ABSTRACT
This chapter engages the questions of marriage and divorce in modern and contemporary Israel through the lens of film. In contrast to the Israeli state's mostly secular Zionist principles, control of family status has been defined by Jewish Orthodox law. Beyond the goal of limiting intermarriages and thus maintaining—indeed, increasing—a predominantly Jewish demography, Israel's rabbinical hold on matters of personal and family law has also contributed to the reinforcement of traditional gender and power relations between women and men. As active interlocutors of Israel's sociopolitical, ethnic, and religious realms, representations of marriage and divorce in film, perhaps more so than any other medium, explore the tension between Judaism's traditional patriarchal structure and contemporary feminist currents, and also between secular and religious law, practice, and society. Different films and film genres engage questions of gender, examined here from three main angles: the first, on cinematic narratives of the Ashkenazi and Mizrachi populations; the second, on secular portrayals; the third, on religious characters. Feminist perspectives, including the voices of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox women, both on screen and beyond, clearly challenge and deconstruct some of the patriarchal strictures that control Jewish matrimony.
