Capturing the gaze in film: Feminist critiques of Jewish and Islamic orthodoxy in Israel and Iran

Introduction

This article addresses issues of the body, sexuality, and intimacy in the documentary cinema of religious Jewish women in Israel. The discussion revolves mainly around two documentaries by Anat Yuta Zuria: ¹ Purity, which deals with immersion and sexuality, and Sentenced to Marriage, which follows women whose husbands refuse to grant them the get (divorce). The discussion raises questions of representation and tries to show how the cinematic medium has participated in the processes that Israeli religious feminism has sparked regarding these issues.

A dominant trend in the cinema of religious women in Israel, especially among graduates of the religious film school Ma’aleh, addresses questions of gender and body in religious and halakhic discourse. ² For example, Miriam Adler’s (2009) film Shira tells about a religious mother of six, exhausted by frequent pregnancies and deliveries. To avoid yet another pregnancy she tries to fake the date of immersion in the mikveh in order to elude intercourse with her husband during ovulation. Nava Nossan (2006) Hefetz's film, A Cohen's Wife, tells about a Cohen's wife who is raped by another man. According to halakhic law she is now forbidden to her Cohen husband, unless her testimony of the rape will be inadmissible. In the film the two options of divorce or non-acknowledgment of her suffering are presented as cruel and revolting.

In her short film Emuna, Natalie Haziza tells about an Ethiopian girl who immerses herself in the mikveh as part of her conversion to Judaism. Validation of the immersion requires the presence of a male court at the mikveh where the naked girl immerses (Haziza, 2006). Nurit Yacob Yanon’s (2013) film, A Story of a Woman and a Robe addresses the same issue. Abigail Sperber (2014), who directed Probation Time, is a founder of Bat Kol, a movement of religious lesbians, is a pioneer in treating these issues in her films. In her film Jeanne d’Arc, My Beloved, Shosh Greenfeld (2012) documents her coming out before her family. All these and more point to the intricate issues the films address and, moreover, to the desire not only to voice criticism but also to initiate changes in a woman’s place in a world based on halakhic values.

Zuria is a pioneer on the cinematic discourse of religious women in Israel. Her film Purity is the first in a trilogy (followed by Sentenced to Marriage and Black Bus). Each film addresses another issue in the lives and status of religious women (Yuta Zuria, 2002, 2004, 2010). The article examines, then, the first two films as works in both cinematic and religious feminist contexts.

Writings on Israeli religious feminism tend to view it as an extension of American orthodox feminism. For example, on the Web site of Kolech ³ (Your Voice), Michal Bergman (2018) writes in her article “Feminism for Beginners”: “Jewish religious feminism was born in the USA, and from there was imported to Israel.” Describing the gist of Jewish-American feminism, she shows, among other things, how it sheds light on the built-in gender inequality of Jewish tradition. As examples, she mentions the wedding ceremony and the divorce process, which may entail the status of aginut (literally: being “anchored” to marriage) for women, and the prohibition of women’s participation in the halakhic and Talmudic discourse. Bergman writes that according to the Jewish feminists, all these aspects are perceived in Jewish life as a “natural condition,” but actually it is an “education toward exclusion.”

The American feminist tradition Bergman addresses is certainly crucial to a description of the reception of Jewish feminism in Israel. Nevertheless, and despite ample scholarly and other writings about Israeli religious feminism, ⁴ I wish to examine the films that I have mentioned, which are treated as Israeli Jewish feminism, from a different angle, namely as part of the feminism practiced in the Middle East.

While Israeli religious feminism is historically connected to American feminism, approaching it from this Western angle is also part of a broader Israeli tendency that signifies how it is different from the geographical and cultural space of the Middle East. I would like to show that the feminism of religious women in Israel grapples in similar ways with similar issues found in Islamic feminism in the Middle East. Such a comparison will highlight critical possibilities that are now absent and could grow out of religious feminism in other areas of Jewish life in Israel.

To clarify this incipient effort, I discuss Yuta Zuria’s films from the perspective of Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s film, Divorce Iranian Style (Mir-Hosseini and Longinotto, 1998), which is a documentary about divorce proceedings at the family court in Teheran. Mir-Hosseini, an Iranian Muslim activist, scholar, and filmmaker lives and works mainly in Great Britain.

As I will explain further below, this film wrestles with many of Yuta Zuria’s questions. I would like to propose that Mir-Hosseini’s film and her scholarly and activist work offer a wider perspective for the cinema of religious women directors and for Jewish religious feminism in Israel. Specifically, I suggest that the affinity between Mir-Hosseini’s and Yuta Zuria’s cinematic work is not only thematic but its perspective allows us to probe broader questions about cinema, religious feminism, the connection between them, and their attempt to sidestep other issues in the Middle East. I undertake this comparison not in the spirit of the Israeli discourse, which usually refers to Iran and Israel as models of a religious state that increasingly abuses the secular rights of its citizens, but rather, to point out the potential of critical cooperation among women who accept the religious world in which they live. In other words, I would like to point out the similarity in the change advocated by both Muslim women and religious women in Israel within their respective religious worlds.

