IS|aEL
A HISTORY
133
6 THE YISHUV
SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND ETHOS
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In 1922 the poet David Shimonovich published a poem that became a
watchword:
Don’t listen, my son, to your father’s instruction
Nor to your mother’s teaching give ear,
For ‘‘Line by line’’ is a father’s instruction
And a mother’s teaching: ‘‘Slow but sure . . . ’’
And a spring storm speaks the truth:
Listen, man, to the song of the son!∞
This poem, published in Warsaw, epitomizes the youth rebellion that was part
of the Zionist experience. Old Judaism seemed aged and ailing, lacking relevance
to the new world dawning in the wake of World War One. The old Jew, the Jew of
the Diaspora, was depicted as psychologically flawed, physically weak, inclined
toward luftgesheftn (lit., ‘‘air business,’’ meaning peddling, acting as middlemen,
and engaging in other ephemeral trades), a stranger to nature and anything
natural and spontaneous, materialistic and incapable of acting on anything but
his or her own immediate interests. The new Jew was to be the complete opposite:
an ethical, aesthetic person guided by ideals who rebels against a debasing
reality; a free, proud individual ready to fight for his or her own and the
nation’s honor. Yearning for freedom and equality among peoples, admiring
nature, beauty, and open spaces, the new Jew relinquished the pleasures of a
hypocritical, bourgeois world shackled by outdated conventions and sought the
challenge of a life in which dedication to the collective was congruent with maintaining
inner truth and a life of simplicity, honesty, and self-realization. The new
Jew aspired to equality, justice, and truth in human relations, and was prepared to
die for them.
This type of thinking is typical of those who dedicate themselves unreservedly
to revolutionary or national movements. It represents the transference of the
patterns of thinking and behavior characteristic of religious sects to the secular
world. Such idealism usually appeals to young people. And indeed the Zionist
movement was essentially a youth movement that also attracted adults. The Zionist
pioneer, the soldier-volunteer in the struggle for the sake of the nation, was always
a young man or woman who devoted his or her life to the uplifting experience
of self-sacrifice for a lofty ideal. Shimonovich’s poem illustrates the cult of
134 a state-in-the-making
youth that was part and parcel of this movement. These young men and women
detached themselves from existing society in order to establish the society of the
future. In such a setting the movement replaces both community and family, and
the peer group becomes the significant reference group. The present becomes an
avenue leading to the future. Relinquishing material possessions becomes a rite of
initiation into the new society. The ‘‘divorce’’ from community, family, and home
symbolizes the severing of old loyalties for the sake of a covenant of loyalty to the
newsociety.‘‘O,Mother,knowthis,thatif youseemeyouwillnolongerknowme.I
am with those who walk barefoot in the wilderness. / Poverty here walks with a
crown of thistles and a robe and carries a great scepter of gold on the Mediterranean
shore!’’ declared Uri Zvi Greenberg in his poem ‘‘The Army of Labor.’’≤
The new identity embraced old Jewish patterns while reconfiguring their
meaning. Thus poet Avraham Shlonsky sanctifies work on the roads:
Dress me, good mother, in a glorious robe of many colors
and at dawn lead me to [my] toil.
My land is wrapped in light as in a prayer shawl. The houses stand forth like
frontlets,
and the roads paved by hand stream down like phylactery straps.≥
And Uri Zvi Greenberg speaks of ‘‘Jerusalem—phylacteries of the forehead,
and the Emek—of the hand!’’∂
The new identity created its own diverse texts and
symbols: poems, songs, slogans, lifestyles. The new society was founded on
truth in human relations; people said what they meant and meant what they said.
In this ascetic way of life, poverty and privation endowed people with special
value. It was a society that lived at high levels of tension: day after day its members
put their loyalty to the test, in both their own eyes and those of their peers.
Only young people, whose enthusiasm enables them to undergo a conversion
from one culture to another, from one society to another, can live like this.
The conversion from old to new Jew was based on the notion of ‘‘negating the
Diaspora.’’ This idea came into being with the fathers of Zionism—Pinsker and
Herzl—and their belief that as a minority in the Diaspora the Jews were in existential
danger, so they needed a homeland. Abraham Mapu, Y. L. Gordon, David
Frischmann, and Mendele Mocher Seforim (Sholem Abramovich)—all nonZionist
writers and poets—also built upon these basic ideas. They rejected the
Jewish way of life in the Diaspora, continuing the line of criticism leveled against
it by all the movements that had sought to modernize the Jewish street since the
Enlightenment period. They depicted a degenerated Jewish society and called for
productivization, secularization, and education. Berdyczewksi and Brenner
added a call for mental and psychological transformation, a ‘‘change of values’’
in the spirit of the Vitalist school of thought, emphasizing earthiness over spir-
the yishuv 135
ituality, tilling the soil as opposed to living at a remove from nature, manliness as
opposed to cowardice.
The more driven the pioneers were by the utopian vision of an alternative
society, the more virulent was their criticism of the society they had come from.
The harsher the reality of Palestine, and the sacrifices it claimed from them, the
greater their need to erect psychological barriers against the desire to go back
home. ‘‘Home’’ was still there in Eastern Europe, and families frequently urged
their sons or daughters to return to the nest. Avigdor Hameiri’s popular poem
‘‘Two Letters’’ gave lyrical expression to the divided heart. The mother writes,
To my good son in Jerusalem,
Your father is dead, Mother is sick
Come home to the Diaspora.
And the son replies,
Forgive me, my sick mother
I shall never return to the Diaspora
. . . If you really love me, come here and embrace me.
Now comes the Zionist declaration of faith:
I shall no longer be a wanderer!
I shall never budge from here!
I shall not budge, I shall not budge
No!’’∑
The need to repeat the oath of loyalty over and over again actually indicates its
weakness.
To maintain the youngsters’ enthusiasm and their loyalty to the enterprise,
writers and poets described the small town in Europe as a human, national, and
cultural failure, the source of the weaknesses that kept the Jews from attaining
Utopia. Perhaps the harshest critics of the Diaspora were Mendele and Brenner,
who described with bitter sarcasm all the ills of Jewish society, its dependence on
the gentiles, its weakness and wretchedness. The pioneers who came from the
Diaspora knew its reality, so their own experience moderated the influence of
literature. Not so with those born and educated in Palestine; for them the literary
caricature reflected a reality that was entirely di√erent from and inferior to a life
of freedom in Palestine. In fact Mendele and Brenner were ambivalent toward the
Diaspora, for it represented their own life experience and their people. Despite
their harsh criticism of the Jews, in the end they identified with them and loved
them. Those born in Palestine, on the other hand, took in the criticism without
the love that mitigated it.
