Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema by Rachel Harris (review)

Rachel Harris’ Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema offers a nuanced and timely index of feminist filmmaking in Israel. Harris situates her analysis vis-à-vis the broad socio-historical context of Israeli filmmaking from the early nationalistic feature films of the 1950s to contemporary films that self-reflexively engage international conversations on the moving image, its production and reception. She also traces a creative arc from proto-feminist films of the 1980s to the emergence of women auteurs in our contemporary moment. Scholars in the fields of Israel Studies, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Film Studies, Jewish Studies, and Cultural Studies will appreciate the breadth of perspective offered by Harris. Warriors, Witches, Whores references an extensive body of feminist film scholarship, from Laura Mulvey’s work on scopophilia and voyeurism to Mary Devereaux’s concept of the male-dominated cinematic gaze to Claire Johnston’s formulation of counter-cinema. Harris then brings these ideas to bear on the Israeli context, noting how the gendered aspects of spectatorship and camera work have been filtered through the Zionist metanarrative. Building on feminist film scholarship from Israel, such as Orly Lubin’s work on body and territory, Nurith Gertz’s writing on traumatic memory, and Yael Munk’s exploration of the documentary as a gateway to feminist feature films, Harris then shows how Israeli feminist filmmaking in recent years has, in form and content, presented a challenge to the predominance of male-centered cine-writing and industry conventions.

Warriors, Witches, Whores is divided into three sections. The chapters included in the first section address the ways in which female perspectives and characters, when incorporated into representations of conflict and militarization, dislodge the frames of reference that situate war narratives as an exclusively masculine domain of cinematic expression. Harris takes as her point of departure films set against the backdrop of the Gulf War. Chapter 1 looks at how a foregrounding of domestic spaces, traditionally the domain of female and queer perspectives, offers an alternate vantage point from which to narrate the experience of conflict. Chapter 2 explores films released during or shortly after the Second Intifada and the types of female solidarities that form along the interstices of language and territory. Harris places a distinct emphasis on encounters between Arab and Jewish female protagonists and the type of dialogue that unfolds in liminal spaces. Chapter 3 considers depictions of women in the Israeli Defense Forces and reflects on the trope of bearing arms as alternately empowering and sexualizing.

The second section of Warriors, Witches, Whores looks at how feminist filmmaking in Israel has come to function as a restorative storytelling space for muted and marginalized female voices. Chapter 4 probes narrative and discursive underpinnings of films featuring the religious community in Israel. Harris identifies two strands of representation: The first involves a voyeuristic gaze at the private workings of religious domestic life. The second offers a nuanced departure from frames of reference that posit female agency and religious life as mutually exclusive. In Chapter 5, Harris explores everyday sites of resistance in films that she groups under the rubric of “ethnic-feminist filmmaking.” The folkloric traditions of ethnically marginalized groups represented in such films are cinematically refigured as binding agents for multi-generational female resistance to patriarchal norms. Chapter 6 opens with an analysis of films dominated by the “virgin/whore dialectic,” according to which women could fall into one of two categories of representation—the fertile body as a territory ripe for conquest or the prostituted and problematically raced body as a project for patriarchal recuperation. Harris then traces the dismantling of this dialectic by feminist filmmakers who represent women’s sexuality and pleasure from a female perspective.

The third section of Warriors, Witches, Whores takes into account how feminist cinema in Israel folds activism into its purview and becomes an avenue for social change. Chapter 7 examines representations of rape and sexual...