The position of these two directors, Mir-Hosseini and Yuta Zuria, is crucial to understanding the cinema they wish to promote. Mir-Hosseini, who documented Iranian women and who herself had been divorced in Iran, lives and works mainly in England. Yuta Zuria, who filmed herself immersing in the mikveh in her film Purity, grew up as a secular woman, married a religious man, and defines her religious identity as “fluid.” Even if Mir-Hosseini’s hybrid identity is linked to a geographic and Zuria’s to a theological or communal rift, the hybrid identity of both women and their positions outside and within the society in which they act, afford them not only a complex standpoint regarding the worlds they document but also the possibility of listening to and allowing the documented women to speak candidly. For example, in an article published in an anthology on new Iranian cinema, Mir-Hosseini describes the work that went into making her film and the film’s public reception. Among other things, she states that the experience of her own divorce in Iran and sharing it with the women at the family court elicited in some the trust necessary to open up before the camera (Mir-Hosseini, 2002).

Who is the “owner” of my sexual life: Purity by Yuta Zuria

Najma Moradiyan Rizi begins her article on women in Iranian cinema with a description of the reciprocity between Iranian cinema and social changes in Iran, in particular those affecting women’s lives. These social changes, she writes, challenged cinema, and in some cases, the latter contributed to progressive and liberalizing processes in Iranian society. Moradiyan Rizi (2015) argues that this interaction between cinema and society, especially with respect to culture, gender, and sexuality, is perceived by the younger generations as collaboration or cross-fertilization. In other words, cinema not only reflects social processes, but also in many ways it implicitly or explicitly challenges or defies norms and conventions of gender and actively participates in transformative processes. ⁵

Similarly to Moradiyan Rizi’s description of the interaction between cinema and gender conceptions in Iran, the cinema of religious women in Israel not only represents gender-related demands for change or actual changes in local religious communities but actively participates in them. Mir-Hosseini’s and Longelitto’s film, as well as Yuta Zuria’s are salient radical examples of these interactions—in their themes, in the influence they exerted on the documented characters, and in the way they attempted to affect and even change the religious discourse from a feminist perspective.

When Yuta Zuria studied at “Maale,” she requested to make a film about religious women and the mikveh as her final graduation project. Yet, the school administration was apprehensive, and for her final project she made another film. After graduation, she began fieldwork, on her film Purity. Like Mir-Hosseini, who tells about the personal circumstances that prompted her to make her film and about the presence of her own divorce during the filming process, Yuta Zuria begins to shoot Purity while confronted in her own life with the questions raised in her film. In an interview with Ran Tal and Anat Even in the periodical Takriv, she states explicitly:

The questions that preoccupied me revolved around the representation of situations and conflicts that were not only hidden from the public eye but also denied by and hidden from many women themselves… My life with a religious partner affected my cinematic activity… I chose to address the oppression of women in the religious sphere… and the subject I chose—female sexuality as reflected in religion—was almost a social taboo. In the first film, Purity, I wanted to address the experience of the female body, of menstruation and sexuality … I came from the secular world and suddenly joined a lifestyle that included these experiences… This allowed me to both experience and observe. To be inside and, on the other hand, to be outside and ask questions… My point of view was explicitly subjective and critical. ⁶

Natalie, one character, is divorced from a yeshiva student. In an early scene, she is standing in an empty apartment that was once her home during married life. The camera gazes at both the empty apartment and her face and bodily gestures as she tells and reexperiences the heartache and sense of failure she felt when her marriage fell apart. For example, in a heart-rending moment before the camera, she describes the exacting, abrupt transition from celibacy, during which the Halakha forbids all physical contact between the prospective spouses, to the wedding night with its halakhic duty of full sexual intercourse. She refers to this quick, traumatic transition and its attendant duty as “rape-like,” avoiding though, any equivalence between the sense of rape and her ex-husband’s treatment of her, since he was gentle and inexperienced himself. ⁷

Later in the movie, she tells how she eventually refused to observe the duty of immersion. This refusal not only entailed the sanction of permanent distance between her and her husband, since she is forbidden to him as long as she has not immersed, but it was also a motive for divorce.

In another scene, she reads aloud in front of the camera a passage from a halakhic text on attending an ill spouse during “distancing days.” Her voice and gaze slightly tinged with cynicism, she reads: “the woman may feed her ill husband, make his bed, and do anything else required. But the husband is not permitted to take care of his ill wife.” This prohibition is valid even when there is no one else to take care of her, lest contact with her should arouse sinful thoughts in him. This rule reveals, also through Natalie’s cynical and “detached” reading, what she perceives as a reduction of the woman to a sexual body, that is, a body examined and controlled through its sexual function.

Natalie attributes the halakhic construction of the woman as a sexual body for her husband’s sake or as a procreative body to the male halakhic poskim (decisors or adjudicators). In other words, like Jewish and Muslim religious feminists, she claim that the halakhic position on gender questions is not related to a female or male essence but to the gender construction elaborated by male adjudicators. The Halakha’s gender construction is, then, not related to the objects of discussion—women—but to those who formulate it, thus preserving patriarchic rule.

Natalie’s moving yet provocative character may be perceived also as someone who chose “to leave the game,” not only in her choice to get divorced but mainly, in her staunch refusal to immerse.

Kathy, who immigrated to Israel from England, is religious and wears a head covering. She suffers from extensive bleeding even between her periods, and the couple has experienced long periods during which Kathy is “forbidden to touch,” that is the couple cannot engage in intercourse. Kathy describes her need for physical closeness to her husband during forbidden periods as well. She also shares with Zuria her deep distress following delivery, when she suffered from protracted bleeding. It was precisely then that she was forbidden the consolation of sorely needed contact.