136 a state-in-the-making
The pioneer was the model used to indoctrinate the youth movements founded
in Eastern Europe between the two World Wars. This ideal figure served as a tool
for recruiting idealistic human resources for the Zionist movement. The figure of
the pioneer was drawn from two sources of inspiration. The Russian Narodnik,
the revolutionary who left family and home behind and pursued a life of total
dedication and sacrifice for the revolution, was the inspiration for pioneering as a
way of life—not a daring onetime act, but a lifelong commitment. The second
source was apparently Hasidism, through which bubbled springs of enthusiasm,
willingness to give up the material world, and dedication to the community of
believers. Other sources of inspiration included the Polish national movement,
which influenced education in Betar. The di√erence between the Betar pioneer
and the pioneer from the leftist movements lay in the final aim of their indoctrination.
Whereas the Betar member was instructed to fulfill any mission required for
the realization of Zionism, especially military ones, leftist youth movements directed
members toward agricultural settlement, preferably on the border, in the
form of kibbutz life. The settlement ethos was potent, for it presented the young
person with a concrete mission whose importance was never in doubt and did not
wane with time. The power of this ethos is evident in the fact that nonsocialist
movements such as Hapo¢el Hamizrachi also espoused kibbutz settlement for
their members. Labor on the borders became the leading Zionist-pioneering
ethos of the time; even Betar was a√ected by it and attempted to establish labor
brigades in the moshavot.
The cult of youth was an inseparable part of the notion of the new Jew. The
adults, in Palestine and the Diaspora alike, were considered ‘‘the generation of
the wilderness,’’ who would not live to see the Promised Land, i.e., the realization
of Zionism. The young people who grew up in freedom would be the ones to
bring redemption. In his poem ‘‘Creed,’’ Shaul Tschernichovsky lauds the future
generation in Palestine:
Then my people will blossom once more,
And in the land a new generation will rise
Its iron chains will be removed,
Eye to eye it will see light.
It will live, love, and strive,
A generation in The Land is indeed alive,
Not in the future, in the sky—
Living in the spirit is not enough.∏
This generation was envisioned as possessing healthy instincts, passion, sensuality,
and a talent for living. The direct link between the country and the young
the yishuv 137
people who were educated in it would bring about the rebirth of the Jewish
people as a courageous nation, connected with nature and rejecting the excessive
spirituality of the Diaspora. In this cult of youth a special place was reserved for
those born and brought up in Palestine. Whereas their fathers had struggled to
get used to physical labor, the sons worked in the fields with no di≈culty. While
the older generation spoke of their love of the country but barely knew it, their
children tramped its length and breadth and identified with its climate and landscape.
They did not yearn for a di√erent home and landscape, nor did they su√er
from what poet Leah Goldberg called ‘‘the heartache of two homelands.’’π
The older generation spoke much of the need for self-defense and bearing
arms, but very few actually did so. In contrast, Yitzhak Tabenkin, the leader of the
Hakibbutz Hameuhad movement, described the young pioneer as a man carrying
a hoe in one hand and a rifle on his shoulder, uniting the tiller of the soil with the
fighter-defender. ‘‘Your boys once brought you peace with the plow. Today they
bring you peace with the rifle!’’ as Nathan Alterman put it in a song of the late
1930s that was sung by the members of the Haganah. The sabra, the desert cactus
encountered by the immigrants, gave its name to this generation: its prickly pear
has a thorny outer skin but flesh that is sweet and juicy. The sabras were said to be
frank and direct, honest and brave, free of the hypocritical mannerisms of bourgeois
society, with strength that lay not in words but in deeds. Thus did the settlers
idealize the native sons, who to their parents seemed to epitomize all the dreams of
free children of nature growing up in Palestine. A young American woman student
who encountered this breed of sabra defined them as follows: ‘‘Rugged and unpolished,
unsophisticated, uninhibited, often shy, uncomplicated, direct, gentle,
ruthless, undaunted, self-reliant, with a gift for improvisation.’’∫
collective versus individual
A mixture of admiration, anxiety, rivalry, and identification characterized the
Yishuv’s attitude toward Soviet Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution inspired tremendous
enthusiasm. Intellectuals all over the world saw it as the opening of a
new, lofty chapter in human history. ‘‘There is no political movement anywhere
to which masses of mankind, in their millions, looked with such messianic
yearning as they did to the Russian Revolution . . . ,’’ wrote Berl Katznelson.
‘‘People did not fully comprehend the nature of the [new] regime; they did not
judge it on its merits or faults. They so sorely wished to see the old regime shatter
that everybody sought to accept the good and refused to acknowledge the evil.
That was the beginning.’’Ω
The experience of a revolution that razed an old world to the ground captivated
young people. The pioneers of Palestine longed for the shortcut discussed earlier:
building an egalitarian society and economy from scratch in Palestine, just
138 a state-in-the-making
as people had in Russia. The pioneers were less influenced by communist ideology
than attracted by the fact that in that vast country a social experiment was
taking place similar in character to the one occurring in Palestine, albeit on a
di√erent scale. From a distance the surge in construction, the industrialization
and electrification, the organizational boldness, eradication of illiteracy, and advances
by women and children, all seemed in line with the pioneers’ own desires.
The communist regime, which swore by the abolition of all forms of discrimination
and had promoted Jews to senior positions, tugged at the very sensitive
heartstrings of Jews all over the world. When the pioneers of Palestine sang,
‘‘Our faces to the rising sun, / Our path again turns eastward. / We look ahead to
the great hour, / Heads held high, our soul unbowed,’’ they had in mind both the
Zionist and socialist visions.∞≠
The pioneers saw themselves as part of the revolutionary movement and expected
the Soviet Union to extend a supportive hand. The problem was that in
1920 the Comintern (Communist International) had declared Zionism reactionary,
considering it an ally of British imperialism against the Arab masses who
were carrying progress forward in the Middle East. Since then the history of the
left in Palestine (and later the Israeli left) has been marked by many attempts to
explain Zionism to the Soviets and prove its justness to them. Relations between
the pioneers and ‘‘the world of the revolution’’ were not severed by the Soviets’
rejection. Many Jews who came from Russia and knew its language loved Russian
culture. But even those who did not know the language sought contact with the
society of the future. Films, journals, and books in Russian and in translation
nurtured the myth of the wonderland where a society without exploiters and
exploited was being built. Hashomer Hatza¢ir posters in Palestine copied the
style of Ogonyok, an illustrated weekly full of Soviet images. ‘‘Socialist realism’’
became the accepted style of many writers of the generation that came of age in
1948. Youth movement members enthusiastically sang patriotic Russian songs in
Hebrew translation. Berl Katznelson cautioned that the Cossack cavalry they
were singing about had perpetrated pogroms against the Jews, but in vain; the
enthusiasm did not falter.
