovesick on Nana Street (2007: 142–45). 36. See, for example, the comprehensive introductory volumes to religion and cinema—The Routledge Companion to Religion and Cinema (John Lyden 2009), The Continuum Companion to Religion and Film (William L. Blizek 2009), and Film and Religion: An Introduction (Paul V. M. Flesher and Robert Torry 2007). 37. Among the recent works that examine the relations between cinema and religion and attend to relevant sociocultural effects and affects, but not specifically to socioreligious dilemmas, are “On Dealing with What Films Actually Do to People: The Page 244 →Practice and Theory of Film Watching in Theology/Religion and Film Discussion” (Clive Marsh 2007), “Polanyi's Personal Knowledge and Watching Movies” (Rebecca Ver Straten-McSparran 2007), “Películas—¿A Gaze from Reel to Real? Going to the Movies with Latinas in Los Angeles” (Catherine M. Barsotti 2007), Religion and Film: An Introduction (Melani J. Wright 2007: 161–65), “Audience Reception” (Clive Marsh 2009), and “Cultural Theory and Cultural Studies” (Gordon Lynch 2009). 38. Some of the prominent contemporary Israeli films of the last two decades about religious communities include the narrative films The Appointed (Daniel Waxman, 1990), Snow in August (Hagai Levi, 1993), The Dybbuk of the Holy Apple (Yossi Somer, 1997), Kadosh (Amos Gitai, 1999), Time of Favor (Joseph Cedar, 2000), The Secrets (Avi Nesher, 2007), My Father, My Lord (David Volach, 2007), and Bruriah (Avraham Kushnir, 2008), and the documentaries Keep Not Silent (Ilil Alexander, 2004) and Eyes Wide Open (Haim Tabakman, 2009). 39. We may draw a parallel here between the recent interest Mizrahi cinema has in religion and a similar trend in Mizrahi music. In their work on Israeli popular music, Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi (2004: 224–26) argue that Mizrahi music (musika mizrait) has been making headway into the Mizrahi religious experience (as in piyutim, traditional religious songs) for several decades now, and they note that some prominent Mizrahi singers have become religious Jews. 40. Yisrael Abuhatzera, better known as the Baba Sali (literally, the praying father), was a Moroccan rabbi and cabbalist. In life and after his death, Baba Sali's followers have believed in his power to heal the sick and to work miracles. The Baba Sali's burial place in Netivot, in the northwestern Negev desert region, is a shrine for many Mizrahi pilgrims. In the film's second sequence, Chetrit follows his mother as she pays a visit to this shrine. 41. As implied in my discussion here, whereas for the Ashkenazi Jew in Israel the return to the fold often entails going from one extreme to the other—from being secular to becoming an ultra-Orthodox—for the Mizrahi this change often entails a somewhat more moderate step, namely, becoming more observant than before. (On the Sephardi/Mizrahi religiously observant tradition, see Aviezer Ravitski [“Introduction,” 2006: 11] and Shlomo Deshen [“Historical Roots and the Israeli Present in the Religiosity of the Easterner Jews,” 2006].) To allude to this aspect, “born again” appears here in quotation marks; even those Mizrahi who became Orthdox or ultra-Orthodox had rarely been completely secular, agnostic, or atheist beforehand. Consequently, mit'azkim (literally, those who strengthen themselves), which is generally used in the Mizrahi context, often connotes a change of scale rather than substance and may be used instead of ozrim bi-tshuva or ba ale-tshuva. (For more on the phenomenon of hit'azkut [gerund form] and mit'azkim in the Mizrahi context, see Nissim Leon's “The Popular Tshuva Assembly in Mizrahi Orthodoxy” [2003].) Conversely, the

ascription “born again” (without the quotation marks) is more appropriate in addressing Ashkenazi returnees to the religious fold; for the latter, the observance of Jewish religious laws is often a change into a hitherto alien tradition. (On this distinction between the two groups and their historical trajectories, see Binyamin Baron's [Bar'on] “The Range of Orthodox Responses” [2006].) 42. Neri Horowitz's “Rabbi Ovadia Yosef—The Formative Years” (2006) offers a Page 245 →close reading of Sephardi/Mizrahi religious rulings that, overall, attest to the relatively moderate form of Sephardi /Mizrahi religious observance. 43. Haredi is used more often in the Ashkenazi form of ultra-Orthodoxy than in its Mizrahi Orthodox/ultraOrthodox equivalent. As Kimmy Caplan (2003, particularly 225–28) argues, the chief characteristics of the haredi society (e.g., being anti-Zionist) do not apply to the Mizrahi ultra-Orthodoxy. Since in Edges Shlomi Avitan joins an Ashkenazi yeshiva, his use of the term “haredi” is rather standard. As for Shlomi's “I'm black,” a term that usually has a derogatory connotation, here it is used in reference to Hasidic or ultraOrthodox Jews for the black garments they wear. 44. The relative importance of religion versus ethnicity (Sephardi/Mizrahi) for Shas has been a topic of debate among Israeli scholars. Yoav Peled (2002: 284) demonstrates that Shas's platform (as it appears in its NGO El Hama'ayan's guidelines) emphasizes religious principles rather than ethnic dilemmas and, likewise, that over the years the party has refrained from making political demands that single out the Sephardi /Mizrahi community (earmarked projects aside). However, in practice, Shas's embedment in the Sephardi /Mizrahi community is undeniable. For example, note that Ovadia Yosef, the party's spiritual leader, as well as all its political representatives, are of Sephardi/Mizrahi descent, that Shas's support comes almost exclusively from Mizrahi Jews (including FSU immigrants from central Asia), and, likewise, that the party's sponsored services are enjoyed mostly in areas heavily populated by Mizrahi Jews. (For more on the particular Sephardi dimensions that set Shas apart from the Ashkenazi political parties and its appeal to Sephardim/Mizrahim see Yoav Peled [2002: 278–79], Sami Shalom Chetrit [2010: 197–98; 2001b], David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner [2006: 134–35], Chaim I. Waxman [2004: 223], and Asher Cohen's “Shas: Periphery in the Heart of the Center” [2006].) For political maneuvering and strategic gains, though, the party often allies itself with the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi parties at the price of sidelining Sephardi/Mizrahi dilemmas. A case in point: in 2010 the public religious school in the settlement of Emmanuel in the West Bank decided to segregate two tracks of its religious female students. In the more Orthodox track, the overwhelming majority of students consist of Ashkenazi schoolgirls, and the less Orthodox track consists of mostly Mizrahi girls. The school is under the auspices of Ashkenazi haredi parties, and school administrators expressed their concern about the negative influence the girls of the less Orthodox track might have on the more “pious” students. However, construed as an audacious ethnic segregation in a school funded by taxpayer money, this decision (which, inter alia, calls for separate entrances to the school building!) was harshly criticized in public forums and the media. What many found shocking in the aftermath of the school decision was Shas's acquiescence; none of its leaders has expressed any protest about this unusual and discriminatory school decision. 45. For more on the public's anxiety stemming from the party's success and on the vituperative attitude toward Shas, see David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner's address of “the party they love to hate” and “anyone but Shas” (2006: 156–58), Yoav Peled (2002: 286), Sami Shalom Chetrit (2010: 176–78), Sara Helman and André Levy (2001), and Asher Cohen (2006: 343–45). 46. See Lehmann and Siebzehner (2006: 168).Page 246 → 47. For a detailed account of Hama'ayan's education system, see Lehmann and Siebzehner (2006: 170–75). 48. See Chetrit (2010: 197–98; 2001b). Importantly though, neither Chetrit nor other scholars who have studied Shas would claim that this party has been able to fill the vacuum created by years of government neglect or to provide a nourishing environment for poor Mizrahi communities. Furthermore, Chetrit (2001b: 21–22) prefaces his discussion of Shas by mentioning that, as of 2001, it has allowed the passing of fifteen budgetary bills that contain unequivocal antisocial elements detrimental to Mizrahi culture and, generally, to the lower-class Mizrahi populace. 49. As mentioned in a previous note, a third woman in this film is a Bukharian immigrant who came to Israel in the 1990s. (Some would consider her a Mizrahi.) The fourth woman is an Israeli Palestinian. 50. See, for example, Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled (2002: 94–95). 51. Although I have lumped together in this discussion two historically somewhat different religious

traditions—the Mizrahi Arab-Jewish and the Sephardi—there is no doubt that both in the past and the present these differences are greatly outweighed by their commonalities and their distinction from the Ashkenazi religious traditions. In my Introduction, I pointed to Rabbi Yosef Karo's Shulan Arukh, the compendium of religious laws that is generally followed by the Sephardi/Mizrahi community, whereas the subsequent ha-Mapa by Rabbi Moshe Isserlis is the basis for Ashkenazi religious practices. As important are the liturgical traditions that distinguish between the two collectives. A related important commonality between the Sephardi and Mizrahi Arab-Jewish religious traditions in contrast to those of their Ashkenazi counterpart is, as mentioned, the more tolerant practice of Judaism among the Sephardi/Mizrahi followers. These commonalities have been bolstered by the efforts of Ovadia Yosef, former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel and the spiritual leader of Shas, to create a “pan-Sephardi/Mizrahi” religious space to an extent that, at times, his rulings clash with particular religious practices the Mizrahi immigrants carried from their countries of origin. For more on this religious enterprise, see, for example, Binyamin Lau's “Changes in the Sephardi Halachic (Religious) Law” (2003). 52. For a detailed discussion of “to restore [the Sephardi] past glory/crown,” see Zvi Zohar (2001). 53. Aviezer Ravitski's “Introduction” (2006: 11). According to the author, these figures are based only on “reasonable estimates.” Lehmann and Siebzehner (2006: 166) indicate that one-third of Shas's voters, either Ashkenazi or Mizrahi, are haredi/ultra-Orthodox. 54. This institution of higher education was founded in 1989 and is located in Jerusalem in an area bordering the Old City. For more, see Ma'aleh's website: http://www.maale.co.il/default.asp?PageID=66. 55. In some years, 40 to 50 percent of the students are religious (information is based on personal correspondence with the program administration). For more on the program, see http://www.ariel.ac.il /communication/en. 56. For more on the program, see http://eng.sapir.ac.il/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=49. 57. Although not in connection with cinema, philosopher Meir Buzaglo clearly points to the breach between the Israeli Mizrahi academia and the religious camps. Page 247 →Buzaglo has been one of the few voices in the Mizrahi liberal milieu who advocate that Mizrahi fellows holding sociopolitical positions similar to his should engage in dialogue with and bridge into the non-haredi religious/masorti groups in Israel. See, for example, Buzaglo's “What Happened to Us? Reflections on the Compassion for the People of Israel” (“Ma haya lanu? hirhurim al ahavat Yisrael,” 2005). 58. Guided by Audre Lorde, Rosemarie Tong (1989: 237) concludes that “attention to difference,” not its erasure, will bring about unity between various groups of women. Similarly, in her discussion of U.S. Third World feminism, Chela Sandoval (2000) attends to the differential mode of consciousness that can potentially permeate social change and stronger affiliations between women's groups, irrespective of their different stands. As she envisions it, this mode operates like a car clutch, allowing us to move between different ideological positionings. It is therefore not despite but because of the different gears/positionalities that power can be generated: “The ‘truth’ of differential social movement is composed of manifold positions for truth: these positions are ideological stands that are viewed as potential tactics drawn from a neverending interventionary fund, the contents of which remobilizes power” (60). 59. Postmodernist feminist Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) borrows “transversal politics” from a group of Italian feminists from Bologna (125) to offer a similar argument. She contrasts “transversalism” with “‘universalism,’ which, by assuming a homogeneous point of departure, ends up being exclusive instead of inclusive and [with] ‘relativism’ which assumes that, because of the differential points of departure, no common understanding and genuine dialogue are possible at all” (130). Accordingly, Yuval-Davis maintains that one of the necessities for “transversalism” or for the formation of alliances and solidaritybased politics is to be tuned and sensitive to the other while maintaining one's set of beliefs, values, and perspective; otherwise, these alliances run the risk of “uncritical solidarity.” In the conclusion to her book, Yuval-Davis conveys succinctly her argument regarding identity, positionalities, and struggle: “The boundaries of a transversal dialogue are determined by the message, rather than by the messenger” (131). Arguably, she employs “boundaries” because not “anything goes” as some radical postmodernist views may intimate, and “message” rather than “messenger” because we should tend to positions, positionalities, and processes, not to assumed fixed identities. 60. Among the films that are relevant to this exploration but won't be discussed in detail here are Zehava Ben and Got No Jeep and My Camel Died. Zehava Ben: A Solitary Star (Zehava Ben: kokhav ead levad,