Among the disturbing scenes that punctuate Kathy’s quest for a solution is a documented conversation with a female “purity counselor.” The Halakha claims that there is a difference between the various bleedings between periods. The decision whether the bleeding woman can nevertheless immerse and live a sexual life depends on the nature of the bleeding. This is an issue over which rabbis usually adjudicate. Women show them pieces of bloodstained cloth according to which they determine the type of bleeding. ⁸ In recent years, one of the changes achieved by religious feminism permits women to exercise this function, and those who do so are called “purity counselors.” In the film, Kathy, who is deeply frustrated, tells a purity counselor that the original Halakha required distance between the spouses only during menstruation. Only later did the sages add the “seven clean days,” during which the woman is still forbidden to her husband and she must check whether she is still bleeding. This prohibition generated “halakhic sterility,” as some women ovulate during the seven days after menstruation. “When I think about all those women who were ‘sterile’ for years because of this, I’m horrified,” she says. This imposed “halakhic sterility,” she believes, is contrary to the Jewish ideal of raising a family and bearing children.

The third character Yuta Zuria documents is Shira, a young woman about to get married. The process she undergoes throughout the film contrasts starkly with Natalie’s description. During the early stages of filming, as part of the preparations for her imminent wedding, she visits the mikveh with her mother, who advises the brides in the community settlement in which they live. Shira does not view the mikveh and what it entails as a “spiritual experience.” The mother defends immersion with the traditional arguments that observance of nidda is not only the key to the preservation of desire between the spouses but also infuses intimate life with spiritual content. The mother’s arguments do not seem to impress Shira. Nevertheless, she insists that immersion is a practical duty Shira must perform. Toward the end of the film, this couple, now in their first week of their marriage, reappears on the screen. In what seems like a metamorphosis, they describe their feelings that the observance of nidda rules allows them to enter marriage equipped with a deeper relationship and to endow it with additional meaning.

In a conversation with Yuta Zuria, the journalist Yair Sheleg asks her about Shira’s metamorphosis (Sheleg, 2002). “This is a common phenomenon among young married women,” she explains. “At the early stages of marriage, strict observance of these laws is common, as is the belief that they contribute to couplehood. The questions recur frequently, only at later stages.” But even if in the interview Yuta Zuria explains Shira’s metamorphosis, she insists on including the mother’s traditional arguments and on showing Shira’s glad acceptance of family purity laws. In this sense, not only the characters but also the entire film scrupulously avoids “breaking the rules” and presents a complex picture of the issues it addresses.

As already mentioned, Yuta Zuria herself appears in the film as a woman wrestling with the same issues. In an impressive scene, just before and during immersion, she raises questions about the gaze and the power relations it entails—questions that the cinematic medium and halakhic immersion rules share. Since the Halakha forbids any barrier between the woman’s body and the water, she must brush her teeth and remove dirt from her entire body, including her ears, her navel, etc. as well as nail polish. Moreover, someone must be standing outside the mikveh to confirm that the immersing woman is fully covered by water. ⁹ Yuta Zuria documents the balanit (female attendant) as she checks whether the immersion rules are properly followed. “Did you brush your teeth?” she asks before the camera, “did you clean your navel?” The camera reveals an embarrassed Yuta Zuria admitting that she did not brush her teeth.

Yet, the camera reveals something else too. Foucault suggests that the internalization of power transforms it into something apparently natural. Discussing institutions such as universities, hospitals, and prisons, he points out that their requirement of discipline (punctuality, control of bodily functions, concentration, refinement of passions, and of immediate feelings) prompts the individual to cultivate internal self-discipline. These disciplinary norms are internalized to the point that the individual no longer experiences them as an institutional creation but as “inborn” and natural (Foucault, 1982).

In this sense, as Yuta Zuria says in the Takriv interview mentioned above, the individual is not always aware of how she has been socialized into observing the halakhic disciplinary rules of immersion in the mikveh. The camera set up in front of these routine acts that many women have internalized, briefly removes the mantle of apparent naturalness and looks at them from the outside. The very setup of the camera is in many ways what Foucault called resistance to power.

Yet Foucault’s argument about the gaze and its utilization is more fundamental. His discussion on the panopticon in prison architecture addresses the relationship between the gaze and power. This issue applies specifically, on the one hand, to the use of the attendant’s gaze at the immersing woman and, on the other hand, to the camera’s presence during the halakhic ritual of immersion. A prison observer, Foucault explains, can see everyone without being seen. Since the individual is forced to act as though he is under constant surveillance, even when he is not, he etches the power relations within himself, turning them into his own source of subjection. This model of the panopticon, Foucault believes, is an architectural metaphor for forms of internalized discipline. But according to Foucault (1980), the individual thus exercises the double function of both object and wielder of power.

Following Foucault, I argue that the camera filming the surveilling gaze at the immersing body both looks at this gaze from the outside and shows how the immersing woman has internalized the power exerted over her. For example, when an embarrassed Yuta Zuria admits before the attendant that she did not brush her teeth, she suddenly seems like a girl facing a scolding parent. Yet, besides revealing this internalization and “collaboration,” the camera, set up by Yuta Zuria herself to reveal the attendant’s gaze at her, also enables the exercise of a different power. The gaze at the attendant’s face, as I explain later, upends the power relations, exposing her own assimilation, in her very body, of what seems to the outside viewer as a disturbing invasion of privacy.