Two publishing houses established by kibbutz movements (Sifriat Hapoalim,
by Hashomer Hatza¢ir, and Hakibbutz Hameuhad, by Hakibbutz Hameuhad)
translated both popular literature and Russian writings on Marxism-Leninism
into Hebrew (literature the younger generation hardly read). In 1942 Sifriat
Hapoalim published Russian Poetry, an anthology of the best modern Russian
poetry, translated into Hebrew by some of the leading poets in Palestine. Nobody
noticed that very few Soviet-period poems were found worthy of inclusion. Novels
such as Anton Semyonovich Makarenko’s The Pedagogical Poem (translated by
the poet Avraham Shlonsky, a pioneer of modernism in Hebrew poetry), describ-
the yishuv 139
ing the educational experience of abandoned children, and Valentin Petrovich
Kataev’s A White Sail Gleams, about the 1905 revolution, became best sellers in
Palestine.∞∞
Books about World War Two inspired admiration for the heroism of
the Russian people in their fight against the Nazis. In the knapsack of every
Palmach soldier was a copy of Alexander Bek’s Panfilov’s Men, which described
the heroism of a Red Army unit in defending Moscow.∞≤
There was no similarity
between the values this book inculcated and the values of the Palmach (for example,
in the novel a deserter is executed in front of his company; no one in the
Palmach would have dreamt of such an act), but that did not prevent psychological
identification with them. The image of the partisan, a fighter with no need of
rank or uniform, a commander who treated his men as equals, was extremely
potent in shaping Palmach norms. It was in line with the perception of genuineness
and sincerity in relationships, in contrast with the buttoned-up formality of
a regular army, which was considered an expression of militarism.
The Zionist call for the ‘‘generation of the wilderness’’ to defer gratification
for the sake of future generations may seem reminiscent of the Soviet mentality
that did not hesitate to sacrifice two generations for the revolution. The essential
di√erence, however, was that the society in Palestine was founded on free will;
anyone who did not want to embrace the directives of the collective was exempt
from them. In Russia such people found themselves in godforsaken exile. In
Palestine they went to live in Tel Aviv.
During the 1920s the Soviet Union presented what appeared to be an alternative
to Zionism. The authorities initiated an agricultural settlement plan in the
Crimea for hundreds of thousands of Jews who had become impoverished due to
the erosion of the middle classes in Russia. Its second stage involved a plan to
establish an autonomous Jewish region in Birobidzhan in Central Asia. Both
these possibilities sparked the imagination of Jewish activists throughout the
world, since not only did they o√er an existential solution for hundreds of thousands
of Jews, they also amounted to Soviet recognition of a Jewish nation.
British author Israel Zangwill, one of Herzl’s first supporters, who had become a
territorialist following the Uganda controversy but returned to Zionism after the
Balfour Declaration, enthused over the broad scope of the Soviet plans. Palestine,
he contended, was as small as Wales and would be unable to provide a
solution for the needs of millions of Jews. The Joint invested millions of dollars
in Jewish settlement in the ussr, while the Zionist Organization could only look
on enviously. The enthusiasm generated by the Jewish rehabilitation plan in the
ussr attracted pioneers from among both the Gedud Ha¢avoda and Jewish
American communists. The lucky ones eventually managed to get out alive, but
most perished in the Holocaust, in the Stalinist purges, or from the privations of
the remote locations they were sent to. Since the local inhabitants opposed Jews
140 a state-in-the-making
being settled among them, and the Jews themselves preferred to rebuild their
lives in Russia’s big cities, these projects produced no lasting results. But in the
1920s they seemed to present an ideological and practical alternative to Zionism.
It is customary to describe Yishuv society as one whose prevailing ethos was
collectivist, requiring people to relinquish their individual personalities for the
benefit of the great national objectives. And indeed, unlike the accepted norms of
today’s individualistic Western society, the power of the collective was greater
than that of the individual. Yet like any generalization, this one is too simplistic.
Although the goal of the national movement was to save all Jews, in order to
motivate people to action it had to present a vision of personal redemption.
Throughout the entire period, therefore, there was tension between individual
aspirations to redemption and the demand that each person accept the collective’s
directives.
The people of the Second Aliya were extremely individualistic. They immigrated
to Palestine alone, without support from an organization, and found their
way in the country as individuals. The ideologies and methods of operating they
formulated were original, derived mainly from their experience in Palestine. The
works of young people who rediscovered their Jewish identity there, such as poet
Rachel Bluwstein or writer Zvi Schatz (Trumpeldor’s comrade in arms), reveal a
strong emphasis on the individual—his or her desires, anguish, and soul searching.
The literature translated into Hebrew on the initiative of people of the Second
Aliya is literature of the individual—for example, the poetry of Mikhail Lermontov,
Gerhart Hauptmann’s stories, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels. The
great diversity of cultural trends during the Second Aliya period indicates an
openness to the world of the individual.
In the 1920s, under the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution, the star of the
collective rose. Among the people of the Third Aliya, especially in the Gedud
Ha¢avoda, there were collectivist tendencies. The aliya’s members immigrated to
Palestine as part of groups that later joined centralist organizations that emphasized
the authority of the community over the individual. Members of Hashomer
Hatza¢ir immigrated to Palestine as disciples of Freud and Gustav Landauer,
fervent individualists who sought personal redemption. But once in Palestine
they organized themselves into a Marxist movement that accepted ‘‘ideological
collectivism’’—meaning that after stormy ideological debates, the position of the
movement’s historical leadership (Ya¢akov Hazan and Meir Ya¢ari) was usually
accepted. Groups of immigrants from Hechalutz and Betar, and people from the
labor youth movements of Palestine in the 1930s, cultivated dedication to the
community and subordination of the individual’s desires to the will of ‘‘the
movement.’’ Members of the Yishuv’s underground and paramilitary organizations
accepted the authority of the collective in the form of an unbreakable rule:
the yishuv 141
‘‘We have all been drafted for life, / Only death will discharge us from the ranks,’’
as Avraham Stern put it in the Lehi anthem he composed.
