Israel by Anita Shapira

Author:Anita Shapira
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brandeis University Press

YOUTH CULTURE AND “BEN-GURION’S STATE ”

Parallel with the youth movements a “salon” youth culture emerged, whose adherents were fans of Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, and Paul Anka. Followers of European fashion, they discovered American jeans, did ballroom dancing, and were not overly preoccupied with ideology. There was no Chinese wall between the cultural styles of these two groups of young people, and they moved in either direction according to their inclination. Western culture took a long time to reach Israel. Foreign travel was expensive and restricted by the shortage of foreign currency. But fashion arrived via newspapers, magazines, and the cinema, and music by means of records. In the 1950s translated literature included war novels published in the United States at the time: James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Battle Cry by Leon Uris, The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions. The works of Jack London and John Steinbeck became best sellers, together with popular American literature translated into Hebrew during this period. These books replaced the Soviet war novels of the previous decade.

The cinema was the most popular form of entertainment. Westerns nurtured the myth of the wide open spaces and became part of local culture, to the point where one journalist claimed that the Palmach had been founded by Yitzhak Sadeh and Gary Cooper. After the War of Independence educated young people traveled to France to learn French culture, and some even went to the United States; they brought these foreign influences back with them. Although the left considered Western culture decadent and doomed to extinction, it was also the heart’s desire of the young people who grew up in the 1950s.

Rhetorically the collectivist ethos reigned supreme and was fostered by the press, the radio, and even literature. First Person Plural, the title of a novel by Nathan Shaham, was typical. But at the same time, an individualist ethos appeared. It did not contravene the patriotism or willingness to sacrifice of young people seeking a challenge, but it did conflict with the old social frameworks that emphasized the peer group and society at large, as opposed to the individual. One example of this individualist ethos is the recurrent attempts by young people to reach Petra, an enthralling Nabatean, non-Jewish site in Jordan. Hiking to Petra was a contemporary substitute for the Palmachniks’ adventure of “conquering” the land on foot, which also carried the meanings of crossing borders and daring to shatter conventions. Author Naomi Frankel wrote in wonderment about Meir Har-Zion, the ultimate ranger, whom Moshe Dayan called the best Jewish fighter since the time of Bar-Kokhba: “What is the source of the extraordinary drive to break limits and conventions, to tread paths yet untrodden by man, to reach mountain summits, to be the first and only one in places that man has never seen, and to always have the feeling of free expanses?”

The transition from the Land of Israel to the State of Israel imposed a practical and spiritual boundary

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