“The Ethno-Religious Juncture: An Emerging Trend in Young Mizrahi Cinema” This paper explores the intersectionality between ethnic identity and religious traditions as they pertain to the cinematic formulation of Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish or Sephardi) Jewish identity in contemporary Israeli films. In line with the regnant European Zionist discourses of the Israeli melting pot and the negation of exile, Mizrahi ethnicity was deemed a remnant of a past that must be erased. From the late 1980s, a growing number of scholarly, artistic, and film works have attempted to retrieve Mizrahi identity in what amounts to a concerted attack on Zionism’s mainstay ideology that has marginalized the Mizrahi collective. Problematically, whereas Zionism had to accept the religious identity of the Mizrahi (in accordance with the “one people” dictum),(1) those advocating the Mizrahi cause, most of whom are liberal and secular Jews leery about the increasing presence and influence of religion in Israel, often slight the place of Mizrahi religious traditions in their works on the Mizrahi struggle (e.g., the elaborate scholarly and artistic exploration of the secular Mizrahi Black Panthers movement of the early 1970s). This paper argues that the emerging trend where young Mizrahi filmmakers explore their ethnic identity in light of religious or mystical Mizrahi traditions (for example, in the feature films Seven Days and To Take a Wife and in the documentaries Come Mother and Edges) is meant not only as a subversive act designed to challenge the Ashkenazi Zionist displacement of the Mizrahi, but, to an extent, also as a plea to broaden our understanding of Mizrahi ethno-religious identity in contemporary Israel. 1. Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity, 2006. In a facetious manner, Iris Mizrahi (2001) states that “When they [the authorities] shut all doors closed for the Mizrahim, they forgot to close one door—the door to the synagogue. . .”