Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s

293 Pages·2014·7.36 MB·English

by  Anat Helman

Becoming Israeli

The Schusterman Series
in Israel Studies
Editors
S. Ilan Troen
Jehuda Reinharz
Sylvia Fuks Fried
The Schusterman Series in Israel Studies publishes original scholarship
of exceptional significance on the history of Zionism and the State of Israel.
It draws on disciplines across the academy, from anthropology, sociology,
political science and international relations to the arts, history and literature.
It seeks to further an understanding of Israel within the context of the
modern Middle East and the modern Jewish experience. There is special
interest in developing publications that enrich the university curriculum and
enlighten the public at large. The series is published under the auspices of
the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University.
For a complete list of books in this series, please see www.upne.com
Anat Helman
Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s
Tuvia Friling
A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz: History, Memory, and the Politics of Survival
Motti Golani
Palestine between Politics and Terror, 1945–1947
Ilana Szobel
A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch
Anita Shapira
Israel: A History
Orit Rozin
The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel: A Challenge to Collectivism
Boaz Neumann
Land and Desire in Early Zionism
Anat Helman
Young Tel Aviv: A Tale of Two Cities

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Hardover isbn: 978-1-61168-556-5
Paperback isbn: 978-1-61168-557-2
Ebook isbn: 978-1-61168-558-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available upon request.
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
1 ■ Introducing Israel in White 1
2 ■ The Language of the Melting Pot 20
3 ■ The Humorous Side of Rationing 47
4 ■ “A People in Uniform” 68
5 ■ Taking the Bus 86
6 ■ Going to the Movies 113
7 ■ The Communal Dining Hall 140
8 ■ Informality, Straightforwardness, and Rudeness 163
Conclusion 187
Notes 193
Bibliography 239
Index 269

Preface
In the summer of 1949, a member of a kibbutz
—an Israeli agricultural collective community—wrote an essay for the local
bulletin. He complained about too much noise and disorder in the commu-
nal dining hall during mealtimes and listed some behaviors that members
of the kibbutz, both workers and diners, could adopt to improve the situa-
tion. After the founding of the state, Israeli kibbutzim faced economic, dem-
ographic, social, and ideological difficulties; as the writer well knew, noisy
and chaotic meals were neither the kibbutz’s gravest problem nor its most
urgent, and yet he found the topic worthy of attention and remedy. He ended
his essay with a somewhat apologetic statement: “Small matters should not
be disregarded,” he wrote, because all the big and important issues “are com-
posed of such ‘small matters.’”1 Following this cue, the chapters of this book
focus on various ordinary, supposedly trivial, daily matters that accumulated
alongside other components in creating a larger entity: Israeli culture during
its formative years.
Whereas the kibbutzim were collective communities, the moshavim were
Israeli cooperatives of individual farms. In 1951 the chair of the moshavim
movement listed four areas of organized cultural activity: (1) “the culture of
language”—implementing the use of Hebrew among the new immigrants
while teaching them “the basic values of the regenerated life in the State of
Israel”; (2) “the culture of the soil”—familiarizing new immigrants with the
country, taking them on hikes, training them in agricultural labor, and teach-
ing them the country’s folk songs; (3) “the culture of manners”—proper
daily behavior, for example refraining from shouts and blows during argu-
ments; and (4) “culture and lifestyle: combining the good and the excellent
in each ethnic lore into one wholeness.”2 The list, presented by the writer as
a program in process, actually portrayed the aspired-for ideal: a culture run
in the national tongue, infused with national values, prioritizing agriculture
and direct contact with the land, composed of well-behaved citizens from
different ethnic backgrounds, merging harmoniously into a unified entity.