Following the preparations, Yuta Zuria films also a part of the immersion itself. The camera’s location in this scene performs the important function of reproducing the attendant’s gaze, that is the gaze the Halakha requires in order to sanction the immersion. However, this reproduction exposes the naked immersing body, whose presence on the screen the Halakha, of course, forbids. Filming a naked female body raises therefore yet another issue from both a cinematic and a halakhic perspective. Female nakedness and its cinematic use, as highlighted in this scene, touches on a broader and more fundamental question about feminist cinema, on the one hand, and a cinema committed to religious norms, on the other hand. To discuss the dilemma Yuta Zuria is grappling with and the resistance the film suggests, I would like to examine them from a wider theoretical and cinematic perspective.

In her paradigmatic article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey discusses the relation between pleasure, including sexual pleasure, and film watching. “The cinema,” she writes, “offers a number of possible pleasures” (Mulvey, 1999: 835). Referring to Freud, who considers scopophilia a central component of sexuality, she maintains that watching films could have the possibility of “perceiving other people as objects by subjecting them to a curious, controlling gaze.” Mulvey links scopophilic sexual pleasure to film watching in a dark movie theater on a bright screen. The alternating light and shadow create a sense of a voyeuristic barrier. In her work, Mulvey addresses the way women are usually the objects of cinematic viewing, constituted as such by the male gaze.

In a subsequent reference to her earlier article, Mulvey writes about the similar complexity Iranian filmmakers are facing. In the afterword to a collection of essays on Iranian cinema, Mulvey (2002) points out the paradox inherent in approaching Iranian cinema from a feminist perspective. Despite the polarity between the feminist and the religious conceptions, both offer a common challenge to filmmakers. On the one hand, Mulvey claims, Islamic censorship exacerbates the male perception of women as inferior and, especially, the fear of female sexuality. In other words, precisely the required modesty confirms the male perception on women as an object. The demand for the body’s concealment is therefore contrary to the feminist perspective. On the other hand, the religious demand for modesty seems equivalent to the feminist demand not to present women as a sexual object on the screen. Still Mulvey says, that despite the differences between, on the one hand, the Iranian motivations behind censorship and the filmmakers who try to contend with them, and on the other hand, the feminist views that are critical of Hollywood’s “objectification” of the female body, both conceptions attempt to wrestle with taboos and different means of representation as they address the “sexualization” of the woman’s body. The presence of more female directors behind the camera, Mulvey argues, will increase alternative forms of representation both on the Hollywood screen and regarding Iranian censorship (258). ¹⁰

Women directors committed to either Islamic or Jewish rules share the same dilemma. Those who introduce a camera to the mikveh, to the rabbinical court in Israel, or to the family court in Iran are tackling a question similar to Mulvey’s. Subjected to the establishment’s exterior censorship and committed to the feminist or religious conception, these women are suggesting a complex approach to the issue of the gaze. Contending with exterior censorship and the desire to both observe halakhic rules and view them critically, though without “breaking the rules”—all of these call for complex solutions.

This struggle is visible also in Yuta Zuria’s other films and in Mir-Hosseini’s film. For example, in Zuria’s Sentenced to Marriage, the rabbinical court does not permit her to film the proceedings. Paradoxically, precisely “this censorship” allows only women to appear on the screen, whereas the court’s and the husband’s representatives, since they are not part of the film or the story, are unable to present their own version of what is seen in the film.

Mir-Hosseini, however, films the way women abide by the rules of censorship. In one scene, a woman who arrives to the proceedings not only wraps a headscarf around her head but also removes all of her makeup to conform to the court’s requirements. Both directors thus point to the censorship—to what is “absent” from the film—or open the possibility of observing what goes on in the rabbinical court from a female perspective.

Yet besides the censorship these directors are both subjected to and expose, it seems that, like Mulvey, they propose a more complex feminist demand. Not only do they refuse, in Mulvey’s words, to present objects of scopophilic pleasure on the screen, but they argue that the modesty rules, in their effort to regulate and surveil intimacy and female sexuality, also construct the woman as an object of pleasure, even if this pleasure is subjected to halakhic rules. Thus, Mir-Hosseini’s frequent filming of women as they instinctively adjust their headscarf before the judge alludes actually to the internalization of the disciplinary rules Foucault describes; they turn into one’s second “nature.” The camera that films them adjusting their headscarf before the judge or removing their makeup reveals not only the disciplined modesty imprinted into these women but also the transformation of the female body into an object through disciplining.

In the immersion scene in Purity, Yuta Zuria offers an even more complex, radical interpretation of the gaze on and off the screen. Since only Yuta Zuria’s hands are visible through the water during the immersion, she reveals here another gaze. The camera’s gaze at Zuria’s face before the immersion, as with her hands visible through the water, is the attendant’s gaze. The objectification that emerges here does not elicit the sexual pleasure of the spectator, but the “halakhik gaze.” The presence of the camera and pointing at it, as the director herself is being filmed, conflate into Foucault’s term “resistance” or what Laura Mulvey’s suggests is an “other narrative option,” which not only refuses to turn the female character into a voyeuristic object but also shows another kind of voyeurism, with which the camera is analogous. If the attendant exercises a halakhic function, the cinematic gaze exercises a critical function. Its very presence there exposes the necessary and customary aspects of the ritual—the exterior gaze that inspects the woman’s naked body, the alien gaze she needs so that the immersion, or the absence of blood stains on a piece of cloth, will permit intercourse with her husband. ¹¹ This involvement of the external gaze in matters between a woman and herself or between her and her spouse is subjected to a new gaze born precisely from the identity between that alien gaze and the camera’s location.

