The Religious Feminism of Rama Burshtein’s Romances

Israeli Jewish filmmaker Rama Burshtein creates trailblazing representations of religious women that shatter stereotypes of religious women as mere victims of patriarchy. Still, she adamantly refuses the term “feminism,” an ideology whose adherents, in turn, typically reject religious devotion as submission to the patriarchy. This article argues the need to recognize Burshtein’s films as broadening the tent of feminism. At the same time, it interrogates the ways her films obscure adjacent systems of oppression. Without engaging shared and even antagonistic struggles amongst Haredi and Palestinian women, what opportunities for insights into the power of intersectional feminism do we lose?