Erez Laufer, 1996) takes place during the precarious mid-1990s—after the signing of the Oslo accords and the peace treaty with Jordan, but a time also marked by increased terrorist attacks against Israelis. Zehava Ben, an Israeli popular singer of Moroccan origin, performed then for Israelis and Palestinians who were enchanted by her Mizrahi/Arab tunes. (In the film's opening, Zehava Ben sings to an ecstatic Palestinian audience a song by the revered late Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum.) Her stage dream is to perform these songs all over the Middle East, a wish she also expresses in her conversations with the musician Felix Mizrahi in Taqasim. Beyond the musical tastes Arabs/Palestinians and Mizrahim share and to which Zehava Ben alludes, the film relates the singer's private and personal sentiments to the public and political dilemmas; Ben's career and fortune were contingent at that time on the prospects for an Arab-Israeli peace, which, she Page 248 →hoped, would allow her to perform in Arab countries and, generally, would facilitate the endorsement of Arab and Arab-Jewish culture among Israelis. Similarly, Got No Jeep and My Camel Died (En li jeep veha-gamal sheli met, Ehud Tomalak, 2007) follows Yair Dalal, a musician of Iraqi descent whose main undertaking has been to revive, promote, and trigger public interest in classical Iraqi-Jewish music and, in his words, “to find the bridge in the middle, the bridge between East and West.” Other than the influence Western jazz and blues had on his musical upbringing, he learned the Iraqi-Jewish music from Salim Al-Nur, a prominent Baghdadi-Jewish musician (who also appears in Eyal Halfon's Baghdad Bandstand), and he has worked extensively with Bedouin musicians in Israel and in the Sinai Peninsula. As for the politics of place, he reflects, “The music is the ultimate proof that we are part of the Middle East…. We (Israeli Jews) have to live in peace in this place and this place has to live in peace with us.” Clearly, both films intimate that the Mizrahi Jew is ably positioned to forge these bridges to the Arab publics. But even as both Zehava Ben and Got No Jeep express a wish for a peaceful coexistence with Israel's neighbors and dismay over the reality of the conflict, they do not challenge Israel's positions toward the Palestinians, let alone rebuke Zionism. 61. See, specifically Yehouda Shenhav's (2006: 110–35) chapter 4: “What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? Population Exchange, the Right of Return, and the Politics of Reparations.” 62. For more on these issues, see Yehouda Shenhav (1999). 63. Wadi Salib (1995) by Seniora (Sini) Bar-David examines the settlement of Mizrahi Jews, many of whom were Moroccan immigrants, in the Wadi Salib neighborhood in Haifa after the local Arabs escaped the city during the 1948 War. Likewise, Nizar Hassan's Cut (discussed in detail later in this chapter) tackles the forced settlement of Iraqi and Kurdish Jews in the vacated Arab village of Ajur/Agur. 64. For an elaborate discussion of the role designated to Mizrahi Jews vis-à-vis the local Arab population, see Gil Eyal's The Disenchantment of the Orient and, particularly, chapters 3 and 4. For various other aspects of the connections between the fates of the Mizrahi and the Palestinian see Shlomo Swirski 1989 (mainly 53–55); Ella Shohat 1989 (particularly 267–68); Efraim Ben-Zadok's chapter “Oriental Jews in Development Towns: Ethnicity, Economic Development, Budgets, and Politics” (in Efraim Ben-Zadok 1993); and Eliezer Ben-Rafael's (1982) subchapter “The Jewish-Arab Case.” 65. For example, in 1925, Moshe de Figiatto (Moshe de Picciotto), a Syrian Jew from Aleppo, chaired the World Conference of Arab [Sephardi] Jewry in Vienna where he harshly criticized Zionism's “lack of concern for Palestinian interests” (G. N. Giladi 1990: 296). 66. See the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow's platform in my “Introduction.” 67. It is noteworthy that this recognition by Mizrahim of the Palestinian predicament due to the creation of the State of Israel and the need for a political or civil mobilization to remedy the situation is not completely a recent phenomenon that can be attributed to the “new Mizrahim.” For example, radical Mizrahim, such as Moni Yakim, Eli Hamo, Ella Shohat, and the late Mizrahi feminist Vicky Shiran, were members of the forum Bimat Kivun Hadash (literally, “stage for a new direction”), which Page 249 →was founded in 1984. The forum expressed unconventionally dovish positions regarding the Palestinian people and a Palestinian state at a time when such views were often considered political heresy. Also worth mentioning in this context is the series of meetings in the mid- and late 1980s between left-wing Sephardim/Mizrahim and PLO representatives, best known of which is the July 1989 conference in Toledo (four years before the commencement of the Oslo peace talks). Finally, former Black Panther Charlie Bitton's affiliation with the communist, mostly Arab, party of Hadash from the 1970s through the early 1990s also attests to these longstanding Arab-Mizrahi affiliations. For an elaborate discussion of this issue see G. N. Giladi's (1990) depiction of Sephardi/Mizrahi groups whose ethnic protest has been tied to the Palestinian predicament

(chapter 10, “Sephardi Resistance and Solidarity with Palestinians”) and Sami Shalom Chetrit (2004a; 2010, mainly chapter 4 and Conclusion). 68. We are reminded here of the comments made by various participants in Ancient Winds and The Black Panthers Speak that vehemently criticize the imprudent, if not dangerous, discursive schism between the social and the political. 69. For a detailed depiction and analysis of the Arbeit Macht Frei vom Toitland Europa performance and Asher de Bentolila Tlalim's Don't Touch My Holocaust, see Yosefa Loshitzky (2001: 36–46). 70. For Shmulik Duvdevani (2010), Tlalim's (and Goren's) “ability to sense shared misfortune with the Palestinian suffering originates in the appropriation and nursing of the image of the victim…and it is rising from within the Jewish victimization discourse rather than criticizing this discourse. The Jewish fate in the past is turning into a model according to which the Palestinian fate is measured in the present” (157). 71. Sami Michael is also featured in Forget Baghdad (Samir, 2002). The filmmaker, a non-Jewish Iraqi who resides in Switzerland, focuses on four Iraqi-Jewish writers and on the scholar Ella Shohat to demonstrate what Nancy Berg (1996) terms “exile from exile,” namely, the sense of alienation the Iraqi immigrants felt for years after their arrival in Israel. 72. Similarly, in “Fragmented Identities and Mimicry: Israeli Cinematic Representation of Palestinians and Arab-Jews” (2007), Nirit Zarum focuses on “the journey into the defect (pgam), the lack, the trauma, and the Mizrahi destruction as it is portrayed in Israeli cinema and the effort to restore the ruins of Mizrahi culture by linking Mizrahi identity to Palestinian identity, a linkage that renews the connection of the Mizrahi Jew to the Arab space” (142). 73. Ezra Nawi is also featured in Elle Flanders's Zero Degrees of Separation (2005). In the context of the broader Palestinian/Israeli conflict, the film focuses on the difficult personal relationships within two mixed gay Israeli/Palestinian couples—between Ezra Nawi and Selim, his Palestinian partner, and between the Israeli-Jewish Edit and her Palestinian partner Samira. 74. Interviews with Osnat Trabelsi, June 8, 2004, and June 2, 2005. 75. Trabelsi (2002). 76. Interviews with Osnat Trabelsi, June 8, 2004, and June 2, 2005. 77. Israel changed the village's name to Agur. 78. Interview with Hassan on June 20, 2004. It should be mentioned, though, that the conversation I had with Hassan can hardly qualify as an interview. Initially, Hassan Page 250 →was interested in the direction my study takes toward the Arab and Mizrahi issues, but later he concluded that “we lack a common ground and, thereby, have nothing to talk about.” (Cut!) 79. Concurrently, Mizrahi activist Ilana Sugbaker Messika (2001) expresses her dismay about Hassan's criticism of Mizrahim. She maintains that, regretfully, Hassan's sentiments are shared by some Palestinian peace activists, including the late Palestinian poet in exile Mahmoud Darwish (85). 80. About a year after the release of Desperado Square, Muhammad Bakri made the controversial Jenin, Jenin (2002). The film describes the killing and suffering of the residents of the West Bank town of Jenin as the result of a vast Israeli military operation there in April 2002. The film was banned in Israel until the Supreme Court deemed the ban unlawful. 81. See Zvi Ben-Dor (2004) for a discussion about the importance of relating the local ethnic struggle, namely, the Mizrahi plight in Israel, to worldwide social and racial conflicts.

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Afterword What Is Mizrahi in Mizrahi Cinema? This work has explored the cinematic rendering of Mizrahi dilemmas—the prolonged ethnic marginalization and cultural displacement as well as Mizrahi protest and struggle. My film analysis was chiefly designed to tease out the ethnic by pointing to the problematics when it is subsumed within the issues of class, generational gaps, and gender (in the near-exclusive focus on women's condition when films feature a Mizrahi woman). Similarly, against the beguiling performative play on ethnicity in contemporary “post-Bourekas” films, I pointed to the residue this exercise leaves and to the redrawing of ethnic boundaries and, thereby, the reiteration of Mizrahi identity in these films. And yet, notwithstanding all the elements and studies that attest to the persistence of the Mizrahi predicament in the areas of education, housing, employment, the scarcity of high-ranking Mizrahi executives in business and media, and the stalled rate of Ashkenazi-Mizrahi intermarriages,1 it is outrightly fatuous to draw clear boundaries between the Mizrahi issue and other social maladies or, for that matter, to categorically demarcate the territory of Mizrahi cinema. In my interviews, some of the most prominent and prolific Mizrahi filmmakers went as far as to shun the label “Mizrahi cinema”; time and again, these filmmakers alluded to the contrived nature of the construction “Mizrahi cinema” and to their preference for “Israeli cinema” as a signifier for a developing, variegated, and inclusive artistic endeavor. Consider, for example, filmmaker Eyal Halfon's (interview, June 2, 2004) unequivocal rejection of thePage 252 → self-designation “Mizrahi filmmaker” and his skepticism about the utility of the “Mizrahi cinema” appellation in general.2 When I referred to Sh'hur as a Mizrahi film due to its focus on a Mizrahi family and community, Halfon retorted, “Right now I'm working on a film about Philippine migrant workers in Israel; does it make it a Philippine film?” It is by virtue of these and other considerations that I emphasized earlier the importance of treating “Mizrahi cinema” as a corpus of films where the question of whether a single film qualifies as “Mizrahi” is mostly inconsequential. Similarly, these formulations and reflections prompt us to attend to the question posed in the title of this Afterword. We should then turn to thematic and aesthetic features that may characterize Mizrahi films. My definition of Mizrahi cinema at the beginning of this work—films whose subject matter is Mizrahi people and space—is primarily thematically based. It is evident from the cumulative discussions in this work that the construction of identities and space (respectively, chapters 2 and 3), the rendering of ethnic struggle (chapter 4), and the focus on ethnicity in the context of gender, class, and religion (chapter 5) in Israeli films do imply the formation of a rather particular corpus of works that warrant the epithet “Mizrahi cinema.” But beyond content, what of particular or alternative aesthetics in contemporary Mizrahi cinema? Robert Stam (2000) suggests, “To address the question of alternative aesthetics, we must first address the question of the normative aesthetic” (258). Considering, however, that Israeli cinema is still in its formative phase, the rapidly changing film scene in Israel (finance, institutions, and competing media outlets), and, finally, the varied aesthetic traditions that immigrant or returnee expatriate filmmakers have infused, it is downright speculative to delineate the outlines of a normative aesthetic in Israeli cinema. Elsewhere in this work I elaborated on the unique cinematic style in Yosef-Joseph Dadoune's works (which I considered haptic cinema) and on distinctive cinematographic features in Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's Seven Days, but these do not amount to a sustained trend that can typify Mizrahi cinema. Even the language polyglossia3 where characters move swiftly between two or three languages (most common of which are Hebrew, Moroccan Arabic, and French), a rather prominent feature of contemporary Mizrahi cinema, does not develop into what John Mowitt (2005) calls “bilingual enunciation”—a set of filmic codes that render an alternative film language.4 Another avenue then in our undertaking to discern aesthetic characteristics of contemporary Mizrahi films will direct us to assess it in light ofPage 253 → ethnic, subaltern, or accented “world cinemas” or Third Cinema.5 A cursory examination of some aesthetic commonalities or features that characterize these cinemas will further attest