But Zuria looks also at the attendant. Zuria’s gaze is the gaze of the immersing woman who is directing her own film. She puts the camera inside the mikve when she is immersing in it; it not only reveals but also controls the latter. Their power relations in the mikveh appear in another light when Zuria’s gaze rests on her, revealing what transforms her into someone engaged in another woman’s bodily business. As a woman, the attendant is exposed here as part of halakhic patriarchy.

In its making, but also with its screenings and the debates it spawned, Purity is part of a candid, bold discourse on questions about sexuality and intimacy that religious communities have developed in recent years. The issues that emerge in the film—such as “halakhic sterility,” the surveillance of the female body, and more—triggered a far-reaching discussion beyond the film itself, and in some of the fields involved, real changes have been affected. ¹²

I would like to argue that the cinematic medium, in both Mir-Hosseini’s film and Zuria’s films, is not a mere documentary tool but also a practice that exposes what is hidden in the inner sanctum, which it redeems from the “private sphere” through its cinematic gaze and it attributes to halakhic practice.

Divorce Iranian style or rabbinical court style in Israel

In front of the camera, in scenes filmed almost entirely in the courthouse, the lives of couples unfold in the film Divorce Iranian Style, in all their pain, rage, courage, and hope. In all these stories, a woman who wishes to claim her right to life and choice is facing both the court and the camera. For example, the film documents the proceedings in the case of a woman who wishes to keep custody of her daughter, whom she is about to lose because she remarried. Another story tells about a sixteen-year-old girl married to a man almost twenty years her senior. She confronts his family, demanding not only a divorce but also “the bride money” ¹³ stipulated in the marriage contract in case of divorce.

In another scene, the judge urged a woman to try to live another month with the husband she wishes to divorce. Looking at the camera rather than at the judge, she replies: “And if he’ll do something to me? He’s capable of anything.” The gaze she aims at the camera underscores not only the director’s presence but also the camera’s validation of her testimony. That is, the camera situates the dialogue not only between a powerless woman and a judge; it reveals not only her situation with respect to her husband but also the judges’ responsibility when they impose “matrimonial peace” on violent husbands and their wives. As in Yuta Zuria’s films, here too the camera has the power to transform the private into public and to open up possibilities to women in similar situations. The camera is thus a form of “sisterhood” capable of real political action.

In an article on the film’s making, Mir-Hosseini describes the hardships the Iranian authorities imposed during the preparations to make the film, as well as the women’s apprehensions to reveal their stories before the camera. One of the film’s impressive aspects is the willingness of both the judge and the court’s secretary to participate in the documentation, thus allowing those women’s husbands to appear on the screen (Mir-Hosseini, 2002). This is impressive also in light of the rabbinical court’s prohibition to film inside the courthouse and, moreover, its attempt to impede the film’s production or those involved in it. When the film came out, the chief of the high rabbinical court claimed it was mendacious and falsified facts. Moreover, as I explain later, the rabbinical court that handled the case of one woman documented in the film forbade Re’ut, the rabbinical pleader who represented her, to appear any further in court, alleging that she had acted dishonestly (see Barzilai, 2005). The reluctance of Israeli rabbinical courts to acknowledge facts and their opposition to the woman, who acted through the camera, is all the more disturbing when one takes into account Mir-Hosseini’s filming in Iran. The assumption of liberalism implied in the Israeli discourse, including those who are religious, yet denied to its Iranian counterpart, is inexact in this case, even if it does have a basis.

As in Divorce Iranian Style, the plot of Sentenced to Marriage is subjected to processes imposed from without. In each case, the lengthy proceedings at the courthouse and the invariable subjection of events to the court’s agenda turn the production into a complex and exacting activity. Each director tackles this complexity in her own way. Due to the internal and external constraints of production, to the fear they might lose their permit to film, to consequences on their lives outside Iran, and more, Mir-Hosseini and her partner had limited time to film in Iran. They filmed at the court almost daily for an entire month. Subsequently, they chose from the material the women and stories to be edited into a film.

Yuta Zuria works differently, also because her filming circumstances are different. Since she lives in Israel, the production period can be longer. Furthermore, because the rabbinical court does not cooperate with the production of the film, there is nothing she has to lose and she can therefore continue filming without fearing she would lose the already limited filming possibilities. She films for a very long period, with interruptions of course, and in the process follows the stories of the three women whose cases are handled by the rabbinical court.

Yet despite the different working procedures, both films document almost the same situations: the court hallways, the women who accompany the women who wish to get a divorce, the court’s arbitrary conduct, the husbands’ manipulative attempts to prevent a de facto separation from becoming de jure, the respect women wish to show the court or the husband on whose agreement they depend, and the protests women voice before the court and the camera. At times it seems that all these “materials,” filmed in entirely different environments and subjected to different religions, could be edited into a single film that would tell a similar story: a story of jealousy, hierarchy, dependence, greed, cruelty, of children who pay a price—all which underlie the plot in both Iran and Israel.

In both films, the directors present the women not only as victims but also as individuals striving to change their lives. For example, one Iranian woman is filmed in her home as she tells about her new love and her plans. Another is seen facing her husband’s family and demanding the bride money she was promised in case of divorce. Facing the many men in the room, she insists on being heard and on getting what she deserves from her and her husband’s family. Yuta Zuria, too, documents the women not only as being “denied divorce” but as living a full, active life, at home and outside, in addition to their quest for freedom. For example, she documents one woman as a radio host at a haredi radio station and another woman while she is painting the apartment she moved into with her children.

