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1 1 3 Ethnicity has always posed a challenge to secular national culture. Therefore it usually has been articulated in cultural production in relation to the question of nationality, often in terms of the degree of incorporation of ethnicity into the national culture. Through the character of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), an Italian American war hero who gradually becomes the head of the Corleone Mafia family and is married to an ethnically unidentified non–Italian American (Diane Keaton), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather : Part II (1974), for example, both opposes American Italian ethnicity to the American national ethos and allegorizes American politics through the Mafia. The way cultural products represent and negotiate this tension between ethnicity and national culture is an index of the stability of national culture and, by extension, the stability of the state. Hence The Godfather: Part II can also be seen as an index of the destabilization of American national culture and of the state apparatus as brought about by the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair. The challenge posed by ethnicity to secular national culture has usually been contained within the particular frame of reference of the respective state despite the subnational or supranational nature of ethnicity. In the past two decades, however, due to processes of globalization, the challenge posed by ethnicity to the nation-state, particularly in peripheral states, transcends the confines of the state. This seems to be so because globalization adds pressures to deregulate the economy in the periphery, as led by the core elites, weakening the legitimacy and bargaining power of peripheral national governments. Thus it seems that ethnicity and religion, particular9 nitzan ben shaul Disjointed Narratives in Contemporary Israeli Films 1 1 4 An Ethno-Cultural Kaleidoscope ly in peripheral states, have become a more effective frame of reference for the individual than that offered by the nation-state. This process is supported by what may be called a core-elite generated “glocalization” (Robertson 1995) discourse whereby differing communities or lifestyles (particularly peripheral ones) are presented as different-yet-equal in relation to core-elite communities. This global-reaching multicultural “democratic” perception expedites the obscuring of the economic-political dependence of peripheral communities on the core elites by detaching culture from political economy. Hence peripheral ethnic groups are economically and politically neutralized in this discourse by their presumed equal and legitimate cultural variety. In other words, the glocal legitimating of peripheral communities allows them to express their culture so as to alleviate the denial of their economicpolitical interests (Ben-Shaul 2006b). This essay focuses on the figuration of ethnicity in the highly acclaimed film Khatuna Meʾukheret (Late Marriage), released in 2001 and directed by Dover Koshashvili, an Israeli Jew of Georgian heritage. The film deals with the failed attempt of Zaza (played by Lior Ashkenazi), a thirty-one-year-old doctoral student of philosophy, to escape his Jewish Georgian ethnic origins and family. While his parents repeatedly attempt to find him a proper engagement with a young Georgian girl, Zaza reluctantly joins his parents in all these peculiarly funny tradition-laden visits to different candidates’ families but conducts a secret passionate love affair with Yehudit (played by Ronit Elkabetz), a thirty-four-year-old Israeli divorcée of Jewish Moroccan heritage with a six-year-old daughter. When Zaza’s father Yasha (played by Moni Moshonov) finds out about his son’s love affair, he and a bunch of relatives break into the woman’s apartment, where the loving couple is. They humiliate Zaza; his father picks up a sword hanging on the wall (left there by the woman’s Moroccan ex-husband and symbolizing Moroccan tradition and male chauvinism) and threatens to decapitate the woman. The terrified woman, noticing her lover’s passivity in the face of his relatives and realizing that he had spotted them coming and actually left the door open for them to come in, brokenheartedly asks him to leave. Now alone, Zaza reluctantly conforms to his family’s traditional demand that he should marry a younger Georgian girl in a prearranged marriage. In the film’s final wedding scene Zaza, standing half-drunk beside his young bride, picks up the microphone and invites his real love to come onstage. The suspense and embarrassment are relieved when one of the relatives urges the protagonist ’s mother to step forward to the stage. The film ends with Zaza joining his father in a traditional Georgian dance. As the latest expression of ethnicity in the...

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