ABSTRACT
The Israeli sodomy law, a remnant from the British Mandate beginning with the British conquest of the area after World War I and ending in May 1948, has not been enforced since 1963, but in 1988 same-sex sexual conduct was actually decriminalized. A trend toward a legally formal and culturally public egalitarianism for lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals seems to quite often follow and coincide with liberalizing changes of the family, at least in the West. At the same time, however, because in Israel the Jewish-Israeli family has been among the material and ideological cornerstones of the Zionist nation-building project, changes in the family seem to require changes in this project. In the film, the playing of the game Machboim loses its innocence because the players, a group of adolescent Jewish boys in Jerusalem just before the 1948 Jewish-Israeli War of Independence, turn the game into a hunt for Jews who spy for either the British Mandate or the Palestinians.