to the problem of attributing to Mizrahi cinema alternative aesthetics. John Downing (1987)6 points to a practice among “Third World” filmmakers to engage the community in the filmmaking process, and likewise, Hamid Naficy (2001) addresses the collective mode of “accented” filmmaking (including its distribution strategies) and, as the equivalent to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1986) formulation of “minor literature,” he proffers the inventiveness of this filmmaking's cinematic language.7 Yet, Mizrahi cinema resorts to these practices only as frequently as other Israeli films do. Similarly, “Imperfect Cinema” (Julio Garcia Espinosa) and “Aesthetics of Hunger” (Glauber Rocha)8 evince low production values, films that generally challenge the transparency of Hollywood-style filmmaking and, conversely, champion formalist/Brechtian works that “lay bare the means”; again, these are hardly common characterizations of contemporary Mizrahi films. A case in point is David Benchetrit's Ancient Winds—it is clear from my discussion in chapter 4 that this film is one of the most radical, militant, subversive, and socially committed films ever produced in Israel, yet the aesthetics of this limpid and somewhat glossy documentary are most conventional and conspicuous. I am not suggesting here that subversive cinema (content-wise) needs to be aesthetically “untraditional,” or conversely, that the deployment of daring techniques, such as in avant-garde cinema, is necessarily subversive; rather, my point is to reiterate that the features alluded to in regard to Third Cinema are far from typifying Mizrahi films. But then what about the particular thematic-aesthetic motif of journey in accented films? Naficy (2001) identifies the journey—physical, psychological, or symbolic—as having a prominent presence in these films. Indeed, in a relatively substantial number of contemporary Mizrahi films, the journey is not only the film's narrational lead but is constitutive of the film structure and form. In films such as Galoot, The South, Taqasim, and Father Language, the journey into the past is physical; in most others, including Bayit, Cinema Egypt, Mirrors, Maktub Aleik, Come Mother, Samir, A Bit of Luck, and The Barbecue People, the journey is referential and constructed (e.g., when, as we have seen, scenes are set in an Israeli movie theater that replaces/displaces the “original” space known to the Arab-Jewish characters prior to their emigration from Arab lands, or when the Mizrahi home in Arab lands is accessible only through fuzzy TV images). But even here there are marked differences between thePage 254 → general features of accented cinema and Mizrahi cinema. Naficy demonstrates throughout his book that accented cinema often revolves around the filmmakers’ psychic schism encoded on the dialectics of emplacement /displacement regarding their two homes—the homeland and the new land—and that their journey is cast as an attempt to bridge or reconcile the two. Contemporary Mizrahi filmmakers, however, most of whom are nativeborn Israelis, rarely have qualms about where home is, even as they vehemently criticize the national Zionist enterprise and its cultural displacement of the Mizrahi. Finally, journey as a pivotal thematic and aesthetic element is just as common in non-Mizrahi cinema,9 which again, undermines any attempt to set the aesthetic or the narrative strategies of Mizrahi cinema apart from those of “normative” or “all-Israeli” films. We may then reconceptualize our inquiry here about the unique or novel aspects of contemporary Mizrahi cinema by asking whether the corpus of Mizrahi films of the last two decades amounts to a break from earlier cinema (Mizrahi or otherwise) in terms of reception, and impact, and by anticipating the trajectories these films might have in the future. The most overwhelming evidence to support the contention about the leap contemporary Mizrahi cinema has taken is that “Mizrahi cinema,” even if at times equivocal and controversial, is a viable term today. Likewise, with the exception of Bourekas Cinema, the films produced until the 1990s did not constitute a corpus of significant magnitude as to generate a sustained scholarly inquiry about the Mizrahi in film. Against the elision or marginalization of the Mizrahi character in the early Nationalist Cinema, in the New Sensibility Cinema, and in Political Cinema, which I adumbrated in my review of the history of Israeli cinema in chapter 1, the focus of contemporary Mizrahi cinema is, ipso facto, the Mizrahi. This more significant presence of the Mizrahi on the screen relates to the place of Mizrahi directors and actors in the Israeli film landscape. The last two decades have seen an increase in the number of Mizrahi filmmakers who are now appreciated greatly in the Israeli film community. Specifically, some directors who established their career on their portrayal of Mizrahi immigrants, musicians, authors, and family members and who were dubbed “Mizrahi filmmakers” (e.g., David Ofek, Duki Dror, and Yossi Madmony) are now well recognized for their film and television work on themes not necessarily related to the Mizrahi issue. Similarly, some veteran Mizrahi actors (e.g., Sasson Gabai, Ze'ev Revah, Arieh Elias, and Yosef Shiloah) who were disparaged for the MizrahiPage 255

→ roles they played in the past are now highly respected in the Israeli film milieu for their film personas as Mizrahi characters or others.10 And yet, as this work has repeatedly suggested, presence and acknowledgment in cinema or elsewhere are necessary but insufficient conditions for the Mizrahi to be a full and equal participant in the public and political arenas; these should be assessed within the broader system of power relations within which they take place. A study of audiences’ reception and institutional policies must be integral to this inquiry. Ultimately, the dilemma “What is Mizrahi in Mizrahi cinema?” is best pursued in terms of Raymond Williams's (1977) “structures of feeling” rather than in attempting to distinguish it from other cinemas—not a viable task, as we have seen, unless considerations are given to content alone. For Williams, “structures of feeling” are shared sensibilities that are not as formalized as worldviews or ideologies;11 they entail “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” (132), and, thereby, they might be called “structures of experience” (as long as, Williams adds, “experience” does not refer only to the past). Guided by this precept, in my discussions of Mizrahi protest cinema, salvage cinema, corrective histories films, and hybridity of emaciation, I underscored people's shared experiences (before and after immigration), traditions, beliefs, languages, and consciousness, rather than simply geographic origins. In the context of the Mizrahi, “structures of feeling” are particularly relevant when couched in consideration of Williams's definition of the residual culture—that which impinges on the dominant culture by offering an alternative and “has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present” (122). As we have seen in this study, Mizrahi filmmakers of the younger cohort, mostly second- and third-generation immigrants, are often inspired by their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences and traditions and, in casting them in the context of contemporary Israeli society, they craft narratives that attest to the continuity of Mizrahi consciousness.

NOTES 1. See discussions in chapter 1. 2. Eyal Halfon's father is from Tripoli, Libya, and his mother is Slovakian (interview, June 2, 2004). 3. Key terms in Bakhtin's literary theory—heteroglossia, polyglossia, and the centrifugal versus the centripetal forces—point to the synthetic nature of languages. InPage 256 → “Discourse in the Novel” (1981), Mikhail Bakhtin defines heteroglossia as the totality and diversity of speech types in the novel. Heteroglossia is predicated on the negotiable, fluid, and intertextual aspects of our speech. Whereas heteroglossia is to be found within a language, polyglossia refers to the same dynamic elements across different languages. 4. John Mowitt's (2005) focus is on the poetics—the filmic codes—of postcolonial cinema as “foreign” to Western or Hollywood cinema. 5. See Teshome Gabriel's Third Cinema in The Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (1982). Gabriel's point of departure is Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema.” The assessment of Mizrahi films in light of Third Cinema is warranted considering that, for Gabriel, “the principal characteristic of Third Cinema is really not so much where it is made, or even who makes it, but, rather, the ideology it espouses and the consciousness it displays” (2). 6. See John Downing (1987: 314). 7. See Hamid Naficy (2001: 26, 45–46). In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari identify three characteristics of “minor literature”: “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (18). As for “deterritorialization,” one way it operates is by the disengagement of the minor language (e.g., the German language of Prague Jews) from the “major” language to become a nomad within the regnant culture /language. Ultimately, against the aridity and transparency of the “major” language, “minor literature” points to the limits of language itself (19, 23). 8. For discussions of these cinematic trends see part VI of Film and Theory (Robert Stam and Toby Miller 2000). 9. Some of the most notable examples in contemporary cinema of non-Mizrahi documentaries engaging journey in the manner discussed above are David Perlov's documentary Revised Diary (2001), Duki Dror's The Journey of Vaan Nguyen (2005), David Fisher's Love Inventory (2000), and the feature films Newland (Eretz adasha, Orna Ben-Dor Niv, 1994), Coffee with Lemon (Kafe im limon, Leonid Gorovets, 1994), and Over the Ocean (meever la-Yam, Ya'acov [Yankul] Goldwasser, 1991).

10. Since 2000, all four have won the best actor award of the Israeli Film Academy (the “Israeli Oscar”). Their works have also been enjoying large coverage in Israeli media and have been addressed in Israeli film studies. (See, for example, Sigalit Banai's “How Do You Say Bourekas in Arabic? Ze'ev Revah Is ‘Returning Home,’ to the Middle East” [2010].) 11. In this context, Raymond Williams (1977) maintains that “structures of feeling” “cannot without loss be reduced to belief-systems, institutions, or explicit general relationships” (133).

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Appendix 1 Israeli Films Cited Many of the films listed here are available at American universities, some of which hold considerable collections of Israeli films in their libraries. Various films listed here can be ordered online from The Third Ear (http://www.third-ear.com/default.htm [website is in Hebrew]), Ruth Diskin Films (http://www.ruthfilms.com/), and Go2Films (http://www.go2films.com/). Sapir Academic College (http://eng.sapir.ac.il/) maintains copies of the films produced by their graduates, some of which are discussed in this work. An asterisk (*) indicates a film by an Israeli Palestinian. ’66 Was a Good Year for Tourism (Shnat shishim ve-shesh haita tova le-tayarut, 1992). Amit Goren. Aisha (2010). Oshri Hayun and Hila Cohen. Ancient Winds: Moroccan Chronicle (Ruwa kadim: khronica Maroka'it, 2002). David Benchetrit. Another Land (Eretz aeret, 1998). Amit Goren. The Appointed (ha-Meyu ad, 1990). Daniel Waxman. Ashkenaz (2007). Rachel Leah Jones. Asmar (2009). Iris Rubin. Aviva My Love (Aviva ahuvati, 2006). Shemi Zarhin. Baghdad Bandstand (Chalrie Baghdad, 2003). Eyal Halfon. The Band's Visit (Bikur ha-tizmoret; al-Ar al-akhir, 2007). Eran Kolirin. The Barbecue People (ha-Mangalistim, 2003). David (Taufik) Ofek and Yossi Madmony. Bayit (1994). David (Taufik) Ofek. Page 258 → Beitar Provence (2002). Ori Inbar. Beyond the Walls (me'aore ha-Soragim, 1984). Uri Barabash. The Black Panthers [in Israel] Speak (ha-Panterim ha-Sh'orim medabrim, 2003). Eli Hamo and Sami Shalom Chetrit. Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi (ha-Kokhavim shel Shlomi, 2003). Shemi Zarhin. Bread (Leem, 1986). Ram Loevy. Bruriah (2008). Avraham Kushnir. The Buganas (ha-Buganim, 2006). Etty Bugana-Bachar. Café Noah (1996). Duki Dror.

Campfire (Medurat ha-shevet, 2004). Joseph Cedar. Casablan (Kazablan, 1973). Menahem Golan. Chanti (2005–6). Yosef-Joseph Dadoune. Charlie and a Half (Charlie va-etzi, 1974). Boaz Davidson. Cinema Egypt (Cinema Mitzrayim, 2001). Rami Kimchi. Citizen Nawi (Ezra Nawi, 2007). Nissim Mossek. Coffee with Lemon (Kafe im limon, 1994). Leonid Gorovets. Columbian Love (Ahava Kolombianit, 2003). Shay Kanot. Come Mother (in Moroccan Arabic, Azhi ayima, 2009). Sami Shalom Chetrit. Common Fate (Goral meshutaf, 2005). Serge Ankri. In “A Matter of Time.” Cup Final (Gmar gaviya , 1991). Eran Riklis. Cut (2000). Nizar Hassan.* Daka Darom (2009, 2010). A collection of one-minute films, The Department of Cinema and Television Arts, Sapir Academic College. Dan Quixote and Sa'adia Panza (Dan Kishot u-Sa'adia Panza, 1956). Nathan Axelrod. Desperado Square (Kikar ha-alomot, 2001). Beni Torati. Don't Call Me Black! (Al tikra li shaor!, 2008). Nitzan Gil'adi. Program creator Ron Kahlili. Don't Touch My Holocaust (Al tigu li ba-Shoah, 1994). Asher de Bentolila Tlalim. Dream Square (see Desperado Square). The Dybbuk of the Holy Apple Field (Ahava asura, 1997). Yossi Somer. Edges (Ktzavot, 2010). Tal Avitan. Egoz (1999). Eli Cohen (Israel Broadcasting Authority). An Electric Blanket Named Moshe (Smikha ashmalit u-shma Moshe, 1994). Assi Dayan. Eyes Wide Open (Enayim pkuot, 2009). Haim Tabakman. The Farhud (ha-Farhud, 2008). Yitzhak Halutzi. Father Language (Sfat av, 2006). Rami Kimchi. From Tripoli to Bergen-Belsen (mi-Tripoli le-Bergen-Belsen, 2005). Marco Carmel. In “A Matter of Time.” Galoot (2003). Asher de Bentolila Tlalim. George Ovadia: Merchant of Feelings (Mokher ha-regashot, 1992). Ran Tal. Get (1992). Episode 3 in Tel Aviv Stories. Ayelet Menahemi. Page 259 →