Clearly, then, there were idealistic minorities who accepted what was known at
the time as ‘‘the movement’s decision.’’ For a movement that had taken upon
itself the task of building a nation, the existence of such minorities was vital. The
question is to what extent these norms were prevalent among the general public,
and whether the collective possessed the power to compel individuals to accept
its discipline. Public intellectuals, propagandists, and educators all glorified
those who accepted the yoke of the collective, although with reservations. For
example, the subject of ‘‘elevation of Man’’ and the importance of the individual
was central for the youth movements of Palestine. Literature, even that produced
by the 1948 generation, was ambivalent about collectivism. The protagonists of
stories about the kibbutz—Ma¢agalot (Circles) by David Maletz, Efraim hozer
la£aspeset (Ephraim goes back to the alfalfa) by S. Yizhar, and Haderasha (The
sermon) by Haim Hazaz—were all extraordinary individualists who rebelled
against accepted norms.∞≥
Even Moshe Shamir’s emblematic novel Hu halakh
basadot (He walked in the fields), considered to express the collectivist ethos,
creates a confrontation between the aspiration of Mika, the female protagonist,
to individual happiness and the commitment of the male protagonist, Uri, to the
collective.
People at the time were aware of the tension between individual and collective.
They perceived themselves not as subject to an unavoidable authority but rather
as having a choice. The intelligentsia who identified with the labor movement
maintained their individualist ideal, and gave expression to it in their work. A
good example is Nathan Alterman, author of both ‘‘The Seventh Column’’ (a title
referring to both his weekly newspaper column and a book of poetry collected
from the column)—political poetry in the full sense of the word that contributed
to shaping the collective ethos—and Kokhavim bahutz (Stars outside), a book of
lyrical individualist love poetry. The popularity of Alterman’s poetry among
young people demonstrates their profound identification with individual experiences
and personal expression.
Although public and political discourse created the impression that the authority
of the collective ethos was universally accepted, behind this public image
lay individualist tendencies that did not accept ‘‘the movement’s decision.’’ The
people on ‘‘the mountain’’—Mount Scopus, home of the Hebrew University—did
not abide by the ethos of the Emek. The dropout rate in the youth movements
even before members reached a kibbutz was staggering. After their arrival in the
country, many members of Hechalutz decided to look for work in Tel Aviv instead
of going to a rural community. Then not everyone who went to a kibbutz
remained to live in it. Every time the Yishuv authorities called for a mass volun-
142 a state-in-the-making
teer e√ort—enlistment in the British Army, payment to Kofer Hayishuv (a fund to
finance security needs) or Magbit Hagiyus Vehahatzala (an appeal for funds for
the Yishuv war e√ort in 1942)—it was very di≈cult to get people to accept the
community’s decisions without coercion. The picture painted of a Yishuv that
voluntarily accepted the community’s decisions thus appears overblown and
simplistic, omitting the variegated shades in the Yishuv mosaic. Recall too that
until the 1950s, the pendulum between the good of the individual and that of the
nation was swinging toward the national interest all over the world. At a time
when nations were fighting for their very existence, as in World War Two, personal
interests were relegated to second place everywhere.
the development of a
distinctive yishuv culture
Yishuv society is also usually depicted as extolling manual labor and the simple
worker and being contemptuous of the intellectual. Artists, writers, and poets
who were members of Gedud Ha¢avoda said they felt that they had to conceal
their intellectual ‘‘weaknesses’’ lest they be mocked or lose their standing. But
although some people reported feeling this way, it is doubtful that their personal
experience was true in general. The Yishuv inherited the esteem of both Jewish
and Russian tradition for the writer and poet. Ever since the Second Aliya, as
much as the Yishuv extolled the manual laborer, it also held the intellectual in
high regard. Yosef Haim Brenner lived in the Gedud Ha¢avoda camp at Migdal
and was deeply admired, even though most of his comrades—to whom he taught
Hebrew—could not read his stories. Uri Zvi Greenberg, who had immigrated to
Palestine in 1924, received an enthusiastic welcome, and his volume of poems, A
Great Fear and the Moon, was published the following year. The two workers’ parties,
Ahdut Ha¢avoda and Hapo¢el Hatza¢ir, competed in publishing literary journals.
Considering the financial di≈culties this enterprise involved, it amply demonstrates
the importance accorded cultural life.
In the 1920s the center of Hebrew culture moved from Russia to Palestine. S. Y.
Agnon, Ahad Ha¢am, and above all Chaim Nachman Bialik all settled in Palestine
and gained both reknown and a large number of admirers. In 1925 Berl Katznelson
began publishing the Histadrut daily newspaper Davar and invited the Yishuv
intelligentsia to contribute. Another example of the importance accorded the
intelligentsia is the special relationship between the labor movement and the
Hebrew University. Many members of Brit Shalom (see chapter 3) were on the
university faculty. As the struggle between Arabs and Jews intensified, their position
as a peace alliance became increasingly marginal. The contrast between the
positionof theBritShalomlecturersandthatof thestudentswasparticularlyacute.
Nevertheless the dialogue between Brit Shalom and the labor movement leadership
the yishuv 143
continued throughout this period. The former were considered worthy interlocutors
who should not be excluded from the Zionist movement, even when their
opinions ran counter to the position of the Jewish Agency Executive.
The importance of cultural heroes in shaping Yishuv society cannot be overstated.
Brenner and Gordon became the paragons of the labor movement; the
youth movements used their works to educate members. Bialik, the national
poet, enjoyed free rein to criticize every event that took place among Jews and in
the Yishuv. Writers such as Uri Zvi Greenberg, Avraham Shlonsky, Eliezer Steinman,
Alexander Penn, and after them Nathan Alterman, Yonatan Ratosh, S.
Yizhar, and the writers and poets of the 1948 generation gained special status in
the Yishuv, much like the place of intellectuals in Russian or French society. On
the Revisionist right, Uri Zvi Greenberg wore the mantle of poet-prophet who
foresaw the future. In the 1940s Alterman’s ‘‘The Seventh Column,’’ which expressed
the spirit of the Yishuv and its aspirations, was considered the most
authentic voice of the period. Alterman did not hesitate to speak in the voice of
humanistic morality in assailing the acts and errors of left and right, but he
gained true fame in the Yishuv for his vehement, powerful criticism of British
policy.
