On Harris's Warriors, Witches, Whores

On Harris's Warriors, Witches, Whores Karen E. H. Skinazi Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema. By Rachel S. Harris. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. 324 pp., ISBN 978-0814339671. US $35.99 The size of Rachel Harris's book on Israeli cinema might not compare to, say, David Biale et al.'s door-stopper book on Hasidism, but it aims to be as comprehensive and far more attentive to women. Harris tracks a panoply of Israeli films, dividing and subdividing genres, and finding ultimately that despite the large arena that constitutes Israeli cinema today, there are a very limited number of roles women tend to play in it—namely, as the title suggests, warriors, witches, and whores. Yet this story of Israeli cinema is rapidly changing as women take their turns behind the cameras, directing a new feminist vision of the nation—and herein lies a second argument coursing through the book. Harris builds on the scholarship of Ella Shohat, whose landmark book Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (1989) launched the study of Israeli cinema,1 as well as that of Yael Zerubavel, Yaron Peleg, Shai Ginsburg, Nava Dushi, and Dan Chyutin, among others, by bringing a feminist lens to bear on this substantial body of film. Warriors, Witches, Whores is divided into three sections that don't quite match the book's title. Although the first section indeed covers women in the military (warriors), the second section focuses on religious identity and sexuality (witches, whores), engaging intimate portraits of womanhood. The third section is where we really see the emergence of the optimistic element of the monograph, in "New Directions in Israeli Feminist Filmmaking." [End Page 108] Perhaps it is unsurprising that militaristic films highlight a masculine ideal, at once patriotic and patriarchal. Harris begins the book with reference to Israel's first full-length feature film, Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1955) to show us how this ideal is built on the sacrifice of Israeli women (quite literally: as Harris reminds us, a UN observer waves the Israeli flag and then drapes it over the dead body of a female soldier to declare the nation's victory). The exclusively male-subject/woman-object version of the Israeli military film, however, is not the only possibility these days. Female war heroes have emerged in Israeli films, and a figure like the mefakedet (commanding officer, female), with its roots in early Zionist (ostensibly egalitarian) discourse, appears as a direct counterpart to the iconic male soldier. Of course, it's not clear whether changing the gender of the hero does a great deal to change the patriarchal nature of the otherwise classically militaristic film. In addition to this parallel figure, many others diverge from the traditional one. In fact, as Harris demonstrates, in the 1990s, the winds of war films shifted directions. Using the academically maligned genre of "chick flicks," which Harris argues shrouds feminist politics in a popular, unthreatening veneer, filmmakers of the Gulf War era decentered Hill 24's patriotic/patriarchal thrust, putting women's subjectivity and daily experiences at the heart of their fare. Iraqi missiles might be falling, but their role in these films' plots lies in the context of the female protagonists' lives. Rather than toting a gun, a female protagonist of this era is more likely to be pictured watching the war on a TV screen or through a window; for her, the experience of the war is mediated. By extension, her domestic, removed experience is a testament to the "feminized" and "digitized" nature of that particular conflict, which sits uneasily in Israel's canon of heroic masculine warmongering. Although the "chick flick" is considered frivolous, Harris compellingly shows that when it is set against the traditional Israeli war narrative, "the paramount preoccupation with national survival" is redirected to a "more generalized pursuit of happiness" (44). Moreover, women serve as a "counterpoint to the battlefield" in other ways (50). For films that deal with the Palestine–Israel conflict, putting women (Palestinian, Jewish, Druze) in primary roles often highlights women's shared terrain, at times diverting attention from and at times complicating ethnic, national, and geographic disputes. Turning to

Argument (complex analysis · Art · Art history · Literature · Movie theater · Political science · Politics · Portrait · Scholarship · Section (typography · Sociology · State (computer science · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society