Got No Jeep and My Camel Died (En li jeep ve-hagamal sheli met, 2007). Ehud Tomalak. Graduate Films, 2004–2006 (Sirte bogrim, 2004–2006). A collection of short films, The Department of Cinema and Television Arts, Sapir Academic College. Grandfather (Saba, 2005). Amram Jacoby. Have You Heard about the Panthers? (Shama ta al ha-Panterim?, 2002). Nissim Mossek. Have You Heard about the Panthers, Mr. Moshe? (Shama ta al ha-Panterim, Mar Moshe?, 1973). Nissim Mossek. Hello Sigal (Shalom lakh Sigal, 1996). Yamin Messika. Hide and Seek (Mabo'im, 1992). Iris Rubin. Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (Giv a esrim ve-arba ena ona, 1955). Thorold Dickinson. Honor (Kavod, 2009). Haim Bouzaglo. Hula and Natan (Hula et Natan, 2010). Robby Elmaliah. Jacky (1990). Rachel Esterkin. James’ Journey to Jerusalem (Masot James be-eretz ha-kodesh, 2003). Ra'anan Alexandrowicz. Jenin, Jenin (2002). Muhammad Bakri.* Jenny and Jenny (Jenny ve-Jenny, 1997). Michal Aviad. The Journey of Vaan Nguyen (ha-Masa shel Vaan Nguyen, 2005). Duki Dror. Kadosh (1999). Amos Gitai. Katz and Karaso (Katz ve-Karaso, 1971). Menahem Golan. Keep Not Silent (et she-Ahava nafshi, 2004). Ilil Alexander. Kerem Hatikva (1997). Yamin Messika. Khamara, A Place Next to Life (Khamara, makom leyad ha-ayim, 1999). Benny Zada. The King of Ratings (Melekh ha-reting, 2001). Doron Tsabari. Kippur (2000). Amos Gitai. Life According to Agfa (ha-ayim al-pi Agfa, 1992). Assi Dayan. Love Inventory (Reshimat ahava, 2000). David Fisher. Lovesick on Nana Street (ole ahava be-shikkun gimmel, 1995). Savi Gavison. Maktub Aleik: A Voice without a Face (Maktub aleik, 2005). Assaf Basson. Mama Faiza (2002). Sigalit Banai. Mama's Couscous (ha-Kuskus shel imma, 1994). Serge Ankri.

Mirrors (Mar'ot, 2004). Orly Malessa. My Family's Pizza (Pitza mishpatit, 2003). Ronen Amar. My Fantazya (Fantazya sheli, 2001). Duki Dror. My Father, My Lord (ufshat kayitz, 2007). David Volach. Newland (Eretz adasha, 1994). Orna Ben-Dor Niv. Night Movie (Seret laila, 1986). Gur Heller. Ofakim (2010). Yosef-Joseph Dadoune. Or, My Treasure (Or, 2004). Keren Yedaya. Over the Ocean (me ever la-Yam, 1991). Ya'acov [Yankul] Goldwasser. Page 260 → Passover Fever (Leilsede, 1995). Shemi Zarhin. People of Hope (Anshe Hatikva, 2004). A collection of Tel Aviv University student films. Pigtails (Tzamot, 1989). Yitzhak Halutzi (Israeli Educational Television). The Pioneers (ha-alutzim, 2007). Sigalit Banai. Created by Aharale Cohen. The Quarry (ha-Matzeva, 1990). Roni Ninio. Queen Khantarisha (ha-Malka khantarisha, 2009). Israela Shaer-Meoded. A Question of Identity (She'ela shel zehut, 2008). A collection of short films, The Department of Cinema and Television Arts, Sapir Academic College. Ramleh (Lev ha-aretz, 2001). Michal Aviad. Revised Diary (Yoman me udkan, 2001). David Perlov. The Ringworm Children (Yalde ha-gazezet, 2003). David Belhassen and Asher Hemias. Sallah (Sallah Shabbati, 1964). Ephraim Kishon. Samir (1997). David Benchetrit. The Secrets (ha-Sodot, 2007). Avi Nesher. Seven Days (Shiva, 2008). Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz. The Shakshuka System (Shitat ha-shakshuka, 2008). Ilan Abudi. Created by Mickey Rosenthal. Sh'hur (1995). Shmuel Hasfari. A film by Hanna Azoulai-Hasfari. Shuli's Fiancé (ha-Baur shel Shuli, 1997). Doron Tsabari. Shuroo (1991). Savi Gavison. Sion (Tzion, 2002–7). Yosef-Joseph Dadoune. The Smile of the Lamb (iyukh ha-gdi, 1985). Shimon Dotan.

Snow in August (Sheleg be-Ogust, 1993). Hagai Levi. The South: Alice Never Lived Here (ha-Darom: Alice lo gara kan af pa am, 1998). Seniora [Sini] Bar-David. Southward (Daroma, 2002). Doron Tsabari and Julie Shles. Stone Flower (in Persian, Gole sangam, 2007). Sarit Haymian. Strike (Shvita, 2005). Asaf Sudry and Amir Tausinger. The Submarine Children (Yalde ha-tzolelet, 1998). Amir Gera. Tales from the Southern Frontier, 2005–2007 (Sipurim meha-gvul ha-dromi, 2005–2007). A collection of short films, The Department of Cinema and Television Arts, Sapir Academic College. Taqasim (1999). Duki Dror. Tarab (2009). Boris Maftsir. They Were Ten (Hem hayu asara, 1960). Baruch Dienar. Three Mothers (Shalosh imahot, 2006). Dina Zvi-Riklis. Time of Favor (ha-Hesder, 2000). Joseph Cedar. To Take a Wife (ve-Lakata lekha isha, 2004). Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz. Travels with My Brother (Mas otai im ai, 1997). Rami Kimchi. True to Life: Stories by Ramleh Youths (Gluiot mi-kan: sipure tzeirim mi-Ramleh, 2006). Series editor Moshe Levinson. Page 261 → Turn Left at the End of the World (Sof ha-olam smola, 2004). Avi Nesher. Underdogs: A War Movie (Beit She'an: seret milama, 1996). Rino Tzror and Doron Tsabari. Universes (Olamim, 2000–2003). Yosef-Joseph Dadoune. Unpromised Land (Dekel shfal tzameret, 1992). Ayelet Heller. Until Tomorrow Comes (in Moroccan Arabic, ta yisba sba, 2005). David Deri. Ushpizin (ha-Ushpizin, 2004). Gidi Dar. Vasermil (2007). Mushon Salmona. Wadi Salib (Vadi Salib, 1995). Seniora [Sini] Bar-David. Waltz with Bashir (Valtz im Bashir, 2008). Ari Folman. We Are All Arab Jews in Israel (1977). Igaal Niddam. White Gold/Black Labor (Zahav lavan/avoda sh'ora, 2004). Tali Shemesh. White Walls (Kirot levanim, 2005). Meital Abekasis.

Who Is Mordechai Vanunu? (Mi ata Mordechai Vanunu?, 2004). Nissim Mossek. Your Younger Daughter Rachel (be-Rahel bitkha ha-ktana, 2006). Efrat Corem. Zehava Ben: A Solitary Star (Zehava Ben: kokhav ead levad, 1996). Erez Laufer. Zohar: Mediterranean Blues (Zohar, 1993). Eran Riklis. Page 262 →

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Appendix 2 Interviews Unless marked by an asterisk (*), these interviews were conducted face-to-face. The designation in parentheses corresponds to the profession or capacity in connection with which the interview was conducted. Not all interviews are mentioned in the body of this book. Abramovich, Yoav (production manager of the Rabinovich Fund), Tel Aviv, September 26, 2010. Alexandrowicz, Ra'anan (filmmaker), Jerusalem, June 8, 2005. Amar, Ronen (filmmaker), Netivot, June 20, 2004. Azoulai-Hasfari, Hanna (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, June 2, 2004. Basson, Assaf (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, June 30, 2004. Bat-Adam, Michal (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, May 12, 2004. Benchetrit, David (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, June 24, 2004. Bouzaglo, Haim (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, June 17, 2004. Cohen, Benny (general manager, Sderot Cinematheque), Sderot, September 27, 2010. Dadoune, Yosef-Joseph (filmmaker/video artist), Jerusalem, September 22, 2010. Dror, Duki (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, June 17, 2004, and September 21, 2010. Fisher, David (former director, The New Foundation for Cinema and Television), Tel Aviv, June 8, 2004, and June 8, 2005. Gavison, Savi (filmmaker), *July 3, 2004, and Tel Aviv, June 9, 2005. Green, Eitan (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, June 5, 2005. Halfon, Eyal (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, June 2, 2004. Hamo, Eli (filmmaker and social activist), Tel Aviv, June 2, 2004. Page 264 → Hassan, Nizar (filmmaker), Sapir Academic College, June 20, 2004. Inbar, Dorit (director, The New Foundation for Cinema and Television), Tel Aviv, September 26, 2010. Kahlili, Ron (television producer), Tel Aviv, June 10, 2004. Kimchi, Rami (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, June 8, 2004, and June 17, 2004. Laufer, Erez (filmmaker), Jerusalem, July 4, 2004. Madmony, Yossi (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, May 18, 2004.

Malessa, Orly (filmmaker), Jerusalem, June 27, 2004, and *May 29, 2005. Messika, Yamin (filmmaker and social activist), Tel Aviv, June 8, 2005. Messika, Yamin, and Yarmi Kadoshi (actors), Tel Aviv, June 24, 2004. Morad, Ya'acov-Ronen (actor) and Sigal Morad-Eshed (writer), Tel Aviv, June 10, 2004. Mossek, Nissim (filmmaker), Jerusalem, May 14, 2004. Naveh, Ziv (director of the public multicultural fund Gesher), Jerusalem, June 12, 2005. Nesher, Avi (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, June 30, 2004. Ofek, David (Taufik) (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, May 12, 2004, and September 26, 2010. Peretz, Noam (former general manager, Sderot Cinematheque), Sderot, June 20, 2004. Shemesh, Tali (filmmaker), Jerusalem, June 18, 2004, and Tel Aviv, June 4, 2005. Shemoelof, (Mati) Matityaho (social activist), *May 29, 2005. Shles, Julie (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, June 30, 2004. Torati, Beni (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, *March 29, 2004. Trabelsi, Osnat (filmmaker and social activist), Tel Aviv, June 8, 2004, and Sderot, June 2, 2005. Tsabari, Doron (filmmaker), Tel Aviv, May 12, 2004, and *July 27, 2005. Zadok, Arnon (actor, filmmaker, chairperson of the Periphery Committee at the Israeli Film Council), Tel Aviv, September 27, 2010. Zarhin, Shemi (filmmaker), *July 3, 2004, and Tel Aviv, June 14, 2005.

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Index ’66 Was a Good Year for Tourism, 73–75, 119, 91n37, 231 1948 Arab-Israeli War (War of Independence), 19, 82, 227, 230, 234, 248n63 1967 War, 15n22, 32, 143n53, 172, 213, 227 1973 War, 176 Abekasis, Meital: White Walls, 60, 76 Abergil, Reuven, 171, 172, 173 Abramovich, Yoav, 144n58 Abramski-Blei, Irit, 165, 166 absence, 7, 12, 77, 78, 83, 107, 147, 211; and marginalization, 27; -presence, 10, 172, 203, 204; of scholarship, 221; structuring, 9, 10, 33, 105, 205, 218, 229; women's, 204 Abutbul, Ovad, 172, 173 adot ha-Mizra, 3–4, 14n10, 50, 183 Ahmed, Sara, 120 Aisha, 59–60, 61, 187n7 Ajami, Tel Aviv, 201 Alexandria, 58, 73–74, 119, 239n6; musicians, 118 Alexandrowicz, Ra'anan: James’ Journey to Jerusalem, 37–39, 48n56, 48n61 Algeria: French Jews, 19; pre-independence, 15n22 Ali, Muhammad, 238 Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, 204 Almagor, Gila, 27, 141n21 Almog, Oz, 42n1; The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew, 168 Althusser, Louis, 10, 166 Ålund, Aleksandra, 50, 88n5, 220 Alush-Levron, Merav: “The Mizrahi Memory and the Zionist Dominance,” 189n25 Amar, Ronen: My Family's Pizza, 144n54 ambivalence, 45n30, 52, 101, 162, 228; and performance of Mizrahi identity, 75–86 American-Jews, 4, 52–53