The labor movement extolled what it called ‘‘the cultured worker’’—a worker
who was also a consumer of culture—and made e√orts to close the gap between
intellectuals and manual workers. While this mission was never accomplished,
the intention behind it refutes the claim that there were anti-intellectual trends
within the movement. The public libraries of the workers’ councils had a wide
readership who sought out Hebrew books. Their culture rooms were populated
by newspaper and magazine readers. The descriptions of philharmonic orchestra
concerts at the Harod Spring and the promotion of choirs and other
musical activities in the kibbutzim demonstrate the yearning for beauty and cultural
experience that persisted even under conditions of material hardship. The
publicity given all these cultural resources demonstrates their importance in the
eyes of the leadership. Herzl had depicted the excessive numbers of Jewish intellectuals
as one cause of antisemitism. But even while in theory the new Jew was
supposed to shed the excessive spirituality attributed to the Jewish intellectual (as
opposed to workers, who made their living through physical labor), the rich
spiritual life that developed in the small Yishuv and turned it into the center of
Hebrew culture, shows that on this issue, too, a great distance separates the
hackneyed notions from reality.
The model pioneer bearing his hoe and rifle had another attribute: he spoke
Hebrew. At the training farms in the Diaspora, those who knew Hebrew got
priority in immigrating. This policy shows the great importance attributed to the
language and the culture deriving from it in the shaping of the nation, following
144 a state-in-the-making
European nationalist tradition in which a nation’s language was a substantive
symbol of its existence as a national entity. The ‘‘language war’’ that broke out
toward the end of the Second Aliya period ensured the dominance of Hebrew in
both the secular and Mizrachi educational institutions in Palestine. Only the
ultra-Orthodox used Yiddish as their language of instruction. During the Mandate
period Yishuv representatives called for Hebrew to be recognized as an
o≈cial language, together with Arabic and English, and to a great degree they
succeeded. The status of Hebrew was recognized symbolically in the name of the
country, which was known as Palestine–Eretz Yisrael—a sort of compromise
between the Jews’ demands that the country’s historical Jewish heritage be recognized
and fierce Arab opposition to this.
Though the Yishuv became the world center of Hebrew culture in the 1920s,
that did not ensure the dominance of Hebrew as the spoken language. Each wave
of immigration brought with it the immigrants’ native tongues. The quintessential
Jewish language was Yiddish, the beloved mother tongue of all the champions
of Hebrew. After the 1908 Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference, and
mainly from the 1920s onward, Yiddish and Hebrew competed for the Jews’
hearts and minds. As belles lettres flourished in Hebrew, the same sort of literature
appeared in Yiddish. Thus as Hebrew literature was being ‘‘demoted’’ from
sacred to secular, Yiddish ‘‘ascended’’ from a vernacular to a language of high
culture. The socialist Bund and Volkist movements that fought for Jewish autonomy
in Eastern Europe presented Yiddish as the language of the Jewish masses
and Hebrew as the reactionary sacred language of an educated Jewish elite detached
from the lives of ordinary people. After the Bolshevik Revolution the
Communist Party created the Yevsektsia (Jewish section), which was responsible
for Jewish culture in Russia. Identifying Hebrew with Zionism, it acted to suppress
both, banning them in the ussr.
The Zionist movement, however, did not ban Yiddish. Hechalutz conducted its
activities in Poland mainly in that language, since most candidates for immigration
knew no Hebrew. Ben-Gurion, a sworn Hebraist who used the language
even before he immigrated to Palestine, spoke Yiddish at election rallies in Poland.
He did the same when he toured the dp camps in Germany after World War
Two. But as long as the non-Zionist left associated Yiddish with the political
rejection of Zionism, setting it up as a challenger to Hebrew, the two Jewish
languages appeared to be in competition.
In Palestine the passion for guaranteeing Hebrew’s dominance as a spoken
language increased with the onset of mass immigration. The Legion of the Defenders
of the Language was formed in Tel Aviv; its members would admonish
people they found conversing in Yiddish in public. This happened to Bialik, who
liked to chat in Yiddish instead of Hebrew, which he said did not roll o√ his
the yishuv 145
tongue. In the 1930s the Hebrew-language zealots faced another issue: most of
the immigrants from Germany spoke only German and displayed little talent for
learning Hebrew. The zealots contended that the Germans should not speak the
Nazis’ language in the street. This uncalled-for fanaticism only made the immigrants’
new life more di≈cult.
The younger generation did learn Hebrew and was relatively fluent in it, showing
that other languages had only a temporary hold on the population. Tel Aviv,
the arena in which the needless zealotry occurred, displayed tolerance toward
foreign languages in one noteworthy area—street names. Despite being known
as ‘‘the first Hebrew city,’’ Tel Aviv commemorated Zionism’s founding fathers,
its writers and poets, and important Jews in history, without being fazed by their
non-Hebrew names. In the end the Yiddish-Hebrew debate dissipated with the
annihilation of millions of Jews—the Yiddish speakers—in Eastern Europe. In
the ussr Yiddish culture was destroyed in the late 1940s, together with its proponents,
while in the United States it simply disappeared with the passing of the
older generations.
Promoting the pioneer as the ideal type of the labor movement was part of a
multifaceted attempt to shape Palestine society into an alternative to bourgeois
society. The seeds of this utopian society were the labor settlements where the
lifestyle perfectly matched the ideal. But most workers in Palestine lived in the
cities and identified only partly with labor ideology. They were attracted to the
bourgeois lifestyle, the temptations of the city, and its hedonism. Yet their allegiance
to the labor movement and acceptance of its ideology as the foundation
for building the country were all vital for a movement that sought to consolidate
its political hegemony through mass support.
Socialization of the workers and their families in the spirit of the dominant
ethos was carried out both directly and indirectly. They were invited to take Hebrew
lessons and evening classes for adults and working youth, to broaden their
education. The daily paper Davar was designed to bring the Zionist-left worldview
into every home. The 1930s saw the publication of Davar Liyeladim (children’s
Davar), a high-quality weekly intended to educate a generation of young readers.
