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CARNIVAL IN TEL AVIV PURIM AND THE CELEBRATION OF URBAN ZIONISM HIZKY SHOHAM Israel: Society, Culture, and History Series Editor: Yaacov Yadgar, Political Studies, Bar-Ilan University Editorial Board: Alan Dowty, Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Notre Dame Tamar Katriel, Communication Ethnography, University of Haifa Avi Sagi, Hermeneutics, Cultural Studies, and Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University Allan Silver, Sociology, Columbia University Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Ethnicity, London School of Economics Yael Zerubavel, Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University CARNIVAL IN TEL AVIV PURIM AND THE CELEBRATION OF URBAN ZIONISM HIZKY SHOHAM BOSTON /2014 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-118113-51-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-618113-84-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-618113-62-7 (electronic) On the cover: “Purim in Tel-Aviv,” by Ludwig Blum (1934). Reproduced by permission of Ludwig Blum estate. Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2014 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-1-644-69328-5. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Effective March 20, 2020, this book is subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. Paula E. Hyman (1946-2011), In Memoriam Table of Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Chapter 1. “All of you to Tel Aviv on Purim”: A Local-National Festival 1 Chapter 2. “Travelling to Esther”: A Civil-Religious and Pilgrimage Event 37 Chapter 3. “A Little Bit of Tradition” 63 Chapter 4. The Civilized-Carnivalesque Body 90 Chapter 5. “Mordechai is Riding a Horse”: Political Performance 112 Chapter 6. “Our Only Romantic Festival”: Hebrew Queen Esther 138 Chapter 7. Another New Jew: Urban Zionist Ideology 163 References 188 Bibliography 189 Index 219 — VI — Acknowledgments Before acknowledging a number of scholars, colleagues and mentors, I would like to express my gratefulness to my family. Amalia, my best friend on earth, and my children Yehonatan, Noga, Ayelet and Tamar, are all sources of incessant pride and endless fun — two major con- stituents of the Tel Aviv Purim carnival, as the reader shall see here- after. I would also like to thank my parents-in-law, Haim and Ester Levanon, for introducing me to the secrets of Purim; and to my par- ents, Yitzhak and Yonina Florsheim, who taught me that a good ques- tion is worth so much more than any answer. Thanks are due to all the librarians, archivists and workers of the Central Zionist Archives, the poster collection at the national library, the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archives and the journal col- lection at Bar-Ilan University — where the primary sources were col- lected. I am particularly grateful to Ziona Raz, Nellie Verzerevsky and Rivka Pershel-Gershon from the Tel Aviv Municipal Archive. In the long line of teachers and mentors whom I have met throughout the years, Adi Ophir, Anat Helman, Derek Penslar, Israel Bartal, Anita Shapira, Margalit Shilo, Arie Saposnik, Jeffrey Alexander, Philip Smith, Elli Stern, Janet Rabinowitch, and Dan Ben-Amos influ- enced this work majorly. I would also like to thank Yaacov Yadgar for his encouragement. Most of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my PhD advisors, Avi Sagi and Jacques Ehrenfreund, for their inspirational and dedicated guidance during the PhD, and for their continuous support afterwards. Avi Sagi, in particular, assisted in overcoming several obstacles to the publication of this book. Special thanks are due to my friends Yair Lipshitz, Avishalom Westreich, Shai Secunda, Micha Perry, Orit Rozin and Nissim Leon, along with my uncle Amotz Asa-el — just for being there. This book was written over more than a decade, during which I was fortunate to have three academic homes. I was both a student and a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Led by — again — Avi Sagi, this unique program proved to be a most protective and fertile habitat for growing new ideas. My fellows and mentors in the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem never ceased to provoke new ways of thinking — VII — Acknowledgments about Jewish cultures. And finally, I am indebted to the program for Judaic Studies at Yale University. I would like to specifically acknowl- edge Steven Fraade for his never-ending support, and Renee Reed, who always cared for everyone and everything. Most of all, however, I am grateful to Paula Hyman (1946–2011) for her immense