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

Chapter Five. Intersectionality and Alliances

195 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, di- 196 • Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel lemmas, 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 ʿam eḥad (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 victim- Intersectionality and Alliances • 197 ization 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...