Entrenched also in the Jewish marriage contract, the patriarchy of the rabbinical court stands out in Yuta Zuria’s film not merely because only women are seen onscreen, but that, paradoxically, the screen offered them a visibility they are deprived of in court. It transpires not only through the cases the court handles, whose details gradually emerge throughout the film. The story of patriarchy unfolds mainly in the documented waiting in the court’s hallways. As the film proceeds, the very act of waiting becomes the film’s and the women’s pivotal story—a desperate waiting for hours and days in the court’s hallways, for the man, the husband, or for his or the dayan’s (religious judge’s) statements, for husbands who refuse to appear, for those smuggled out by rabbis to elude the police waiting for them outside, for those who try to extort money from their wives in exchange for the divorce, for scheduled proceedings that do not take place, for answers the court finally says will be sent by mail.

As in Purity, where it reveals the power relations imposed by the gaze, in this film too the camera deploys the power of resistance. The exposure of the waiting, of the conversations conducted under its auspices, of the women’s dependence on the husbands’ “utterances,” offers women the possibility of action, though only without “breaking the rules.” In the Israeli case, because family laws are under the jurisdiction of the rabbinical court, breaking the rules of patriarchy may result in the severest punishment for women, that is prevention from entering a new relationship. ¹⁴ The camera exposes this dependence—what is hidden in the inner sanctum and what women are ashamed of or too exhausted to articulate—as well as the husband’s or the court’s power manifested in violent coerciveness, abuse, cruelty, and utter arbitrariness.

For example, while one woman and her mother are waiting in the hallway for the scheduled proceedings they have been expecting for months, the husband once again does not show up. The mother, in contrast to her restraint throughout the trial, breaks the rules of polite speech and, in her emotional turmoil, blows up at the judges, revealing before the camera that the husband has been living with another woman for years and has fathered children with her. While the court, the mother says, is aware of the husband’s new life, it deprives his wife of the same right. She is crying out against this iniquity and demanding an answer from the female rabbinical pleader. ¹⁵ The mother asks an existential question relevant to herself, her daughter and other women: why can the husband get on with his life, live and father children with another woman, whereas her daughter depends on her husband’s agreement to divorce her, without which she will risk sanctions if she lives with another man and the children she will bear him will have the status of bastard.

The rabbinical pleader, a religious woman committed to the Halakha, is trying to explain that this difference is deeply ingrained in the long-standing conceptions of men and women as distinct. Her reply thus implies the conflict of religious feminists committed to the Halakha. To function in the rabbinical court and help the women she represents, she must accept the rules of the system. If she contests the law that only the woman needs the divorce to get on with her life, she will not only be dismissed from her position but will mainly hurt the women she represents.

Zuria’s documentation, like Mir-Hosseini’s also seems to have decisively impacted the events. By her presence behind the camera and around the women, she seems like an activist who, similar to Mir-Hosseini, sees writing and documentation as well as the different representations of these women, as a political act to which the cinema is committed. Thus, one woman, in a press interview after she received her divorce, tells about Yuta Zuria’s significant presence throughout the entire process (Barzilai, 2005). She said in this interview that she had finally obtained her divorce after a court demanded that Reut, the female rabbinical pleader, withdraw from her case. The judges justified their unusual request with the claim that the pleader had tried to involve the media in order to expose the rabbinical court’s injustice toward that woman, which they believed had not been inflicted on her. It seems the rabbinical judges’ aversion to the rabbinical pleader is connected also to the presence of Zuria’s camera. Yet, if the rabbis could not prevent the filming of a documentary film in which they refused to appear, appealing to the media is an act against which they can enforce sanctions.

However, even if the camera’s presence seems to have caused short-term damage to this woman, its public “testimony,” reinforced by the director’s support, pressured the rabbinical court to act more resolutely on her and other women’s similar cases. Furthermore, such action would preserve the court’s reputation. In this respect, Mir Hosseini’s film had similar effects. Here is yet another example of the relation between these films’ documentary character and their role as “agents” beyond the documented world.

Furthermore, the film’s screening at festivals and in various forums—on television channels, at the Knesset, etc.—like the camera’s setup at the rabbinical court in Israel or at the family court in Iran, allowed an “external gaze”—the kind that does not partake in power relations. It looks at the situation and undermines the given power relations, even if incipiently and partially.

The men—the husbands or the judges—are, of course, a central part of the stories the films tell. The cooperation of the Iranian judge allowed looking at the husband, at his face when the judge sends him to be tested for sexual adequacy, or when he refuses to grant his much younger wife the divorce she requested. The camera looks at the husband at eye level, exposing what is hidden in the inner sanctum. The women who are subordinated to the husband, his family’s or the judge’s power to free them become, also through the camera, subjects with a gaze who own their bodies and lives.

But in Yuta Zuria’s film too, the couples and certainly the women, are not subjected only to the male gaze, including the adjudicators. The men’s reluctance to look straight into the camera, at the way they reproduce the relations of power and subjection between women and men, reveals what women are ashamed of and subjected to. Both films thus look at what is hidden from the eye, woven into power networks, and with their direct gaze participate in what makes change possible.

Female Torah scholars: Feminist perspectives on the halakhic discourse on women

The body, sexuality, intimacy, surveillance, and control of the female body—all these preoccupy both Muslim and Jewish feminists. The films Purity, Sentenced to Marriage, and Divorce Iranian Style grant a generous space to these questions, allowing the women not only to tell their stories but also to state their views on halakhic conceptions of the female body and sexuality.