Amrani, Naomi, 199 Ancient Winds: Moroccan Chronicle, 133, 159, 174, 175, 177, 178, 183, 191n41, 192n50, 193n60, 249n68 Ankri, Serge: Mama's Couscous, 78n19 Another Land, 73, 231 Appadurai, Arjun, 65, 90n34 The Appointed, 244n38 Arab-Israeli conflict, 5, 15n19, 19, 32, 72, 73, 175, 221 Arab-Jews, 4, 11, 14n8, 14n14, 22, 23, 42, 50, 58, 100, 117, 140n13, 162, 189, 224, 226, 246n51; characters, 253; culture, 56, 79, 105, 220, 247n60; dual valence, 51–53; hyphenated identities, 11, 51, 86, 87, 88n12, 101; identity, 57, 61, 62, 64, 87, 104 Arab-Palestinians, 3, 73, 227, 228; actors, 85; Israeli conflict, 72, 73, 231; nationalism, 19 Arabs, 14, 15n22, 18, 43n12, 46n39, 57, 58, 65, 66, 67, 69, 73, 76, 91n39, 100, 105, 119, 132, 142n40, 143n53, 189n19, 191n38, 248nn63–64; anti-, 89n15, 223, 224, 227; “Ashkenazi,” 114, 120; culture, 22, 53, 64, 77, 118, 128, 226, 233, 235, 247n60; enemy, 21, 22, 23, 158, 232; identity, 233; laborers, 20, 84; Middle East, 11, 22, 42n3, 62, 155, 168n12; Mizrahi connection, 4, 11, 21, 22, 23, 40, 50, 52, 53, 62, 74, 87, 101, 114, 116, 117, 118, 128, 140n12, 142n37, 159, 162, 185, 223, 231, 247n60, 248n67, 249n72, 249n78, 253; music, 29, 54, 56, 61, 79, 82, 85, 119, 128, 219, 224, 226–28, 229, 230–31, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236–37, 247n60; Muslim, 14n12, 42n3, 50, 59, 61, 62, 72, 75, 88n12, 155, 168n12, 230, 234; nationalism, 161, 189n23; Nazi, 162, 164; non-Jewish, 51; poor, 163; purification of, 140n12; revolt, 161; space, 249n72. See also Druse Page 284 → Ashcroft, Bill, 166, 177 Ashdod, 80, 81, 82, 220 Ashkenaz, 184 Ashkenazi, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 16n29, 19, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 41, 43nn5–6, 46n40, 48n62, 118, 121, 130, 140n18, 153, 174; Arab, 114, 116–17, 184–86, 188n12, 192n49, 193n64, 243n33; center, 106, 107, 150–51, 175; communities, 101; elite, 20, 40; establishment, 234; European, 44n16, 162, 170, 197; habitus, 23, 52; hegemony, 20, 88n10, 106, 141n22, 175, 183, 185, 187n11, 197, 232; immigrants, 21, 22; Israel, 8, 16n29, 184, 219; Israeli media, 146n78; Jews, 14n6, 19, 119, 236, 244n41; landowners, 20; management, 155, 188n13, 191n45; -Mizrahi intermarriages, 44n25, 113, 251; -Mizrahi disparities, 141n25; -Mizrahi relations, 30–32, 33, 35–36, 185, 213, 215, 228; -Mizrahi space, 105; modern, 20; Orthodox, 222, 223, 224, 245nn43–44, 246n53; political parties, 245n44; political partners, 173; racism, 184; religious traditions, 246n51;/sabra men, 29, 198; as savior, 200; sexual economy, 96; society, 235; synonymous with Israeli, 88n9; topos, 110; unmarked, 133, 184; women, 197, 212, 240n13; Yiddish culture, 23; Zionism, 22, 52, 88n10, 107, 159, 162, 166, 175, 176, 177, 182, 186, 197, 226, 230, 232, 240n11 Asmar, 211 Aviad, Michael: Ramleh, 223–25, 243n32 Avitan, Tal: Edges, 222–23 Aviva My Love, 139n5

Avraham, Eli, 45n28, 106, 146n77, 241n19; The Media in Israel, 25–26 Azar, Henriette, 66 Azoulai-Hasfari, Hanna, 20; “I Came Amongst You Emaciated and Hungry,” 103; Sh'hur, 102–4, 140nn15–16, 141n19, 187n6, 211 Baghdad, 62, 82; farhud, 160–61, 163, 189nn21–22; Gulf War, 57, 77, 78; pro-Nazi, 160, 161; theaters, 86; women's jail, 162; Zionism, 84 Baghdad Bandstand, 53, 54, 61 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 34, 36, 47n52, 97, 255n3 Bakri, Muhammad, 235, 236; Jenin, Jenin, 250n80 Banai, Sigalit, 145n69, 154–55, 256n10; Mama Faiza, 56; The Pioneers, 160 The Band's Visit, 114, 116, 118–20; features of Bourekas, 117, 118 Barak, Ehud, 173, 185–86 Bar'am, Nir, 184 The Barbecue People, 76, 80; casting, 91n42; storytelling, 83 Bar-David, Seniora (Sini), 192n49; The South: Alice Never Lived Here, 201–5, 210; Wadi Salib, 248n63 Barthes, Roland, 14n9, 123 Basson, Assaf: Maktub Aleik: A Voice without a Face, 61 Bayit, 57, 79–80, 93 Beer Sheva, 157, 243n32 Behar, Moshe, 47n48 Beitar Provence, 141n22 Ben-Ami, Shlomo, 172, 173, 176 Benchetrit, David, 174; Ancient Winds: Moroccan Chronicle, 133, 159, 169, 172, 175, 176, 177, 183, 192nn49–50, 253; Samir, 62, 231 Ben-Dor, Orna, 132 Ben-Dor, Zvi, 250n81 Ben-Gurion, David, 18, 22, 43n12, 101, 192n51, 227 Ben-Gurion University, 157, 241n26 Ben-Harush, David, 176, 191n38 Benjamin, Walter, 65 Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, 14n10, 44n21, 248n64

Ben-Zadok, Efraim, 213 Berg, E. Nancy, 16n31, 249n71; Exile from Exile, 22 Berg, Ramírez Charles,9 Berlin International Film Festival, 132 Beyond the Walls, 32 Bhabha, Homi, 9, 45n30, 97–98, 99, 100, 101, 129, 139nn1–2, 139n9, 140n10, 178; “DissemiNation,” 187n3; “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency,” 149 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 167 Bitton, Charlie, 172, 192n46, 248n67 Bitton, Ezer, 172 Page 285 → Black Panthers, American, 237 Black Panthers, Israeli, 90n35, 149, 191n39, 192n46, 222, 237 The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak, 147, 169, 170–72, 175, 176–78, 191n36, 249n68 Boltanski, Christian, 78, 86 Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi, 30, 59, 107–8, 111, 211 Bourdieu, Pierre, 117, 220 Bourekas, 23, 33, 37–38, 45, 46n35, 98, 254; carnivalesque nature, 36; dialogue, 48n56; ethnic characterizations, 31, 38–39, 48n62; language, 46n35, 153; late, 48n54; Mizrahi time, 139n7; 1960s and 1970s, 35; origin of term, 27–28; portrayal of Mizrahi in, 28, 30–31; post-, 36, 47n55, 251; sexual economy, 96, 105, 113; substandard language, 46n35. See also titles of individual films, e.g., Sallah Bouzaglo, Haim: Honor, 222; Zinzana, 138 Bread, 30 Briza, 139 Bruriah, 244n38 Bugana-Bachar, Etty: The Buganas, 199–200, 225 The Buganas, 197, 200, 222 Butler, Judith, 17n35, 88n4, 187n5 Buzaglo, Meir, 246n57 Café Noah, 54 Café Noah, 54, 61

Cahiers du Cinéma, 9 Calderon, Nissim, 196 Camp David, 15n19 Campfire, 41 Casablan, 29 Casetti, Francesco, 47n52, 66 Castells, Manuel, 182 casting, 39, 68, 85, 98, 124, 151, 168, 240n12, 255; “blood” rather than “look,” 36; mis-, 48n61; mixed race actors, 47n53; Mizrahi, 40, 41, 46n41, 50, 80, 91n42, 94, 96, 102, 141n21, 235–36 Castro, Fidel, 238 Cedar, Joseph: Campfire, 39, 40 Center for the Heritage of Iraqi Jews, 80, 84, 86, 190n26 César Award, 132 Channel 1, 136; “Mabbat Sheni,” 161 Channel 2, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 145n59, 145nn72–73, 146n80, 146n84; The Barbecue People, 130; Don't Call Me Black!, 44n22 Channel 10, 146n80 Chanti, 143n45 characters, 41, 46n41; Palestinian actors as Mizrahi characters, 48n61, 235–36 Charlie and a Half, 29, 46n35 Chetrit, Sami Shalom, 4, 14n10, 24, 43n122, 172, 191n38, 192n51; analysis of Desperado Square, 128, 151, 237; The Ashkenazi Revolution Is Dead, 175; Ashkenazi Zionism, 88n10, 107, 176, 177, 191n45, 245n44; The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak, 170, 171, 175, 237; Come Mother, 58, 77, 222, 244n40; critique of Sh'hur, 107; IntraJewish Conflict in Israel, 183, 243n34; Mizrahi collective identity, 88n7; Mizrahi dilemma, 20, 21, 23, 43n11; new Mizrahim, 42n3, 89n15, 213; review of Samir, 62, 232; Shas, 245n45, 246n48; Sephardi/Mizrahi groups, 248n67; Yemenite Jews, 43n6, 44n14 Chetrit-Edri, Yakut, 58, 222 Cinderella, 109 Cinema Egypt, 56, 62, 65, 76, 77, 187n7, 240n11, 253 Cinema Novo, 28 Citizen Nawi, 187n7 Close, Glenn: Fatal Attraction, 208 Close-Up, 33

close-ups, 46n42, 69, 123, 206 Coffee with Lemon, 256n9 Cohen, Aharale: The Pioneers, 160 Cohen, Asher, 245n45; “Shas: Periphery in the Heart of the Center,” 245n44 Cohen, Benny, 181–82, 192n52 Cohen, Eli: Egoz, 164 Cohen, Hila: Aisha, 59–60 Cohen, Yaffa Tusia: I Am Faiza, 56; Mama Faiza, 56 Cohen, Yinon, 24 Columbian Love, 48n62 Come Mother, 153, 187n7 Common Fate, 165 community of resistance, 149, 150, 177, 178 compartmentalization, 33, 73, 74–75, 167, 215, 226 consciousness, 172, 174, 228, 247n58, 255, 256n5; double, 58, 87; group, 147; heightened, 182; Mizrahi, 10, 35, 50, 74, 155, 170, 174, 232, 255; political, 32, 33, 117, 150, 171, 236; social, 167; sociopolitical, 4, 234 constructionism, 49; vulgar, 193n60. See also essentialist/constructionist dyad Cook, Pam, 63 Page 286 → Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 193n59, 196, 197, 212, 225 culture, 11, 13, 22, 47n51, 64, 104, 110, 123, 130, 131, 137, 167, 183, 220; Arab, 53, 64, 77, 101, 118, 128, 140n12, 233, 235, 247n60; Arab-Jewish, 56, 79, 105, 220, 247n60; Ashkenazim, 22, 185, 188n12; Ashkenazi Yiddish, 23; of complaint, 2, 12, 169, 170; dominant, 17n37, 129, 155, 255; emergent, 17n37; high, 28, 30, 46n36, 58, 110, 118; and identity, 13n5, 49–51, 87, 185; Israeli, 22, 24, 129, 138, 185, 190n32, 200, 228, 243n33; Jewish, 58, 225; leisure, 13n5; lost, 72; low, 28, 29, 30, 46n36, 118; mass, 30; Mediterranean, 13n5; Mizrahi, 11, 13nn5–6, 23, 26, 128, 138, 186, 237, 246n48, 249n72; non-Mizrahi, 27; Oriental-Mizrahi, 23; original, 93; past and the political present, 72–75; politics of, 226; pre-Zionist Eastern European Jewish, 186; real, 26; regnant, 256n7; residual, 255; Russian, 220; Zionist, 23, 128 Cup Final, 32 Cut, 234–35, 248n63 Dadoune, Yosef-Joseph, 186n2, 252; Ofakim, 124; Sion, 122–23, 124, 187n6 Da'i, Shlomo, 214–16, 241n18 Daka Darom, 144

