ISSN: 1353-1042 (Print) 1744-0548 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjih20
Deborah Bernstein (2015) Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s, Journal of Israeli History, 34:2, 221-224, DOI:
10.1080/13531042.2015.1068981
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2015.1068981
Published online: 21 Aug 2015.
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Download by: [Brandeis University] Date: 29 October 2015, At: 09:37

The Journal of Israeli History , 2015
Vol. 34, No. 2, 221–230
BOOK REVIEWS
Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s , by Anat Helman,
The Schusterman Series in Israel Studies, Waltham MA, Brandeis University Press,
2014, xvii
þ
274 pp., ISBN 978-1-61168-556-5
In her conclusion Helman describes her book as an attempt to avoid both nostalgia and judgment, offering what she calls a “messy picture” of Israeli state and society during its first years of sovereignty, its most formative years of both nation building and state building (p. 191). In somewhat different terms, I would suggest that Helman’s intriguing book may be seen as a nuanced portrayal which manages to navigate the winding terrain between “top,” “middle” and to some extent “bottom” segments of a growing, diverse society. Helman, as most other historians/sociologists of the early state period, distinguishes between newcomers, defined as those who arrived after the establishment of the State of Israel (May 1948), and old-timers, or to use Helman’s term
– long-timers ( vatikim ). And yet I would like to moderate this distinction by reminding us that the majority of the “long”-timers had not been in Palestine/Israel for that long.
Some had come twenty years earlier, though most had come either in the few years prior to World War II or just after it. Thus the majority of the population, both “old” and
“new,” had undergone, and were still undergoing, upheavals, traumas of war (both
World War II and the War of Independence) and their aftermath, experiencing shortages of both food and housing and sharing, though to different extents and via different forms of involvement, the excitement of a new country and new state, as well as the immigrants’ new challenges of everyday life.
The first decade of statehood has been studied before, usually focusing either on the mass immigration and the related forms of state-managed absorption or on the predominantly political transition from pre-state autonomy to a sovereign state. Much of Israeli historiography, and possibly especially the study of this period, has been very
“top heavy,” emphasizing state formation, institutional change, ideals and their implementation, and ideological splits within the veteran elites. Helman, on the other hand, has adopted a different perspective. Building on the very recent trend of the writing of social history, to which she contributed in her earlier work on Tel Aviv during the pre-state period,
1
Helman combines the analysis of institutional and ideological developments of state building “from above” and the responses and reactions of the “rank and file.” More specifically, Helman adopts the terms of Michel de Certeau who distinguishes between strategies and tactics; the strategies of elites, political leadership, and institutions aimed to advance state building along the more or less accepted ideological lines, and the manner in which large segments of society devised tactics of response, routines of everyday life which accepted much of the hegemonic decrees, yet did so while negotiating their own version and ensuring some degrees of freedom. To quote Helman, the book “portrays how, during the first years of sovereignty, Israeli identity emerged from a combination of a self-conscious elite culture and the array of informal habitual practices and conventions shared by many

222 Book Reviews
Israelis” (p. xii). Within this historiographic perspective of interaction between strategies and tactics, the main emphasis of the book, as well as its main innovation, is on the “practices”; the informal, routine, and often mundane aspects of behavior, which usually did not offer outright opposition to state and elite strategies, but manipulated, negotiated, and shaped them in manners compatible to those who were “becoming
Israeli.”
Those “becoming Israeli” were a diverse crowd, as Helman describes in detail. They include the old-timers who arrived in Israel and became part of the Yishuv prior to
1948, and the new immigrants who doubled the number of the Jewish population within a decade. Many of these identified with the basic tenets of Zionist hegemony, had respect for the state, its institutions and symbols. Three large segments of society bore a far more conflictual or at least ambivalent and ambiguous relation to the state, these being the large new immigration in general and that from Middle Eastern and North
African countries in particular, the ultra-religious communities, and the Palestinian
Arab minority, the remainders of the Arab pre-1948 majority. In her study Helman focuses on the former group, the majority of the Hebrew-speaking population, who played a major role in shaping Israeli hegemonic culture. As Helman explains, “Since this study investigates informal daily correspondence with national hegemony, it is interested mainly in Israelis who did share the hegemonic culture to a large degree and even took part in shaping it: How did they interpret, distribute, modify, contest, or ignore familiar hegemonic notions? How were hegemonic ideals translated, practiced, and communicated in the hectic flow of daily life, by the people who were well acquainted with these ideals?” (p. xv).
Helman makes use of a wide range of sources to put together this rich and often evocative study, aimed at giving at least initial answers to the questions raised above.
Institutional and ideological strategies were explicit and well documented in numerous official sources. Daily customs, norms, and patterns of behavior were also well documented in different types of sources only recently studied by historians, among them autobiographies and memoirs, satire, cartoon, jokes, photographs, advertisements, letters to editors and to ministers, and the likes. All of these serve Helman to portray a number of spheres of daily social interaction: three representative public spaces – the bus, the movie house, and the kibbutz communal dining hall (chapters 5, 6, and 7), two major forms of human interaction – language and manners (chapters 2 and 8), and two central subjects of Israeli public opinion and reference – the economic rationing policy and the army (chapters 3 and 4). In each of these, Helman finds an original angle through which to present the patterns of daily behavior in response to state policy and material and social circumstances. Thus, for example, when discussing the severe food shortage and the policy of rationing and austerity which was carried out by highly centralized state-controlled institutions, rather than dealing with the black market as most scholars do, Helman focuses on another widespread response, that of humor.
Humor was expressed in satire, cartoons, jokes, and jingles, humor being a way of coping, answering back, negotiating the limits, yet without outright rejection, of the hegemonic understanding of state responsibility and thus state intervention in one’s daily food supply.
Movies were one of the public spheres studied by Helman. While she briefly discusses the numerous ways in which movies can highlight the culture of society, she chooses the most informal aspect, movie going, as her prism for discussing everyday