Every now and then Davar published books relevant to the Zionist-socialist worldview,
which the paper distributed at a discount to subscriber households. In the
early 1940s the development of indoctrination through printed materials was
completed with the establishment of the Am Oved (working people) publishing
house.Incontrastwiththepublishingarmsof HashomerHatza¢irandHakibbutz
Hameuhad, whose dominant objectives were Marxist indoctrination and cultivating
a sympathetic attitude toward the ussr, Am Oved nurtured its readers’ literary
tastes while emphasizing Jewish subjects and identification with the Jewish
people. In 1928 the Habima theater arrived from Russia and built a new home in
146 a state-in-the-making
Tel Aviv. Despite the general admiration of Habima, the Histadrut founded the
Ha£ohel theater, which it defined as a workers’ theater, part of the alternative
society. The Hapo¢el sports association stressed the distinction between the
workers’ and the middle class sports association, Maccabi. In its early years
Hapo¢el did not encourage competitive sports but focused above all on popular
sports. Over the years the di√erences between the two associations blurred, but
Hapo¢el retained the loyalty of its leftist members, who identified with its redshirted
teams at soccer games, a clear class symbol.
In addition to services such as its sick fund and labor exchange, the Histadrut
built ‘‘workers’ housing’’—pleasant, well-planned neighborhoods with large
green spaces separating the buildings. It also built schools for workers’ children,
whose educational practice promoted the importance of manual labor by having
students work in the vegetable garden and with livestock and taught labor movement
values. These housing developments and schools served mainly the families
of o≈cials and permanent workers—the working class elite. Poor workers
could not a√ord workers’ housing and usually sent their children to the schools
of the general education system. But the attempt to create a workers’ community
where the workers lived close to one another and assimilated the same manners
and behavioral norms was of cardinal importance in forming their self-awareness
as bearers of a di√erent culture.
This culture had its own character and symbols. Clothing fashions highlighted
proletarian reserve: the simple blue cotton shirt worn by youth movement
members (‘‘The blue shirt surpasses any jewelry,’’ they sang); the side-buttoned
Russian shirt worn on festive occasions, such as the Sabbath eve; the young
women’s sarafan (pinafore dress) and long braids; the Palmach fighter’s khaki
shorts; the kibbutznik’s tembel beanie; and the city worker’s peaked cap. Leisure
activity usually included dancing on Sabbath eve. The kibbutzim and youth
movements preferred circle dances that demanded no special skill and allowed
single people to join in. The hora circles whirled at a dizzying pace to the sound
of hasidic tunes, highlighting the connection between religious and secular ecstasy.
Couple dances to Russian melodies were given a seal of approval since they
were ‘‘folk dances’’ that ostensibly resurrected authentic popular culture from
oblivion, in the spirit of reinventing the tradition of European nationalist movements.
Sing-alongs lasting hours created a sense of belonging to the community
and sharing common values. Here too the emphasis was on equality; the choir
took precedence over self-important soloists. Festival ceremonies were designed
to include as many children as possible in the performance. This practice gave
rise to the ‘‘pageant,’’ a reading of texts in sequence that did not require either
acting or vocal talent. One of the most popular selections was Yitzhak Lamdan’s
poem ‘‘Masada,’’ describing the refugees fleeing the 1920 pogroms in Ukraine
the yishuv 147
for Palestine, while resisting the seduction of the Red enchantment. ‘‘Open your
gate, Masada, and I, the refugee, shall enter!’’ declares Lamdan, for whom Masada
symbolized reborn Palestine, not destruction. He calls out: ‘‘Rise, fire of the
dance! / Masada shall not fall again!’’∞∂
The Jewish calendar provided ample opportunity for applying religious symbols
to the secular world and adapting them to the needs of labor settlement.
Thus the Sukkot (Tabernacles), Passover, and Shavuot (Pentecost) holidays became
agricultural festivals. Every kibbutz worthy of the name had its own bikurim
ceremony (the harvesting of the first fruits), with a procession displaying all the
kibbutz’s achievements in agricultural produce and livestock, plus the latest
farm machinery. These festivals engendered music and dance traditions. The
walls of the dining hall were decorated according to the members’ artistic talents.
The Passover Seder was a great festive celebration held in the dining hall, at
tables covered with white cloths, with the traditional Passover Haggadah replaced
by a locally written version reflecting the spirit of the time and its problems
and including readings of literary excerpts and singing.
However, this heroic attempt to establish the alternative society and invent for
it suitable cultural patterns never overcame the seductive power of bourgeois
modernity. The norms of the petite bourgeoisie lived and flourished together
with those of the workers. In Tel Aviv, the center of bourgeois society, immigrants
from Poland built a plethora of ‘‘dream homes’’ during the 1920s. These
houses were intended to combine the architectures of East and West but were
actually an odd and extraordinary collection of eclectic styles that expressed the
Tel Aviv bourgeoisie’s aspirations for a life of comfort and luxury. Certain areas
of Tel Aviv were built during the 1930s in the Bauhaus style, with spacious apartments
boasting the latest architectural innovations.
Ever since the first Tel Aviv kiosk was constructed at the time of the Second
Aliya, that city displayed a clear tendency toward hedonism and joie de vivre. As
early as the 1920s, and even more so in the 1930s, the shop windows along the
main thoroughfares displayed the latest Paris fashions. The cafés and restaurants
were crowded. Cultural and political elites preferred meeting in the bourgeois
cafés rather than the workers’ kitchens or the modest cultural centers. The
Tel Aviv boardwalk was lined with cafés where orchestras played, so that diners
could dance ballroom dances like the tango and waltz in the best European
tradition. The stark contrast between the ascetic lifestyle of labor settlement and
the city’s open hedonism aroused sharp criticism of Tel Aviv, whose very existence
was a constant temptation for the pioneers who had to forgo the pleasures
of life in order to build the nation. Very few city workers could resist the attraction
of bourgeois glamour.
Tel Aviv’s leisure culture attracted the middle and working classes alike. The
148 a state-in-the-making
masses went to the beach, which suited their wishes and the size of their pockets.
Billboards invited the public to cultural events, from the Oneg Shabbat (lit.,
Sabbath joy, reception of the Sabbath) evenings led by Bialik as an expression of
the high Hebrew culture the intelligentsia sought to nurture, to the satirical theaters,
such as the Kumkum and the Matateh. The most popular form of entertainment
was the cinema, even though the proponents of high culture sermonized
against it as an empty, escapist medium. The Adloyada processions accompanying
the Purim festival (the name is derived from the rabbinic saying that one
should revel on Purim until one ‘‘no longer knows’’—ad delo yada) were an example
of the light, entertaining culture that characterized Tel Aviv and attracted
thousands. During the festival the streets were crowded with visitors from all over
the country, including labor settlements, who came to enjoy the costumes and the
carnival atmosphere. Even the Arab neighbors from Ja√a liked to walk among the
happy throng.
