WHAT BECOMES A BRIDE THE MOST: THE YEMENITE JEWISH HENNA

The Yemenite Jewish henna bride is widely admired and envied in Israel. Her iconic image is reified and exhibited in shops, on billboards, and in museums for political and economic purposes. Simultaneously, the local folk culture reveres the Yemenite henna ceremony as a joyous living custom that affirms their ethnic identity. This embellished ethnographic report traces the fate of the henna ceremony in Israel through the conflict between curators, who offer museologically preserved effigies of the Yemenite bride, and a local dresser dedicated to constructing actual living brides for the henna ceremony. The report's narrative borrows from the language of psychoanalysis as the author exploits the affinity between dreams and ceremonies and, following the dresser, attempts to construct a textual bricolage that is representative of her work.