The Journal of Israeli History 223 life. Helman reminds us that there was no TV at the time, so that movie going was the main form of leisure. This takes her, and the reader with her, to the somewhat creaky movie hall which was not made any better by the audience’s habit of eating sunflower seeds and spitting out the shells. She combines the public sphere and private interests by pointing to the profiteering through bargaining over tickets. She then moves on to more sociological issues by noting the difference between the movie-going experience in the major cities and that in the periphery, where films would often tear in the middle and/or the electricity would fail. Finally she draws attention to a highly significant cultural and sociological phenomenon, the keen interest and pleasure which the immigrants from
Middle Eastern and North African countries took in Arabic-speaking films predominantly from Egypt, frowned upon by both the elite and veteran Jewish
European population.
I shall leave the other detailed discussions of public arenas and everyday manners and relationships for the readers to find out on their own. To conclude, Helman claims, rightly, that the tour of the public-cum-private spheres and experiences she presents, based on a wide and diverse range of primary sources, presents a far more heterogeneous and nuanced picture than is usually portrayed when dealing, either approvingly or critically, with strategies, ideologies, and policies of state and nation building. To understand the successfully achieved hegemony, it is important to note that even those, often the majority, who did not refute the hegemonic elites and their ideological tenets, were not mere carriers of values and decrees handed down.
“Hegemonic ideals” concludes Helman, “were neither wholly fulfilled nor treated with total cynicism. National ideals were only partly implemented by the dominant
Israeli groups, and when so they were modified in various manners” (p. 188). She continues to argue that the cultural processes of state and nation building, as well as state building more generally, “Cannot be cleanly summarized as a dramatic, dichotomous conflict between a technology of power from above and a civic resistance from below. Such a clear-cut bi-dimensional presentation is naı¨ve and historically inaccurate
. . .
in daily life dealings between strategies and tactics do not occur solely on the extreme poles of control and resistance but also, and to a large degree, along less specified spectrums through negotiation, appropriation, and disregard” (p. 189).
A few final comments and suggestions. As someone who grew up in the period studied in this book, many recollections emerged as I was reading; going with my mother to the neighborhood grocery and her handing the notebook of rationing stamps, the crowded bus rides, the hard wooden seats of the movie theatres, movie viewing on the kibbutz grass with the frequent breakdowns of electricity, and many more. The style of the book is such that will no doubt bring back memories and recollections to many of the readers, either direct memories or those passed down, lovingly or bitterly, from parents.
The book also implicitly invites comparisons to present-day Israeli society. For example, the state policy of rationing of food in times of severe shortage stands in striking contrast to the neoliberalism adopted by the current Israeli state, which has been systematically cutting back on its commitment to sectors of society in dire need.
Or, the transportation service of the bus collectives which had a monopoly over public transport in a time when there were relatively few private cars in comparison to our carloaded roads, comfortable buses, new private bus companies and at the same time fewer

224 Book Reviews buses on the non-profitable lines going to distant settlements as profitability has become the major, or sole, criterion.
I would like to suggest that further work should be done, along similar theoretical and historiographic lines, focusing on those segments of society which Helman has, for reasons she discusses, left out. As explained above, Helman focuses in this study on oldtimers and more generally those who were familiar with the hegemonic ideals and institutions, who to a major extent accepted them but at the same time negotiated with them and shared in shaping them. It is now essential to move over to some of the other segments which Helman charts in her early chapters – immigrants from Muslim countries, the Jewish Ultra-Orthodox and the Arab Palestinian population who remained within the border of the state, and were during the first decade, under military rule. The question of their relation to hegemonic ideals is of course very different and documentation is far more difficult to come by. Yet, it is a challenge which this book passes on to other scholars.
Finally, to return to Helman’s description of the book as one which avoids both nostalgia and judgment: while most contemporary Israeli historians have for some time moved away from nostalgia in their academic work, Helman’s work has achieved an important balance, combining knowledge of critical historiography and its contribution, while greatly mitigating the judgmental position of the historian. She does this by attempting to understand the period from the perspective of the everyday experience of both its better-known and anonymous actors alike.
Note
1. Anat Helman, Young Tel Aviv: A Tale of Two Cities , translated by Haim Watzman (Waltham,
MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010).
Deborah Bernstein
Department of Sociology and Anthropology (Emerita)
University of Haifa bernstein.deborahs@gmail.com
q
2015, Deborah Bernstein http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13531042.2015.1068981
The “Magic Carpet” Exodus of Yemenite Jewry: An Israeli Formative Myth , by
Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Eastbourne, Sussex Academic Press, 2014, xi
þ
265 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-84519-616-5
Meir-Glitzenstein’s book is an in-depth study of the mass migration of Jews from
Yemen to Israel, which took place from late 1948 to September 1950. During this movement, alternatively called operation “Magic Carpet” or “On Eagle’s Wings,” almost 50,000 Jews traveled from Yemen to Aden and were then transported to Israel.
Very few Jews remained in Yemen after this point. Israeli historiography and collective memory portray this immigration as an example of the new State rescuing Jews in the diaspora. According to this narrative, Jews in Yemen were suffering, waiting for the opportunity to leave their place of exile. When the State of Israel was established these