The Orient Fair, which first opened in 1932, provided an opportunity to exhibit
the country’s industrial and agricultural achievements. All the leading dignitaries
attended the opening. Tel Aviv showcased itself as the economic and manufacturing
heart of Palestine, no less important than labor settlement. A young
American student who came to Palestine in October 1947 was more impressed,
however, by the di√erences between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where she lived: ‘‘Tel
Aviv is a far cry from provincial Jerusalem, very sophisticated and cosmopolitan
with a slight Hebrew accent.’’ The city reminded her of Coney Island: ‘‘It has a
carnival air about it: big signs, blaring noises, laughing faces, boisterous children
and flamboyant colors.’’∞∑
Tel Aviv was also where large-scale events were held. The city’s halls were
small and stifling, and in the Mediterranean climate, the outdoors had greater
appeal for a sort of street theater. Open-air political rallies went on for hours,
with audiences standing as they listened eagerly to the speakers. Heat, sweat, and
crowds did not bother the hundreds and thousands of supporters. In the pretelevision
era the political rally was the most direct form of contact between the
public and its leaders. Attendance at these events demonstrated solidarity with
the organizers, plus a willingness to enlist in the cause for a few hours by addressing
political issues. Such a rally was both political statement and source of
entertainment, for the political leaders were first-rate orators who knew how to
capture an audience.
May Day was the occasion for mass demonstrations by the Histadrut and the
parties of the left. The Histadrut leadership, trade unions, workplaces (especially
those belonging to the hevrat ha¢ovdim, or society of workers), kibbutzim, and
youth movements all made sure their members attended. Red flags were waved
and rousing speeches delivered, after which the public quietly dispersed. On Tel
the yishuv 149
Hai Day (eleventh of the Hebrew month of Adar), commemorating Trumpeldor
and his comrades who fell defending Tel Hai in 1920, the youth movements
marched through the city streets, with those in brown Betar uniforms marching
separately from the wearers of blue shirts. Whereas May Day symbolized solidarity
with the workers’ movement worldwide, Tel Hai Day symbolized the Zionist
struggle for Palestine. Betar emphasized the myth of Trumpeldor the fighter,
who as he lay dying whispered, ‘‘Never mind, it is good to die for our country.’’
Those in blue shirts focused on Trumpeldor the pioneer worker, the man who
plowed his soil. The slogan ‘‘What we have built must not be abandoned,’’
coined by one of the Tel Hai fallen, became central to the labor movement ethos.
The Hanukkah torchlight processions by the youth movements reflected the way
this holiday had been transformed. The traditional festival of the small jug of oil
was now a festival of heroism. The heroism of the Maccabees had inspired the
founding fathers of Zionism and their dream of transforming the image of the
Jews. ‘‘The Maccabees will rise again,’’ Herzl declares.∞∏
When Bialik wanted to underscore
the wretchedness of the Jews during the Kishinev pogrom, he compared
their cowardice with the heroism of their Maccabean ancestors. And in his poem
‘‘They Say There Is a Land,’’ Tschernichovsky declares, ‘‘You are the Maccabee!’’∞π
A miracle did not happen to us,
We found no cruse of oil
We cut through rock till we bled
And there was light!
Thus sang the youngsters of Zionist activism, setting themselves in opposition to
those who believed in miraculous redemption.∞∫
The traditional Hanukkah spinning
top and pancakes remained popular, but the holiday as a whole acquired a
layer of public meaning designed to demonstrate the historical tradition of heroism
in the Holy Land.
Large national funerals were also held in Tel Aviv. This tradition began with
the funerals of the people killed in the 1921 riots, who included the venerated
writer Yosef Haim Brenner. It was renewed with the funeral of Chaim Arlosoro√,
the murdered head of the Jewish Agency Political Department (1933), and continued
with the funerals of Bialik, Tel Aviv mayor Meir Dizengo√, Berl Katznelson,
and many more. Cultural heroes were given mass funerals as a mark of
respect for the deceased and what they stood for. The funerals for riot victims
provided an opportunity to express solidarity and loyalty either to labor or to the
right. The mass demonstrations against the Mandatory government had a similar
purpose. Particularly noteworthy were the demonstrations protesting the
White Paper in 1939, and those after the World War demanding that the gates of
Palestine be opened, using the slogan ‘‘Free Immigration, A Jewish State.’’
150 a state-in-the-making
The education system worked to inculcate in the younger generation a commitment
to the Zionist idea. Every Friday children came to school with a donation
to the Jewish National Fund, which they put in the jnf Blue Box. The class that
collected the most money won a commendation, with songs in the accompanying
ceremony stressing the importance of these contributions for redeeming the
land. One lesson taught in primary school classes was ‘‘Homeland,’’ which covered
the country’s geography, climate, and flora. A map of Palestine appeared on
the first page of the exercise book, in which children wrote the songs about
Palestine learned that year. Children’s books emphasized the connection with
the country. ‘‘Our Land, You Are Beautiful’’ was the title of one popular book.
Textbooks were full of such terms as ‘‘homeland’’ and ‘‘our land.’’ ‘‘As the sun
blazes on the mountain, / And while the valley’s dew still glistens. / We love you,
our homeland, / With joy, with song, with labor,’’ the children sang. ‘‘From the
slopes of Lebanon to the Dead Sea / We will plow your fields. / Plant, farm and
build for you, / So that you will be beautiful.’’ Nobody questioned this song’s
personification of the land itself rather than the nation.∞Ω
A tree-planting festival
was held on the fifteenth of the Hebrew month of Shevat. According to the
Zionist narrative, the Arabs had destroyed the country’s forests, causing soil
erosion. Now the Jews had come to restore Palestine to its former beauty as a land
flowing with milk and honey, so trees must be planted. The tree-planting ceremony,
done by kindergarten and primary school children, encouraged them to
identify with the slogan of making the desert bloom.
