The Charedi feminist icon who seems to be defending a rapist - The Jewish Chronicle

What happens when a filmmaker you believe is a feminist icon writes a script that could be interpreted as be an elaborate, artful defence of a rapist?

Since her debut in 2012, I have been fascinated by the work of Breslover Chasidic filmmaker Rama Burshtein-Shai. I went to see her first film, Fill the Void, at a small, independent cinema in New Jersey, dragging along my friend Mary, who was forced to listen to my long-winded explanations of Chasidic community norms, rules, and expectations. The film had an interesting premise, playing on the biblical idea of yibum, wherein a man is expected to marry his dead brother’s widow if said brother died childless. Here, the film shifted the story from brothers to sisters and asked: if a woman’s sister dies, and leaves behind a motherless child, should she marry her brother-in-law to keep the child in the family? There is no biblical imperative but, as the film demonstrated, a strong familial and communal incentive. By agreeing to marry her brother-in-law, Shira (played by Hadas Yaron) would prevent her widower brother-in-law from leaving Israel for Belgium, where some other woman, not of her family or community, would raise the child.

I had seen films by other Charedi women who screened their women-only productions in private settings, but I was excited to see a mainstream film by a Charedi woman in an actual cinema. Men and women (mostly not Jewish) mingled in the crowd. It was revolutionary.

Fill the Void is beautiful, sensual, an emotional rollercoaster. When I saw Yochay standing close to Shira during their unchaperoned nighttime garden chat, my heart started pounding uncontrollably. Unlike the male characters in other Charedi women’s productions, who have bit parts and are played by women in obvious drag, Yochay (Yiftach Klein) is very, very masculine. I was, quite literally, on the edge of my seat. In Chasidic communities, touch between unmarried men and women is not permitted. But Yochay, who has been married before, who is a decade Shira’s senior if not more, who has known intimacy, exploits the gap in their maturity and sexual experience by coming ever closer to her, stimulating her, terrifying her. “You’re too close,” Shira tells him. The camera zooms back, and we can see the short distance between their noses, the way they are looking directly into each other’s eyes. If the film-maker wasn’t Charedi, you would know without a doubt that they are about to kiss. “You’re too close,” I wanted to echo. My poor friend Mary had to grab my arm to bring me back to reality.

In the context of the film, Yochay’s near transgression appears to be less about teaching audiences the rules of Charedi religious life and more about Shira’s sexual awakening. Fill the Void, ultimately, cares most about its heroine: what she thinks, how she feels, what she wants. Burshtein-Shai’s films, unlike typical Charedi women’s films, involve men, but the camera primarily lingers on one side of the effective mechitzah: the women’s side. The resulting films are “feminine”, a term the filmmaker uses about her oeuvre, but also “feminist”, a term she does not.

People — religious and secular — often think the yoking of “religious” and “feminism” constitutes an oxymoron. (If this is you, you might like to read my book, Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture). Burshtein-Shai’s feminist vision of a religious community tells another story.

Throughout Fill the Void, we see women making the major decisions and controlling practical matters, like the distribution of money and the arranging of community marriages. Men defer to women, and women’s feelings take priority above all else. To be honest, I don’t know any actual community like Burshtein-Shai’s — religious or secular — but if I find one, I’m moving there.

The camerawork is also significant. Traditionally, film privileged what Film Studies scholar Laura Mulvey called “the male gaze”. Heterosexual men, in other words, were the presumed audience, so films presented women as sexualized objects for them. Nearly 50 years after Mulvey’s insight, not much has changed. Yet in Fill the Void, the female gaze is privileged throughout; we watch Shira (and her mother and her aunt) watching men.

Perhaps most radically, desire in this Charedi community is neither ignored nor brutally suppressed (see Unorthodox), but instead, the “fuel”, to use the language of Rabbi Natan in Burshtein-Shai’s latest work, a television series called Fire Dance.