Dan Quixote and Sa'adia Panza, 27 Davidovitch, Nadav, 189n19 Daw, Salim, 39, 48n61; James’ Journey to Jerusalem, 235 Dayan, Assi: An Electric Blanket Named Moshe, 40; Life According to Agfa, 40 de Gaulle, Charles, 126, 143n53 Deleuze, Gilles, 7, 50, 149, 177, 253, 256n7 de Man, Paul, 31 Deri, Arieh, 172–73, 174, 177 de Sica, Vittorio: Miracle in Milan, 98–99 Desperado Square, 76, 122, 143n52, 144n54, 150, 151, 175, 178, 235, 236, 240n11, 250n80 Dimona, 217, 219, 241n21, 242n28, 242n30; Cinematheque, 182; Dead Sea Plant, 216; Mizrahim, 242n27; nuclear power plant, 157 documentaries, 5, 6–7, 13, 15n20, 44n15, 53, 54, 57. See also individual titles Dolev, Omri: “Ashkenazim from the Bunker,” 184–85, 193n63 Don't Call Me Black!, 44n22 Don't Touch My Holocaust, 178 Doron, Gideon, 15n17, 145n73, 146n77, 196 Douglas, Mary, 152, 153 Downing, John, 175, 183, 253 Dream Square. See Desperado Square Dror, Duki, 74, 77; Café Noah, 54, 254; My Fantazya, 54–55, 56–57, 65, 89n19; The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, 256n9 Druse, 3, 14n12 Duvdevani, Shmulik, 91n37, 230–31, 249n70 The Dybbuk of the Holy Apple Field, 244n38 Edges, 178, 225, 245n43 Egoyan, Atom: Speaking Parts, 78 Egoz, 164 Egypt, 53, 58, 74–75, 76, 231; films, 65, 66–68, 70, 77, 239n6; immigrants, 54, 73, 227; languages, 89n22, 115; slavery, 242n28. See also Alexandria Egyptian Arabs, 118, 119, 142n37

Egyptian-Jews, 56, 58 Egyptian Radio, 53 Eisenstadt, S. N., 121 Elazar, Daniel, 4, 47n45 An Electric Blanket Named Moshe, 40 Elias, Arieh, 80 Eliezer, Mizra, 240n13 Elkabetz, Ronit, 205; The Band's Visit, 114; Or, My Treasure, 239n6; Seven Days, 252; Sh'hur, 187n6; Sion, 123–24, 187n6; To Take a Wife, 42, 115, 206, 208–9, 239n8 Elkabetz, Shlomi: Seven Days, 252 Elkariv, Yakir: “To Take a Director,” 208 Elon, Amos: The Israelis: Founders and Sons, 19 environments of memory, 58–59, 89n23 Eshed, Sigal, 91n39 Espinosa, Julio Garcia, 253 essence, 87n3, 101 essentialism, 49, 50, 87, 168, 171, 190n29, 191n37; vulgar, 183, 193n60 essentialist/constructionist dyad, 11, 49–51 ethnicity: boundaries, 12, 100–105, 198, 251; and class, 12, 13, 195, 196–220; and gender, 12, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 203, 205, 207, 210, 211, 212, 220, 240nn12–13, 252; identities, 11, 25, 35, 36, 39, 41, 51, 94, 106, 114, 128, 140n18, 185, 221; and religion, 101, 220–25; symbolic, 2, 13n4, 212, 213; as a symptom, 66–71. See also specific ethnicity or ethnic group European Jews, 4, 53, 189n24, 219, 220 Page 287 → Eyal, Gil: The Disenchantment of the Orient, 101, 140nn11–13, 248n64 Eyes Wide Open, 244n38 Ezekiel, Avraham, 62 Fanon, Frantz: Black Skin, White Masks, 218–19 farhud, 160–62, 163, 189nn20–24 The Farhud, 190n26 Father Language, 56, 253

feature (narrative) films, 6, 76, 125, 131, 145n67, 154, 221, 256n9. See also individual titles Feldman, Avigdor, 158 fiction films, 6, 15n20, 79, 200; contemporary, 53. See also individual titles film criticism, 8–9, 28, 33–34, 35, 183, 188n12, 209 film funds, 131–35. See also Gesher Multicultural Film Fund; Makor Foundation; New Fund; Rabinovich Fund; Social Fund “first Israel,” 32, 47n44, 103, 107, 213 Firstspace, 93 Fisher, David, 132, 134, 135, 145n60; Love Inventory, 256n9 former Soviet Union (FSU), 5, 8, 45n28, 174, 213, 219, 220, 243nn31–33, 245n44 Foucauldian terms and thought, 84, 105, 202 Foucault, Michel, 127, 148: History of Sexuality, 148–49 French New Wave, 28 Friling, Tuvia, 7, 16n24 Frith, Simon, 46n36 From Tripoli to Bergen-Belsen, 165 Fund for the Encouragement of Quality Israeli Films, 131 Fuss, Diana, 49, 87n3, 171, 191n37 Gabai, Sasson, 254; Get, 240n12; Tewfiq, 142n35 Gabriel, Teshome: Third Cinema in The Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation, 256n5 Galili, Lily: “His Own Canton,” 192n49 Galoot, 253 Gavison, Savi, 48n56; Lovesick on Nana Street, 139n8; Shuroo, 140n18 Gaza Strip, 144n54, 160, 179, 181 gender, 29, 46n39, 88, 121, 196–212, 239n6, 240n11, 251; dichotomies, 30; and ethnicity, 12, 195, 196–212, 220, 240nn12–13, 252; feminine, 30, 46n39, 143n44, 152; feminineness/effeminization, 121; femininity, 46n42, 168, 205; hypermasculinity, 90n35, 240n11; Italy, feminists, 247n59; masculine/feminine binary categories, 30; masculine heterosexuality, 240n11; masculine physique, 30; masculine sabra, 29, 46n39; masculine West, 123; masculinity, 91n37, 121, 168, 205; men, 29, 95, 116, 204, 205, 207, 239n9; Mizrahi Feminist Forum, 183, 193n62, 240n13; Mizrahi men, 30, 90n35, 197; Mizrahi women, 197; and sexuality, 46n42, 123; war between the sexes, 211–12; women, 116, 204, 205, 239n9 George Ovadia: Merchant of Feelings, 188 Gertz, Nurith, 46n39: Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature, 194n67

Gesher Multicultural Film Fund, 131, 133–34, 145n66, 145n67 Get, 240n12 Giladi, G. N., 20, 191n39, 228, 248n65, 248n67 Golden Globe, 132 Gone with the Wind, 82, 86 Goren, Amit, 249n70; Another Land, 73, 231; ’66 Was a Good Year for Tourism, 73–75, 91n37, 231 Got No Jeep and My Camel Died, 187n7, 247n60 Gourama, Morocco, 58, 77 Graduate Films, 144n54 Grandfather, 59, 61–62 Grosz, Elizabeth, 152–53 Guattari, Félix, 50, 149, 253, 256n7 Guetta, Jenny, 239n6 Guevara, Che, 238 Gulf War, 56–57, 74, 77, 89n21, 91n39, 206 Ha'aretz, 103, 106 Habermas, Jürgen, 146n82 habitus, 22, 23, 150, 199; Ashkenazi, 52; Mizrahi, 118, 222, 224 Hadash, 192n46 Ha'ir, 14n6 Halfon, Eyal, 146n80, 251–52, 255n2; Baghdad Bandstand, 247n60 Hall, Stuart, 34, 47n51, 49, 50–51; “Minimal Selves,” 147 Halutzi, Yitzhak, 164; The Farhud, 160–63; Pigtails, 160, 162 ha-Mapa (Ashkenazi religious law), 3, 246n51 Page 288 → Hamo, Eli, 147, 174; The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak, 175, 177, 237; radical Mizrahim, 248n67 Hanegbi, Haim, 170, 171, 176 Hasfari, Shmuel: Sh'hur, 140n15 Hassan, Nizar, 249n78, 250n79; Cut, 234–35, 248n63

Have You Heard about the Panthers?, 169, 171–72, 192n48, 222 Haymian, Sarit: Stone Flower, 61 Hayun, Oshri: Aisha, 59–60 Heath, Stephen, 9, 152 Hebrew, 13n1, 14n7, 47n49, 58, 153–54, 200–201; guttural sounds, 26; history, 42n1; interrelation of victimhood, sacrifice, and action/agency, 190n32 Hello Sigal, 154–55 Hertzberg, Arthur: The Zionist Idea, 19, 142n42 Herzl, Theodor, 19, 48n58 Hide and Seek, 205, 239 Hill 24 Doesn't Answer, 210, 240n10 Hirsch, Marianne, 64, 75, 86–87, 90n31; “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” 63 History and Anthropology: “The Politics of Victimhood,” 167 Hochberg, Gil, 43n12 Holocaust, 15n21, 19, 161, 163, 166, 189nn24–25, 190n30, 192n49, 229–30; artists, 78; survivors, 46n39, 63, 164, 165 Holocaust Museum (Kibbutz Lohame Hageta'ot), 229; Yad Vashem, 165, 189n24 Honor, 222 hooks, bell, 121, 168, 177, 178, 190n29, 196, 212; Yearning, 149, 226 Horowitz, Neri: “Rabbi Ovadia Yosef—The Formative Years,” 244n42 Hot Docs, 132 Hula and Natan, 144 al-Husayni, Haj Amin, 189n23 Hussein, Saddam, 57, 89n21 hybridity, 23, 103, 140n14; cultural, 139n1; East/West, 104; of emaciation, 101, 104–5, 255; forms of, 101–2; and purification, 101, 104, 140n11, 142n37; and Thirdspace, 92, 100, 105, 139n2, 139n9; zero-sum, 101–2, 104 hyphenated identities, 51, 86, 87, 88n12 idfa, 132 Inbar, Dorit, 1, 132, 135, 144n58, 145n64 Inbar, Ori: Beitar Provence, 141n22 in-betweenness, 65, 92

intermarriages, 25–26; Ashkenazi-Mizrahi, 35, 36, 44n25, 251 interpellation, 107, 166, 187n5 intersectionality, 12, 195–250; alliances and inspirations, 225–26, 238; ethnoclass dilemma, 212–20; ethnoreligious juncture, 220–25; Mizrahi woman, 196–212, 240n13; political and structural, 196–97 Iraq: communities, 3, 89n21; immigrants, 22, 54, 82, 249n71; Israeli-Jewish writers from, 22, 220; Jewish Communist underground, 90n27; Jewish immigrants, 21, 43n7, 54–55, 57–58, 61, 144n54; Jewish underground, 80; Jews, 20, 80, 84, 85, 160, 161, 162–64, 190n26, 227, 234, 236, 248n63; al-Kaylani, 160–61; music, 93, 247n60; police, 62; pro-Nazi, 189n23; Zionism, 43nn6–7, 80, 105. See also Gulf War Israel: Ashkenazi, 8, 16n29, 184, 219; Cinema Law, 131, 132, 133, 135; film funds, 131–35; Left, 33, 47n45, 75, 175; media, 146n78; 1967 War, 15n22, 32, 143n53, 172, 213, 227; parliament, 22, 44n24, 173, 194n66; Right, 75; television, 5, 15n16–17, 46n42, 57, 77–78, 91n39, 93, 95, 128–29, 130, 131, 134, 135–39, 146n80, 162, 165, 191n41, 193n61, 214, 233, 254 Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA), 53, 136, 137; The Ashkenazim Are Coming, 185–86; Pillar of Fire, 137, 146; Vicky Shiran vs., 146n78. See also Channel 1 Israel Film Council, 131, 133, 145n67, 180, 193n58; Periphery Committee, 243n33 Israel Film Fund, 131, 145n67 Israeli Educational Television, 190n26 Israeli Film Academy, 142n34, 256n10 Israeli New Historians, 6, 15n19 Israeli New Wave, 45n33 Isserlis, Moshe, 3; ha-Mapa, 246n51 Italy, 188n15; feminists, 247n59 ITV, 136 Ivgy, Moshe, 141n19 Jacky, 197–99, 200, 201, 204, 210, 211, 238n2 Jaffa, 29, 201, 239n6 Jakobson, Roman, 16n32, 90n36 James’ Journey to Jerusalem, 37–39, 48n56, 48n61 Jefferson Airplane: “White Rabbit,” 204 Jenin, Jenin, 250n80 Jenny and Jenny, 59, 205, 211, 222, 239n6 Jerusalem, 40, 103, 106, 107, 111, 143n46, 164, 165, 170, 171, 172, 176, 179, 188n12, 189n24, 191n40, 222, 223, 224, 232, 240n10, 246n54 Page 289 →

