Dress Culture in the Young State of Israel Anat Helman

——————————————————— iNTRODUCTION ——————————————————— A Coat of Many Colors: Dress Culture in the Young State of Israel — 1 — 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 ——————————————————— iNTRODUCTION ——————————————————— A Coat of Many Colors: Dress Culture in the Young State of Israel Anat Helman Boston 2011 — 3 — Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Helman, Anat. A coat of many colors : dress culture in the young state of Israel / Anat Helman. p. cm. -- (Israel: society, culture, and history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934843-88-8 (hardback) 1. Clothing and dress--Israel--History--20th century. 2. Israel--Politics and government-- 20th century. 3. Israel--Social life and customs--20th century. I. Title. GT1430.I8H45 2011 391.0095694'0904--dc22 2011006281 Copyright © 2011 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved Book design by Adell Medovoy Published by Academic Studies Press in 2011 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 978-1-644-69326-1. 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. ——————————————————— iNTRODUCTION ——————————————————— Contents Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 9 Chapter One: Simplicity by Necessity and Choice 21 Chapter Two: Fashion Makers and Consumers 51 Chapter Three: Israeli Dress between East and West 89 Chapter Four: Clothes and Ideology in the Kibbutzim 135 Chapter Five: Representing the State, Molding the Nation 165 Conclusion 199 Bibliography 205 Index 233 — 5 — ——————————————————— iNTRODUCTION ——————————————————— — 6 — ——————————————————— iNTRODUCTION ——————————————————— Acknowledgements This study is part of a wider research about everyday culture in 1950s Israel, which was generously supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No.032.2321). I wish to express my gratitude to a team of ex- cellent research assistants—Erez Hacker, Shira Meyerson, Arik Moran, and Noah Benninga—for tracing and gathering thousands of textual and visual historical sources. These documents were collected at the National Library in Jerusa- lem, the Blumfield Library at the Hebrew University, the Central Zion- ist Archive, the Shenkar College archive, the Beit Ariella newspaper col- lection, the Israeli State Archive, the IDF Archive, the Lavon Institute, the Jabotinsky Institute, the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa Municipal Archive, the Jerusalem City Archive, the Hai- fa Municipal Archive, the Yad Tabenkin Archive, the Religious Kibbutz Movement Archive, and the local archives of Afikim, Kiryat Anavim, Hazorea, and Alonim. Thanks are due to the archivists, librarians and workers in all these institutions. I wish to thank Sara Libby Robinson, Sharona Vedol, Kira Nemirovsky and Adell Medovoy of Academic Studies Press, and Yaacov Yadgar, editor of the series “Israel: Society, Culture, and History.” Special thanks to an anonymous reader for an attentive and constructive review, which was invaluable for rethinking and rewriting the manuscript. I am very grateful to Emmanuel Sivan, Ezra Mendelshon, Atalia Hel- man, Anat Peleg, Ayala Raz, Mordechai Bar-On, Orit Rozin, and Haim Hazan, who read drafts of the Hebrew version of this study, for their helpful remarks, suggestions, and comments, and to Eviatar Zerubavel and Asher Biemann for their significant advice. Last but not least, I wish to thank Yael Zerubavel, who initially suggested, consistently motivat- ed, and kindly accompanied the writing of this study into a new English version. — 7 — ——————————————————— iNTRODUCTION ——————————————————— — 8 — ——————————————————— iNTRODUCTION ——————————————————— Introduction This book reconstructs and analyzes the emerging culture of Israel by viewing clothing, one of many fields in which culture is reflected, molded, communicated, and enhanced. It reveals how clothes played a part in the young state’s central projects: overcoming the post-war crisis and establishing a thriving national economy; absorbing an unprecedented number of new immigrants; defending its volatile borders; establishing a state apparatus; and consolidating a national identity. It also explores how clothes and fashion embodied informal values, popular trends, and cultural options, which were not necessar- ily molded into formal ideological doctrines. Dress, as part of Israel’s material culture, permits us to look into unexplored corners of social reality. It provides us with new angles from which the political, social, and military history of Israel could be revisited and viewed afresh. It helps us discover how central events and national processes were ex- perienced, implemented, and negotiated in practice, in the daily lives of ordinary Israeli citizens. The Young State of Israel Although the state of Israel was founded on a specific day, May 15, 1948, the transition from a stateless community to a sovereign state was in many ways a gradual process. Zionist settlement in Palestine began in the 1880s, when the country was part of the Ottoman Empire, and increased after World War I, when the land was ruled by the British Man- date. Zionists did not view their move to Palestine merely as an act of immigration, but rather as a meaningful act of national deliverance, and called it “aliyah,” which literally means ascent.1 The Jewish community of Palestine, known as “the Yishuv,” consolidated effective economic, political, cultural, and military institutions and organizations, creating a viable base for a future autonomous national home.2 After the foundation of the state, certain institutions went through radical change, whereas in some fields Yishuv traditions continued uninterrupted after 1948, or altered only by degrees.3 Likewise, a number of Israeli dress phenomena discussed in this book originated in the Yishuv era, while others stemmed from the novel conditions of statehood. — 9 — ——————————————————— iNTRODUCTION ——————————————————— The newly established Israeli state spent its first months in total war, defending its very existence. In January 1949 Israelis elected their first parliament. Although the last battles took place in March, by the begin- ning of 1949 the result of the War of Independence4 was already deter- mined in Israel’s favor, and cease-fire agreements were gradually signed with the Arab states. But the end of war did not bring about peace, and security remained a central and costly national concern. The IDF—Is- raeli Defense Force—hence became a central national institution, “an army of the people,” which carried out civilian assignments, such as settlement and education, as well as military tasks.5 A military rule was imposed on the Arab population who remained within Israel’s borders. The Arab community of Palestine, numbering about 1,300,000 before the war (800,000 of them in the area that was to become Israel), was dispersed, dwindled, and was devastated by the war. About 160,000 non-Jews (mainly Muslim Arabs alongside Druze and various Christian minorities) remained in the state of Israel, eighty percent of them living in villages.6 The Jewish population, on the other hand, increased at an unprecedented rate. As soon as the state was established, Jewish immigrants started arriving in the hundreds of thousands. About 650,000 Jews lived in Israel in May 1948, and within one decade they numbered more than 1,800,000. This huge wave of immigration was titled “the great aliyah,” and was defined by the government as the state’s primary mission.7 The great aliyah was characterized both by its rapid pace (between 1948 and 1951 the population of Israel dou- bled), and by the unusual ratio of newcomers to long-time residents. While 90 percent of the Zionist immigrants in the Yishuv were Ashke- nazim (Jews of European origin), the great aliyah changed the ethnic composition of Israel, as less than half of the new immigrants came from Europe (mainly survivors of the Holocaust) and America, and more than half of the immigrants arrived from Asia and North Africa. Whereas most Jewish immigrants during the Mandate era were young people, more than half of the immigrants in the great aliyah were old people and young children.8 New immigrants had to be accommodated, so state authorities opened transit camps and created temporary settlements, but immigrants often stayed there much longer than originally planned, in isolation and in very

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