Ah yes, Burshtein-Shai’s latest. Here’s where the film-maker I have long believed to be a feminist icon in the Charedi world, has created a firestorm.

Fire Dance, an eight-episode series, ran from April to June in Israel. It’s not yet available in the diaspora. But I can tell you the following: we are back in the land of Burshtein-Shai, where Irit Sheleg makes a formidable mother (of Shira in Fill the Void, of Rabbi Natan in Fire Dance), where music is used to stir the soul, where characters are extremely surprising (no less startling than her petmobile-driving heroine in her second film, Break the Wall, is the burka-wearing rabbi’s daughter in this series), and where desire — female desire — is at the heart of everything. The main character is Faigie (Mia Irwyn), a deeply troubled teenage girl who wears Coke bottle glasses (that she doesn’t need) and fights with her unstable, abusive mother (Noa Koler, who starred in Break the Wall as well as the popular Israeli series Srugim).

The unusual nature of Burshtein-Shai’s female characters adds great depth to her work; after young, lovely Shira, her first heroine, she’s moved onto women who resist a classically marriageable mould. Moreover, depicting mental illness, something that continues to be hushed up in Charedi communities (though there have been advances in these communities as elsewhere), is brave and important.

In the first episode of Fire Dance, Faigie is, emotionally, in a dark place, and Rabbi Natan (Yehuda Levi) — a charismatic rabbi who is at the centre of a Chasidic dynasty succession war — saves her, telling her, “I see you, Faigie.” These are words that Faigie has clearly needed to hear all her life, and his speech changes her, gives her life meaning. Later Rabbi Natan tells her that desire is the “fuel” of life, and she knows what she desires: him. But Natan couldn’t possibly return her feelings, could he? He is middle-aged, in a position of power, married, a father — surely, this is an impossible romance?

Moreover, surely, this can’t be the Charedi filmmaker’s idea of an acceptable romance? A moral romance? Desire might be the fuel, but at the end of the day, fire can’t be created out of older rabbis exploiting their power positions and manipulating young girls into sexual relationships. Right?

When the penultimate episode aired in Israel last month, a news story broke, revealing the apparent source of Burshtein-Shai’s motivation. A “close friend” of Burshtein-Shai claimed that Burshtein-Shai told her that she made the series in defence of Breslover rabbi Eliezer Berland, a convicted sex offender.

The friend noted Yehuda Levi’s blue eyes, like Berland’s, and his ability to draw in the women of the community, as well as the way the words of the characters resemble those of Berland’s defenders, and the thanks given to a man — Rabbi Ofer Erez, who ran a fundraising campaign to support the convicted sex offender — in the series’ credits. The “friend” also pointed out Burshtein-Shai’s own nearly untouchable position; outside of Orthodox circles, Burshtein-Shai is the most famous (the only) Charedi woman filmmaker.

Berland’s crimes of rape and sexual assault have been well known for a decade, though his loyal followers didn’t and don’t want to accept he is anything but a holy man.

Throughout his time on the lam — Berland fled Israel in 2012 to avoid conviction — he was sheltered by adherents in various countries. When he returned to Israel in 2016 he was convicted and sentenced; he also demonstrated remorse, admitting his crimes. Still, his followers continued to support him and in 2020 a Charedi Beit Din stepped in, ruling that Berland should be ostracised. The religious judges explicitly declared Berland’s defenders were committing heresy.

Is Burshtein-Shai, a writer and director who critiques the demands on young women to be perfect in order to be worthy of marriage, who exposes the damage done to married women by a system of divorce that gives all rights to men, who time and again puts the spotlight on women’s wants and women’s needs within and against the patriarchal structure of Charedi Judaism, among Berland’s defenders? Is the purpose of her new series to vindicate a rapist?

I don’t know, but when Fire Dance comes to the diaspora — as it’s likely to do, given Burshtein-Shai’s fame — I suspect we’ll all be watching with exactly those questions at the forefront of our minds.

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