encourage- ment regarding this particular project and so much else. Paula was a passionate scholar, an involved public intellectual, and a dedicated and generous mentor. She was a tough person, but well knew how to laugh. Carnival in Tel Aviv is dedicated to her memory. — VIII — Introduction In 1935, in the Purim section of his daily newspaper, Uri Keisari (1901– 1979), one of the most notable journalists in British mandate Palestine, described a Tel Aviv street conversation about the carnival. His inter- locutor recalled memories from the first Purim celebrations fifteen years earlier, in 1920: “I remember the first year… I came [to Tel Aviv] from Haifa with my friends… each of us had a suitcase… and in each suitcase there was a special garment, a costume.” However, a few hours before the ball in “Eden” theater, shocking news was heard: there was an attack on Tel-Hai, an isolated settlement in the upper Galilee, and six Jewish pioneers were killed, including their com- mander, the Jewish war-hero and Zionist leader Yosef Trumpeldor (1880–1920). The balls were cancelled. Keisari’s interlocutor said that since then he could not celebrate Purim anymore “on this very day of Trumpeldor’s death.” Furthermore, the man criticized the fancy and grandiose Purim celebrations which overshadowed the heritage of Tel-Hai. Keisari asked him: “Don’t you think that the popular tradi- tion of the pilgrimage to Tel-Hai is enough?” and the man responded: What vanity! A few hundred youngsters break with Purim joy and make the journey to the site. But the masses, do you hear me? The “masses,” the people, I’m telling you, they stick with the joy, the merriment of Ahasuerus, Esther and Mordechai! And the pilgrimage does not begin until the festivities are over, right after all four traditional balls, and the youngsters are then making the pilgrimage with scraped knees, broken bodies and tired souls. Keisari added that “He spoke no more, I stopped asking, and both of us felt that it is not that good to die for the homeland.”1 1 Uri Keisari, “Keitzad hayim etzlenu: Divrey tuga misaviv le-yud dalet ba’adar…” [How Do We Live: Howlings around the Fourteenth of Adar], Doar-Hayom 19.2.1935. Ellipsis in original. — IX — X Introduction In 1935, the invented tradition of Tel-Hai was already well-estab- lished in the cultural life of Jewish Palestine in the British Mandate period (commonly referred to as the Yishuv). The name and heritage of Trumpeldor were embraced by Zionists across the political spectrum. Numerous stories, poems, and plays were written about the heroes of Tel-Hai, and an annual ritual emerged on the eleventh of Adar (three days before the fourteenth of Adar, the day of Purim) to commemo- rate the bloody incident: a challenging journey to the historical site in the upper Galilee, conducted by Zionist youth movements. The story about the hero who said on his deathbed “it is good to die for our country” (rather than “homeland” as in Keisari’s text) had already become an essential part of Zionist political ritual and myth.2 Keisari’s text directly targeted Purim celebrations. Unlike the Tel-Hai tradition, about which there was a consensus, the Purim cele- brations were highly controversial, and were condemned by many as hedonist, escapist, and anti-nationalist. The nationalist criticism of the Tel Aviv Purim carnival deviated from the merely anti-hedonist criti- cism, since the supporters of the carnival contended that in addition to its economic value, it had educational and cultural value — which par- ticularly aggravated the opponents: How could such a hedonist festi- val teach self-sacrifice? How could such a capitalist festival encourage the youth to serve the nation? And how could such an exilic festival, which celebrated the rescue of the Jews by court-romanticism, teach Jews the value of self responsibility and self defense? The incidental proximity between the two invented tradi- tions in the Hebrew calendar led Keisari to create a rhetoric conflict. Historically, Trumpeldor died three days before Purim, and no Purim ball was cancelled in 1920, although a few were postponed (only the carnival procession was cancelled).3 Interestingly, Keisari conflated the two traditions not only on the calendar but also chronologically, by retrospectively determining an identical point of genesis for both: the Purim day of 1920. These mnemonic proximities sharpened the inevi- table confrontation in content between the two different ways of con- structing nationalist identity: on the one hand, self-sacrifice for the 2 Goldstein & Shavit 1981; Liebman & Don-Yehiya 1983: 44–48; Zerubavel 1995: 41–43.