To underpin their arguments with a wider perspective, I would like to address first the key practices of Islamic feminism presented by Mir-Hosseini. Her writings on the relation between Islam and feminism belong to a broad, rich body of writing about Islam from a feminist perspective. They are not only fascinating in themselves but also shed light on similar practices suggested by Jewish religious feminists both in Israel and abroad. ¹⁶ Nevertheless, I would like to make use of her work. I believe that the way she links feminism, Islam, and cinematic documentation, as well as her writings on her film and its context, invites a challenging approach to the documentary cinema of religious women in Israel. In an article on zina laws—which prohibit sexual relations between non-married couples (single individuals, those married to others, homosexuals, etc.)—she suggests examining these laws within the wider context of the Islamic surveillance of the female body and sexuality. One of her principal arguments is that these laws rely on two cardinal constructions: female sexuality as the husband’s property and the female body as an object of shame. In her view, these constructions rely on a patriarchal reading of Islamic laws that intends to keep female sexuality under surveillance. Like Jewish religious feminists, she reads these laws within their context rather than judging them through an anachronistic reading. Furthermore, the questions she raises about the context within which these laws were promulgated prompt rethinking of women’s legalized subjection to male authority and of male ownership of their sexuality (Mir-Hosseini, 2010).

Like Israeli religious feminists, Mir-Hosseini is careful not to defy all religious laws. ¹⁷ Yet precisely this avoidance and the indication of the times and context within which these laws were implemented allow her to highlight their relativism, and her suggestion to change them is an alternative from within. She links the legislation that constructs the conception of the woman’s body as the man’s property to the patriarchal ethos and to women’s exclusion from religious texts and the production of religious knowledge.

In the film Purity, Natalie interprets the halakhic prohibition to touch one’s menstruating ill wife while helping her, as a rule that constructs the woman’s main physical existence around her sexual or childbearing function. Similarly, Mir-Hosseini contends that the male-dominated legislation has reduced women to merely a sexual existence justified by Islamic law. The marriage contract, as she describes it in the Islamic context, and in the scene of the furious mother in Yuta Zuria’s film Sentenced to Marriage, has become an instrument of male control.

The arguments Mir-Hosseini raises can be heard also in some of the statements the female interviewees utter in the film. For example, in her conversation with the purity counselor, Kathy claims, as pointed out, that originally male contact with the menstruating woman was forbidden for seven days, whereas the seven “clean” days are a late rabbinical addition. Natalie, after reading aloud the halakhic rule that forbids the husband to attend to his ill wife during menstruation, states explicitly: “Men wrote the halakha.” Besides pointing to the male origin of the Halakha, both Kathy and Natalie describe the contradiction between halakhic rules and other laws that also underpin the Jewish or human worldview. Kathy points out the contradiction between the “sterility” caused by strict observance of nidda rules and the Jewish ideal of procreation. Natalie describes her collapse following deliveries and parenthood and the obligation to get pregnant in this physical and emotional state.

Like Moridian Rizi, quoted at the beginning of this article, who describes the interaction between cinema and social changes in Iran (especially on gender-related issues), the women who tell their stories on Yuta Zuria’s screen also challenge the discourse beyond it. As in Mir-Hosseini’s work, in religious cinema too, religious feminist writing and religious activism go hand in hand. While one cannot exactly trace the process of this interaction, the examples given in this article reveal a mutual influence, as do the documented activities of religious feminist organizations such as “Yad laisha” (Hand for women), of rabbinical pleaders and, in the film itself, of purity advisors.

Changes introduced in recent years, such as the ruling that admits immersion without the attendant, doctors’, and others’ critical approach to “halakhic sterility,” measures taken by some rabbinical courts in matters of aginut (being “chained” to marriage), and even the concern of religious communities with issues of LGBT identities are entwined with the work of religious filmmakers. Thus, the cinema of Mir-Hosseini, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of Yuta Zuria, Yakobs Yinon, Abigail Sperber, and other female filmmakers, in many ways not only expresses but also participate in the process of feminist change that challenges both religious communities and individual lives.

Afterword: Sisters or cousins? On Jewish feminism in Israel, Islamic feminism and sisterhood

Writing about Yuta Zuria’s films from the perspective of Mir-Hosseini’s work is not a self-evident procedure. Zuria’s films belong to the context of Jewish feminist activism and scholarship in Israel, whereas Mir-Hosseini’s work has grown out of Islamic feminist activism and scholarship in and outside Iran. Moreover, cinema is not Mir-Hosseini’s exclusive occupation. Still, her activity can stimulate a revaluation of the relation between Islamic feminism and Jewish feminism also within the Israeli context.

Islam and Judaism are both “halakhic” (juridical) religions sustained, among others, by an internalization of their laws and a surveillance of daily life, though not only in gender-related contexts. The similarity between these religious conceptions is related to the similar forms of feminist struggle within these religions. The similarity between the interpretive procedures suggested by Islamic and Jewish feminists, between the films and between Jewish and Islamic activists—all these challenge the thought on Jewish feminism in the context of the Middle East.

The similarity between the practices and questions that concern Jewish and Islamic religious feminists also challenges the thought on what feminist scholarship calls “sisterhood,” that is the joint action of women from various places and backgrounds as “sisters in struggle.” I believe that the possibility of sisterhood among religious feminists active in the same Middle Eastern area, let alone in Israel, is a crucial question that has to remain open. The contradiction between the struggle for gender equality, and the acceptance of the power relations between Jews and Palestinians in Israel, has to take issue with both religious and secular feminism in Israel.