Schools and youth movements took field trips to historic sites such as the
graves of the Maccabees at Modi¢in, Masada, and Tel Hai. Every trip included
explanations of the historical contexts. The songs participants sang as they went
along, the texts read at the sites, the physical exertion of the walks, peer-group
identification, and the sense of togetherness and belonging all coalesced to help
anchor love of the country, its landscapes, and its history deeply in the adolescents’
psyches. This identification with the physical land, its heat and dust and
mountain springs, was unique to the children born and raised in Palestine. Their
parents’ generation did not know it. They acquired the feeling of being masters
of the country from Jewish history and Zionist ideology, and their love of it was
not free of longing for other landscapes. For native-born children, being masters
of the land was self-evident. It was their homeland—they knew no other. If on
their field trips they encountered Arab villages, they perceived these as part of the
scenery—perhaps as a cause of some tension and a sense of danger that heightened
the excitement of the trip but not as representing another claimant to ownership
of the country.
Had a survey about the Zionist ethos been conducted among the people of the
Yishuv after World War Two, we can assume that the majority would have recited
the yishuv 151
the standard slogans about ‘‘inverting the pyramid’’ and establishing a workers’
class in Palestine, the importance of the pioneer, the wonders of the country’s
youth, the malice of the British, and the backwardness of the Arabs. They would
probably have condemned the employers of Arab labor and demanded free immigration
to Palestine. If asked whether they were willing to dedicate their time
and their lives to achieve national objectives, a high percentage would have declared
themselves ready and willing. We can also assume that they would have
expressed faith in the Zionist leadership headed by David Ben-Gurion and shown
themselves ready to follow him. On the face of it, this survey would have shown
the predominance of Zionist-socialist ideology in its moderate Mapai form. On
the conscious level of public discourse, propaganda, and education, this was a
consensual worldview, accepted also by the center and even the right. To what
degree this worldview was a guiding light in everyday life is another question
entirely.
notes
1. David Shimonovitz, ‘‘Mered haben’’ (Rebellion of the Son), first published in the
Hashomer Hatza¢ir magazine in Warsaw, 1922. Reprinted, inter alia, in Songbook, Tel Aviv:
Yakhdav, 1965, p. 76.
2. Uri Zvi Greenberg, ‘‘Tzvah ha¢avoda’’ (The Army of Labor), Be£emtza ha¢olam uve£emtza
hazmanim (In the Middle of the World, In the Middle of Time), Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1979,
p. 32.
3. Avraham Shlonsky, ‘‘Amal’’ (Labor), Poems, Merhavia: Hapoalim Publishing, 1965, p. 165.
4. Uri Zvi Greenberg, ‘‘Hizdaharut’’ (Illumination), Be£emtza ha¢olam uve£emtza hazmanim (In
the Middle of the World, In the Middle of Time), Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1979, p. 52.
5. Avigdor Hameiri, ‘‘Shnei mikhtavim’’ (Two Letters), popular song.
6. Shaul Tschernichovsky, ‘‘Ani ma£amin’’ (Creed), Kol kitvei Shaul Tschernichovsky (Collected
Works), vol. 1, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990: Poems and Ballads, pp. 27–28.
7. Leah Goldberg, ‘‘Oren’’ (Pine), Barak baboker (Morning Lightning), Merhavia: Sifriat
Hapoalim, 1957, p. 39.
8. Porath, Letters from Jerusalem, p. 51.
9. Berl Katznelson, Arakhim genuzim (Hidden Values), Ephraim Broide (ed.), Tel Aviv:
Ayanot, 1957, p. 111.
10. Yitzhak Shenhar, ‘‘Shir haherut’’ (The Song of Freedom).
11. Anton Semyonovich Makarenko, Hapoema hapedagogit (The Pedagogical Poem), Avraham
Shlonsky (trans.), Merhavia: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1939; Valentin Petrovich Kataev, Mifras boded
malbin ba£ofek (A White Sail Gleams), Leah Goldberg (trans.), Merhavia: Sifriat Hapoalim,
1942.
12. Alexander Bek, Anshei Panfilov (Panfilov’s Men), Shlomo Even-Shoshan (trans.), Ein
Harod: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1946.
13. David Maletz, Ma¢agalot (Circles), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1945; S. Yizhar, Ephraim hozer
la£aspeset (Ephraim Goes Back to the Alfalfa)—first published in Gilyonot, ed. Yitzhak Lamdan,
1938. Reprinted in book form in 1978 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad) and 1991 (Tel Aviv:
152 a state-in-the-making
Zmora-Bitan); Haim Hazaz, ‘‘Haderasha’’ (The Sermon), Luah Ha£aretz, 1943, pp. 82–96.
Reprinted, inter alia, in Avanim rotkhot (Seething Stones), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1946,
pp. 227–244.
14. Yitzhak Lamdan, ‘‘Masada,’’ Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1952.
15. Porath, Letters from Jerusalem, p. 31
16. Binyamin Herzl, Medinat hayehudim (The Jewish State). Jerusalem edition: Jewish
Agency, 1986, p. 75.
17. This particular line appears in the first draft of the poem, dated 1923. Kol kitvei Shaul
Tschernichovsky (Collected Works), Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1990, vol. 1: Poems and Ballads,
pp. 253–255.
18. Aharon Ze£ev, ‘‘Anu nos£im lapidim’’ (We Are Carrying Torches), Shirei Hanukkah: kovetz
shirim me£et malkhinim umehabrim shonim (Hanukkah Songs: A Collection of Songs by Various
Composers and Lyricists), Tel Aviv: Renen, 1971.
19. Nathan Alterman, ‘‘Shir boker’’ (Morning Song).
bibliography
English
Shapira, Anita, Berl: The Biography of a Socialist Zionist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984.
Shapira, Anita, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999.
Hebrew
Helman, Anat, Or veyam hikifuha: tarbut tel-avivit bitekufat hamandat (Tel Aviv’s Culture during
the Mandate Era), Haifa: University of Haifa, 2007.
Shapira, Anita, Mitos ve£etos bahistoria uvakolnoa hayisraeli (Myth and Ethos in Israeli History and
Cinema), Ra¢anana: The Open University, 2008.
Shavit, Ya¢akov, and Biger, Gideon, Hahistoria shel Tel Aviv (The History of Tel Aviv), Tel Aviv:
Ramot, Tel Aviv University, 2002.
suggestions for further reading
Bernstein, Deborah S. (ed.), Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel, Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1992.
Helman, Anat, A Coat of Many Colors: Dress Culture in the Young State of Israel, Boston: Academic
Studies Press, 2011.
Oz, Amos, A Tale of Love and Darkness, London: Vintage, 2004.
Zakim, Eric, To Build and Be Built: Landscape, Literature, and the Construction of Zionist Identity,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Zerubavel, Yael, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.