Jewish National Fund, 30 Jews, 58, 225; diasporic, 18, 38, 168. See also Algeria, French Jews; American-Jews; Arab-Jewish identity; Ashkenazi, Jews; European Jews; Iraq, Jewish immigrants; Iraq, Jewish underground; Iraq, Jews; Middle East, Jewish communities; Middle East, Jewish immigrants; Middle East, Mizrahi Jews; North Africa, Jews; Oriental Jews; Sephardi, Jews; Yemen Jones, Rahel Leah, 44n16; Ashkenaz, 133, 184, 193n64 The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, 256n9 Kadosh, 244n38 Kahlili, Ron, 138–39 Karo, Yosef, 3, 246n51 Katz, Elihu, 13n5, 190n31, 196; Beracha Report, 44n18, 146n77 Katz and Karaso, 27 Katznelson, Kalman: The Ashkenazi Revolution, 191n45 al-Kaylani, Rashid Ali, 160–61 Keep Not Silent, 244n38 Kennedy, John F., 241n21 Kerem Hatikva, 145n69 Khamara, A Place next to Life, 144 Khazzoom, Aziza, 43n12 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 155 Khouri, Makram, 85; The Barbecue People, 235–36 Kimchi, Rami, 23, 46n43, 48n55, 64–65, 74; Cinema Egypt, 58, 66–71, 77, 90n35, 104; “Exiles on Their [Own] Land,” 68; Father Language, 68–69, 70; Travels with My Brother, 89n22, 222 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 238, 241n21 The King of Ratings, 13, 213–14, 220 Klein, Uri, 142n29: “Beginners’ Overkill,” 208; “The Dark Side of the Melting Pot,” 192n50; “Hysteria and Discomfiture,” 208 Kolirin, Eran: The Band's Visit , 142n36 Kollek, Teddy, 172 Kolnowa, 33 Kristeva, Julia, 152, 153, 239n9 Lacan, Jacques, 10, 16n32, 70, 90n36

Latour, Bruno, 101, 140n11, 142n37 Left, 33, 47n45, 75, 175 Lebanon War, 32, 47n46 Leila the Village Girl, 58, 69 Levy, Tikva, 240n13 Life According to Agfa, 40 Likud, 13n5, 32, 47n45, 109–10, 214, 223–24, 228, 241n16 Lissak, Moshe, 8, 16n24 London Sunday Times, 157 Lorde, Audre, 247n58 Loshitzky, Yosefa: Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen, 5, 47n49, 190n34, 221, 229–32 Love Inventory, 256n9 Lovesick on Nana Street, 30, 36, 39, 76, 97–98; dialogue with Bourekas, 139n8; ethnoreligious dilemma, 243n35; “game of indeterminacy,” 140n18; Mizrahi space, 94–95; Thirdspace, 96, 105 Lubin, Orly, 107, 150, 151–52, 198, 204, 238n2 Lynch, Gordon, 221 Madmoni-Gerber, Shoshana, 192n49 Madmony, Yossi, 254; The Barbecue People, 77, 83, 84, 91n40, 130; Bat Yam-New York, 130; opinion of New Fund, 133 Maftsir, Boris: Tarab, 219–20, 243n32 Makor Foundation, 131, 190n36 Maktub Aleik: A Voice without a Face: 153, 253 Malessa, Orly: Mirrors, 200 Malka, Haim, 43n8 Mama Faiza, 76, 187n7 Mama's Couscous, 78n19 Marciano, Sa'adia, 176 Marcuse, Herbert, 138 Margalit, Avital, 189n19 Marks, Laura, 64, 101, 124, 127, 143n51, 149, 152, 177, 178, 187n4

Marx, Karl, 20 Marxism, 25, 47n51, 148, 150, 167, 232, 238 masorti, 195, 221, 224, 225, 238n1, 246n57 Massad, Joseph: “Zionism's Internal Others: Israel and the Oriental Jews,” 43n5 “A Matter of Time,” 165, 178 Mediterraneanism, 14 Meir, Golda, 172, 191n39 Memmi, Albert, 88n12 memory, 53, 58–59, 65, 84; collective, 183; cultural, 64; historicist, 187n3; of Holocaust, 189n24, 229; national, 165, 229; post, 63, 64, 75, 78, 85; prosthesis, 59; second-generation, 75; sites of, 58–59, 60, 89n23; Zionist, 162, 164 Messika, Ilana Sugbaker, 250n79 Page 290 → Messika, Yamin, 134, 135, 145n68, 187nn8–9, 187n11; Hello Sigal, 154–55; Kerem Hatikva, 145n69 Metz, Chrístian,16n32; The Imaginary Signifier, 10 Michael, Sami (aka Samir): Forget Baghdad, 44n15, 47n47, 90n27, 249n71; Samir, 61, 62, 231 Middle East: Arabs, 11, 22, 42n3, 62, 155, 188n12; films, 96; history, 19; Jewish communities, 3; Jewish immigrants, 4, 13n5, 189n19; languages, 187n7; male chauvinism, 79; Mizrahi Jews, 20, 169; music, 89n16, 136, 247n60; non-Jewish Arabs, 51; peace, 229, 230 mimetic surplus, 9, 152 Ministry of Science, Culture, and Sports, 131, 180 Mirrors, 187, 201, 202, 210, 211, 253 Mitzpe Ramon, 182 Mizrahi: cinematic construction of identity, 49–91; cinematic topos, 105–21; collapse of postmodern playfulness, 100–105; culture and identity, 49–51; cultural past and political present, 72–75; dilemma, 1, 2, 5, 8, 11, 18–27, 35, 151, 175, 229, 239n6, 242–43n30, 245n44, 251; ethnic as a symptom, 66–71; film funds, 131–35; Greek music, 128; on Israeli screen, historical context, 27–42; language and dialogue, 28–29, 44n15, 46n35, 88n8, 95, 97, 150, 153, 154, 176, 187n7, 215, 237, 246n57, 252–53; marginality as a normative space, 121–28, 150–51; mediated constructions of, 75–86; music, 54, 61, 154, 187n11, 188n12, 244n39; niche, 128–31; -Palestinian connections, 195, 213, 226–37; reconstruction of the past, 51–53; remaking of, 182–86; salvage cinema, 53–62; space, 11, 12, 42, 92–142, 144n54, 150; television, 135–39; utility of rootedness, 62–66; woman, 12, 42, 103, 124, 196–212, 251. See also New Mizrahim Mizrahi, Felix, 61, 247n60 Mizrahi, Iris, 39, 40, 41, 220 Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, 11, 16n34, 42n3, 146n78, 158, 183, 193n64, 228, 240n13, 248n66 Mizrahi Feminist Forum, 183, 193n62, 240n13

mockumentary genre, 57, 77, 79 modernity, 20, 103, 182 Modleski, Tania, 30, 46n42 Morocco, 108, 113; emigrants, 60, 157, 158, 165, 230; Jewish exodus, 164. See also Gourama Morris, Benny, 15n19 Moskowitz, Tzahi, 186 Mossek, Nissim, 174; Citizen Nawi, 232; Have You Heard about the Panthers?, 171; Have You Heard about the Panthers, Mr. Moshe?, 171–72, 222; Who Is Mordechai Vanunu?, 156–57, 188n17 Mourad, Leila: Leila the Village Girl/Cinema Egypt, 66, 69 Movement for Ashkenazi Identity, 184 Mowitt, John, 252, 256n4 Mulvey, Laura, 46n42 Muslims and Islam, 14n12, 42n3, 50, 59, 61, 62, 72, 75, 88n12, 155, 168n12, 230, 234 My Family's Pizza, 122, 150, 151 My Fantazya, 61, 76, 77, 91n99, 104 My Father, My Lord, 244n38 Naaman, Dorit, 36, 48n54, 142n40 Naficy, Hamid, 14n8, 64, 80, 83–84; An Accented Cinema, 51–52, 53, 86–87, 90n33, 93, 100, 104, 130, 144n56, 253, 254; analysis of Egoyan's Speaking Parts, 78 Naveh, Ziv, 133–34, 135 Nazi, 165; Arab, 162, 164; Germany, 163; Iraq, 161, 189n23 neoliberalism, 2, 241n26 Nesher, Avi: Turn Left at the End of the World, 39, 112–13, 142n30, 142n34, 155–56 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 241n26 New Fund, 1, 131–35, 144n58, 145n59, 145n64, 145n67 Newland, 256n9 new Mizrahim, 19, 42n3, 50, 52, 92, 140n15, 228, 248n67 New Sensibility Cinema, 27, 28, 31–32, 45n33, 254 NGO, 228; El Hama'ayan, 245n44; Kedma, 193n62 Niddam, Igaal: We Are All Arab Jews in Israel, 52–53, 229

Night Movie, 32 Niv, Kobi, 104, 109, 140n16, 211 Nobel Peace Prize, 188n16 Nocke, Alexandra: The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity, 14 Noi, Menashe, 141n19 nonfiction films, 6; dilemma of distinguishing between fiction and, 15n20; Mizrahi, 7 Nora, Pierre, 53, 58–59, 89n23, 90n24 Page 291 → Nordau, Max: “Jewry of Muscle,” 38, 48n58 North Africa, 4, 13n5, 20, 22, 51, 230; accent, 144n54; child immigrants, 159, 189n25; cuisine, 222; immigrants, 160, 169, 189n19; Jews, 43n8, 102, 165–66, 191n38, 208 Odin, Roger, 63 Ofakim, 124, 143n49 Ofek, David (Taufik), 254; The Barbecue People, 57, 77–78, 83, 84–85, 130; Bat Yam-New York, 91n40, 130; Bayit, 57, 79–80, 93 Ofir, Shaike, 27 Okun, Barbara S., 44n25 Orientalism, 20, 101, 123; Hebrew, 42n1 Oriental Jews, 13n1, 43n5, 123; communities, 4 Oriental-Mizrahi, 23, 44n25 Oriental space, 42n1 Or, My Treasure, 205 Orsher, Gidi, 208 Or Yehuda, 80, 108, 109, 110 Oscars (Israel), 132, 142n34 Ovadia, George, 239 Over the Ocean, 256n9 Palestine, 18–19; Arabs, 230; Ashkenazim, 8, 22; British military, 164; farming, 43n6; Grand Mufti, 189n23; immigration, 160, 162; Jewish community, 16n28, 120, 240n10; Mizrahi Jews, 21, 23, 159, 226; Oriental Jews, 43n5; partition of, 82; wars, 32, 161, 163; Zionism, 20, 52, 142n42. See also Israel Palestinians, 1, 2, 7, 43, 117, 227, 236, 247n60, 248n65, 249n70; laborers, 32, 72, 213; militants, 73; Mizrahi connections, 3, 5, 7, 13, 20, 24, 33, 48n61, 52, 91n42, 117, 142n35, 165, 170, 184, 195, 226, 227, 228–37,

247n60, 248n64, 248n67, 249n72; peace activists, 250n79; students, 157; women, 193n62, 246n49 Palestinian Wave (in cinema), 32, 229, 232 Pappe, Ilan, 15n19 Parmar, Pratibha, 121 Passover Fever, 94, 105, 139n6 Pedaya, Haviva: “The City as Text and the Periphery as Voice,” 121 Peled, Yoav, 24, 46n40, 121, 245n44 Peleg, Yaron, 15n19, 140n18; Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination, 42n1 Penslar, Derek, 7, 15n22, 16n24 People of Hope, 144n54 Peretz, Noam, 180, 181, 182, 192nn52–53, 193n55 performance of identity, 50, 88n4, 92, 100, 104 Peri, Yoram, 13n5 periphery, 12, 95, 97, 108, 112, 141n22, 202, 238n4; cultural, 10; Israel's geographical, 13n5, 25–26, 45n28, 124, 135, 241n19; Mizrahi, 12, 21–22, 35, 45n28, 94, 105–7, 121–22, 123, 139, 144n54, 150, 214; societal-psychic, 12 Personal Cinema, 27, 45nn32–33 Pigtails, 163–64, 190n26 The Pioneers, 160 Political Cinema, 7, 32, 116–17, 232, 254 postmemory, 63, 64, 75, 78, 85 power dialectics, 148–49 prosthesis-memory, 59 protest: attenuated, 155–59; corrective histories, 159–66; coupling of victimhood and agency, 166–74; films, 174–78; modalities of Mizrahi, 149–55 The Quarry, 30, 188n13 Queen Khantarisha, 187, 197, 199, 200 A Question of Identity, 144n54 Rabin, Yitzhak, 73 Rabinian, Dorit, 109 Rabinovich Fund, 131, 144n58, 145n67