Despite the geographical and cultural distance, the Iranian example can challenge the Israeli case on this question as well. In her book Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran, Nima Naghibi (2007) examines the significance of the collaboration between western and Iranian feminists in joint activities. She opens her discussion by noting that as a Muslim living in France, she feels she represents two different identities: on the one hand, she is an “other” for the West; on the other hand, she wishes to offer an alternative to Muslim identity within her own community as well as to others.

It seems that not only many Muslim women in Europe but also religious women in Israel may share Naghibi’s feeling. Their signification as “others” in the public sphere, with or without a head covering, is part of their complex position with respect to feminist or other civilian issues. On the one hand, they are signified as “others” in relation to secular women, on the other hand, they assume, because they are required to, the double role of representing another critical possibility of religious life and of calling into question the identity between religiousness and patriarchy (or conservatism). In this sense, the presence of Muslim and Jewish religious women in the public sphere is challenged and challenges in similar ways: on the one hand, even when they cover their hair or observe a religious lifestyle, they refuse to be perceived as belonging to what is signified as “other,” and, on the other hand, they offer a critical alternative both nationally and within their communities. That is, the sisterhood between Jewish and Muslim women in Israel can, ostensibly, both challenge questions of ethnicity and nationality, and cross-fertilize each other.

Naghibi’s discussion about this sisterhood, which is cardinal to feminist thought, touches not only on the challenging collaboration among religious women from various religions as they confront patriarchy, but also on the more basic question she raises about the sisterhood between privileged and nonprivileged women. In her view, the collaboration between Western women and privileged Iranian women places the latter in a privileged position vis-à-vis Iranian women from other classes.

In the Israeli context, one can read Naghibi’s writings in various ways. Within the Jewish religious feminist discourse in Israel, critical voices have claimed that this “white feminism” leaves no room for Oriental religious women. In other words, this sisterhood exists between privileged Western religious women. Reading it only as a direct extension of American feminism is in many ways part of this “feminist whiteness.” Of course, this argument applies to Israeli feminism as a whole, and the movement Akhoti (My Sister) is active within and against it precisely regarding these questions.

The sisterhood between Jewish and Muslim women, certainly in religious contexts, hardly exists in Israel. ¹⁸ Despite the similarity between the practices and themes of these feminisms, Jewish feminism in Israel prefers to eschew not only collaboration with Islamic feminists but also political questions unrelated to gendered power relations. Religious feminism avoids, almost explicitly, questions related to Israeli politics in order to allow Jewish religious women of various political affiliations to collaborate toward the same goals. Still, despite the importance of this collaboration, the “intra-Jewish sisterhood” denies the existence of other power relations and the privileges these women enjoy. In other words, the power relations the Israeli occupation entails between Jewish and Palestinian women are not only silenced but also perceived as “irrelevant” to the religious feminist discourse. The sisterhood between Jewish feminists, like nationhood, is perceived as above the politics of the occupation. The contradiction of this feminist position, its blindness to the power position of Jewish women within the “Israeli patriarchy,” to the oppression the occupation imposes, is repressed, silenced, and hardly has any place in the religious feminist discourse in Israel.

In Israel, as in the West, the signification of Muslim women and the concern for their rights is almost automatically intertwined with the perception of Islam as primitive, and, as Mir-Hosseini and many others have argued, Islam is increasingly identified with the support of terrorism. This signification seems to “exempt” the sisterhood of Jewish religious women in Israel from its apparent commitment to include Muslim women. The labeling of female Muslim citizens and residents as primitive, dangerous, “a security problem,” etc., is part of the intention to set exclusionary boundaries between Jewish and Muslim societies.

Following Eduard Said (1978), Albert Memmi (2000, 2006), and others, who address the way societies justify racism or power relations, I would argue that the way that Muslims in Israel are considered as violent and primitive, and the perception of entrenched differences between Jewish and Muslim women are used as a justification for the maintenance of power relations between Jews and Muslims. The persistent avoidance of political questions or of collaboration beyond gender issues is part of this justification. The identification with Muslim women from an egalitarian rather than a hierarchical perspective, especially if one bears in mind the double hierarchy (gendered and ethnic-national) Muslim women are subjected to in Israel, can defy “Jewish patriarchy” as well, and, furthermore, it not only threatens many feminists, but also challenges the critics of patriarchy as well.

The challenge facing Jewish feminism, whether religious or secular, is thus precisely the acknowledgment of its dual position. The status of Jewish women as subjected to patriarchy but also as privileged by virtue of their Jewishness challenges the intellect, but also requires grappling with the responsibility for the place of Israeli non-Jewish citizens and of those who live under Israeli occupation without citizenship.

Yuta Zuria’s and Mir-Hosseini’s films and the work of Jewish and Muslim activist scholars reveal, then, not only similarities in content, questions, and forms of activism, but also opens the option of “sisterhood,” and locates Jewish feminism in the context of the Middle East. The “sisterhood” they invite between Jewish and Muslim women in the Israeli context would not be limited to the collaboration of privileged women but would act out of the awareness of power relations between Jews and Palestinians in the same context. These are the very reasons why the films and works of these women are paving a challenging way for Israeli feminism as a whole, and religious feminism in particular, to engage in a complex and incisive critique of power relations, otherness, and arbitrary power that are unfortunately perceived as “natural” in other Israeli contexts as well.