Rajwan, Naim, 54 Ram, Haggai: Iranophopia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession, 43n8 Ramat-Aviv Gimmel, Tel Aviv, 106, 141n20 Ramat Gan, 89n21 Ramleh, 223, 224, 243n32 Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon, 120, 143n44, 230 realism, 9, 139n6 Regev, Motti, 244n39 religion, 3, 21–22, 41, 75, 142n37, 142n42, 195, 199, 238n5, 239n6, 243nn36–37, 244nn38–39, 244nn41–42, 246n51, 246n55, 246n57; and ethnicity, 101, 220–25, 245n44; of labor, 18, 38; Mizrahi-religious connections, 13. See also Ashkenazi, religious traditions; Druse; ha-Mapa (Ashkenazi religious law); intersectionality, ethnoreligious juncture; Jews; masorti; Muslims and Islam; Sephardi, religious tradition; Shulan ‘Arukh (Sephardi religious law); Zionism Renov, Michael, 6, 15n20 Page 292 → Revised Diary, 256n9 Rhodes, 68, 69 Right, 75 The Ringworm Children, 159, 178, 189n25 Rocha, Glauber, 253 rootedness, 204, 205, 210, 238n5; utility of, 62–66 Rowlands, Gena: A Woman under the Influence, 208 Rubin, Iris: Asmar, 72, 73; Hide and Seek, 239 Rubin, Rahamim, 72, 211 Rushdi, Faiza, 56 Sabra (refugee camp), 47n46 sabra, 22, 23, 29–30, 46n39, 66, 121, 168–69, 186, 190n30, 197, 198, 220, 228, 240n10 Said, Edward, 12, 16n24, 106–7, 123, 215–16, 228 Said, Nuri, 227 Sallah, 30, 38, 46n43, 118, 156, 198; music, 29 Salmona, Mushon: Vasermil, 243n32

salvage cinema, 11, 46n41, 53–62, 64, 65, 186, 255 Samet, Gideon, 190n34; “The Culture of Complaint Rides Again,” 169 Samir. See Michael, Sami Samir, 62, 231, 232 Sandoval, Chela, 225, 247n58 Sapir Academic College, 144n54; Department of Cinema and Television Arts, 181, 225 Satloff, Robert: Among the Righteous, 190n27 Schejter, Amit: Muting Israeli Democracy, 137–38 Schnitzer, Meir, 208; “Caution, a Typhoon Is Approaching,” 209 Sderot, 160, 222, 223 Sderot Cinematheque, 178–82, 192n52, 193n58 Second Authority, 134, 136, 137, 145n73, 146n78 “second Israel,” 47n44, 95, 107 secondary memory, 59 The Secrets, 244n38 Segev, Tom, 15n19 Senesh, Hanna (Szenes), 164 Sephardi, 11, 13n1, 22, 195, 224, 228, 229; accents, 26; clans, 110; communities, 4; cuisine, 105; dilemmas, 245n44; ethnicity, 1; exile, 231; households, 27; immigrants, 21; Jews, 3, 19, 128, 158, 177, 191n45; liturgy, 3, 246; Orthodox, 171, 173, 185, 223; past glory/crown, 224, 246n52; rabbinical schools, 68; religious tradition, 222, 225, 244nn41–42, 245n44, 246n51; revolution, 173; women, 201 Sephardim, 8, 16n28, 21, 161, 184, 228; Greek music, 128; left-wing, 248n67 Seri, Bracha, 199 Seroussi, Edwin, 244n39 Seven Days, 187n7, 206, 209, 210, 222 Shafir, Gershon, 46n40, 121 Shahrabani, Suzan (Iman), 54 The Shakshuka System, 241n26 Sharon, Ariel, 47n46, 242n30 Shas, 171, 172, 173–74, 185, 223–24, 245nn44–45, 246n48, 246n51, 246n53 Shatila (refugee camp), 47n46 Shemer, Yaron: “The Burden of Self-Representation: Reflections on Shur and Its Legacy for Contemporary

Mizrahi Films in Israel,” 47n49; “Trajectories of Mizrahi Cinema,” 47n49; “Victimhood, Protest, and Agency in Contemporary Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) Films in Israel,” 47n49, 190n33 Shemesh, Kokhavi, 147, 171, 175–76 Shemesh, Tali: White Gold/Black Labor, 216, 218, 241nn25–26 Shemoelof, Matityaho (Mati), 157, 158, 188n17; “The Band's Visit: Ethnicity and Stereotypes in Israeli Cinema,” 142n37 Shem-Tov, Yossef, 54 Shenhav, Yehouda, 4, 20, 22, 24, 51, 101, 140n11, 140n13, 162, 213; The Arab Jews, 21, 43n6, 227 Sh'hur, 102–4, 140nn15–16, 141n19, 187n6, 211 Shkhunat Hatikva (Hatikva Neighborhood), Tel Aviv, 144 Shklovsky, Victor: 124, 143n50 Shles, Julie: Southward, 182 Shohat, Ella, 4, 9, 21, 33, 47n47, 249n71; “analogical structures of feeling,” 234; Arab-Jews, 140nn12–13, 161; Arab/Palestinian dilemma, 228; Ashkenaz observations, 184; Bimat Kivun Hadash, 248n67; casting, 36, 46n41, 47n53; diasporic Jew, 46n39; East/West dyad, 46n39; hybridity, 100, 101, 140n12, 140n14; Israeli Cinema: East /West and the Politics of Representation, 33, 228; Mizrahi Feminist Forum, 240n13; Mizrahi identity, 88nn7–8; Mizrahi oppression, 228; Personal Page 293 →Cinema, 45n33; “Political Wave” filmmakers, 228–29; “Ruptured Identities,” 22; “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” 228; They Were Ten observations, 240n10; Unthinking Eurocentrism, 48n66; women as national allegories, 46n37 Shulan ‘Arukh (Sephardi religious law), 3, 246n51 Shuli's Fiancé, 108–9, 111, 141n23 Shuroo, 141n19 Siegel, Dina: The Great Immigration: Russian Jews in Israel, 243n31 Silverdocs, 132 Sion, 143n45, 151 sites of memory, 59, 60, 76, 89n23 Sleeping Beauty, 109 slipzone: cultural, 65, 77; films, 90n33, 93, 96 Smilansky, Moshe, 42n1 The Smile of the Lamb, 32 Smooha, Sami, 43n12, 44n21, 212, 213 Snow in August, 244n38 Social Fund, 134, 135, 145n59, 145n69

Soja, W. Edward, 93, 98, 121 The South: Alice Never Lived Here, 59, 211, 253 southerners, 13n5, 202, 238n5 Southward, 182 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 10, 12, 144n56 Stam, Robert, 9, 46n39, 48n66, 252 Stav, Yehuda, 208 Stone Flower, 59, 60–61, 153, 187n7, 205, 239n6 Strike, 241n24, 242n30 The Submarine Children, 188n12 subversion, 12, 39, 147, 151–55, 170, 199; resistance and, 150; woman's, 239n9 Swirski, Shlomo, 45n26; Israel: The Oriental Majority, 3–4, 20–21, 25, 44n25, 213, 248n64 Swissa, Jenny, 222, 239n6 symbolic ethnicity, 2, 13n4, 212, 213 Tal, Ran, 188n12 Tales from the Southern Frontier, 144n54 taqasim, 89n16 Taqasim, 53, 61, 187n7, 247n60, 253 Tarab, 219–20, 243n32 Taub, Gadi, 146n77, 196 Tel Aviv, 47n46, 53, 54, 55, 60, 95, 106, 111, 112, 125, 126, 141n22, 179, 220, 223; factory management, 156; International Student Festival, 182; open-air markets, 154. See also Ajami; Ramat-Aviv Gimmel; Shkhunat Hatikva; Tel Kabbir Tel Aviv University, 16n33, 224 television, 5, 15n16–17, 46n42, 57, 77–78, 91n39, 93, 95, 128–29, 130, 131, 134, 135–39, 146n80, 162, 165, 191n41, 193n61, 214, 233, 254. See also Briza; Channel 1; Channel 2; Channel 10; Israeli Educational Television; ITV; Yes Tel Kabbir, Tel Aviv, 202, 204, 205 textual analysis, 9, 98 They Were Ten, 210, 240n10 Thirdspace/Third Space, 92–100, 105, 106, 139n2, 139n9

The Three Bears, 109 Three Mothers, 205, 239n6 Time of Favor, 244n38 Tlalim, Asher de Bentolila, 249n70; Don't Touch My Holocaust, 165, 229–31, 249n69; Galoot, 229, 230, 231 Tong, Rosemarie, 225, 247n58 Topaz, Dudu, 241nn15–18, 241n21; “Harishon Babidur,” 214–15, 241n18; The King of Ratings, 214–16 Topol, Haim, 27 topos, cinematic, 12, 105–21 Torati, Beni: Desperado Square, 35, 90n35, 125–28, 237 To Take a Wife, 187n7, 206, 209, 210, 222, 239n8 Trabelsi, Osnat, 133, 174, 191n43, 233 Travels with My Brother, 89n22, 222 True to Life: Stories by Ramleh Youths, 144n54 Tsabari, Doron, 110; The King of Ratings, 13, 213–14, 215, 220, 241n15; Shuli's Fiancé, 108–9, 111, 141n23; Southward, 182; Underdogs: A War Movie, 141n22 Turn Left at the End of the World, 110, 111; affinity to Bourekas, 114 Tzror, Rino: Underdogs: A War Movie, 141n22 Tzur, Eran, 185 Underdogs: A War Movie, 141n22 Universes, 143n45 Unpromised Land, 160 Until Tomorrow Comes, 59, 60, 153, 187n7, 205, 239n6 Ushpizin, 39–40, 222 Utin, Pablo, 209–10 Page 294 → van Leer, Lia, 1 Van Leer Institute, 191n43 Vasermil, 243n32 Vicky Shiran vs. Israel Broadcasting Authority, 146n78 victimhood, 190nn32–33; and agency in Mizrahi protest cinema, 166–74; Mizrahi, 12, 175, 235; Samir, 232

voice-overs, 56, 58, 59–60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 74, 79, 84, 86, 89n20, 104, 144n54, 158, 203, 204, 205, 217, 222, 241n25, 242n28 Volach, Yonah, 199 Wadi Salib, 248n63 Wadi Salib, Haifa: riots, 171, 176, 191n38 Wahbi, Youssef: Leila the Village Girl/Cinema Egypt, 66 Waltz with Bashir, 132 wars. See 1948 Arab-Israeli War; 1973 War; 1967 War; Arab-Israeli conflict; Gulf War; Lebanon War; Palestine, wars; World War II al-Wataniya, 86 We Are All Arab Jews in Israel, 89n13 Wenders, Wim: The Buena Vista Social Club, 53 West Side Story, 29 White Gold/Black Labor, 13, 213, 216–17, 220, 241n21, 241n24, 241n26, 242nn29–30 White Walls, 59, 60, 61; Abekasis, Meital, 76 Who Is Mordechai Vanunu?, 223 Williams, Raymond, 13, 233–34, 255, 256n11; Marxism and Literature, 17n37 Wolman, Dan, 98 World War II, 68, 161, 165–66, 168, 189n23. See also Holocaust Yachimovich, Shelly, 146n78, 241n26 Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, 165, 189n24 Yas, Arieh: I Called/Named You, 193n65 Yedaya, Keren: Or, My Treasure, 239n6 Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, 131 Yemen: immigrants, 22; Jews, 20, 43n6, 44n14, 46n40, 144n54, 160, 192n49; women, 199 Yes (satellite station), 139 Yiddish, 23, 184, 186, 191n39 Yiddishpiel Theater, 186 Yisrael Ba'aliya, 174 Yitzhaki, Aharon, 20, 43n12

Yoaz, Yuval, 145n69 Yonah, Yossi, 127, 151 Yosef, David, 173, 177 Yosef, Ovadia, 245n44, 246n51 Yosef, Raz, 47n49, 90n35, 240n11 Young, Robert, 151 Your Younger Daughter Rachel, 205, 211, 239n6 Yuran, Noam: Channel 2: The New Statism, 137–38 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 196, 225, 247n59; Gender and Nation, 46n37 Zada, Benny: Khamara, A Place next to Life, 144n54 Zadok, Arnon, 243n33 Zaretzki, Ronen, 184 Zarhin, Shemi: Aviva My Love, 139n5; Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi, 108; Passover Fever, 93, 139n5 Zehava Ben: A Solitary Star, 247n60 Zimerman, Moshe, 40, 138, 240n12, 243n35 Zionism, 7–8, 15n21, 20, 55–56, 121, 122, 125, 162, 197, 201, 229; Ashkenazi, 22, 52, 88n10, 107, 159, 162, 166, 175, 176, 177, 182, 186, 197, 226, 230, 232, 240n11, 247n60; attempt to erase Arabness of Jews, 140n12; the body, 198; critiques of, 233, 248n65; diasporic Jew, 38; early, 18, 19; emergence, 16n28; equated with a colonial movement, 15n22, 16n24; lack of “mother country,” 15n23; Mizrahi, 21–23, 88n10, 231, 232; mockery of, 39; modern, 18; and national goals, 5; “phallicization” of new Jew, 143n44; post-, 15n19; post-World War II, 168–69; revival of Hebrew language, 154; spiritual, 142n42; territorial, 120, 142n42; time, 126; treatment of Holocaust victims, 190n29; Western outlook, 43n12 Zionist Congress: 1897, 18 Žižek, Slavoj, 10; Enjoy Your Symptom!, 71 Zohar: Mediterranean Blues, 188n12