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Does the civil sphere consist merely of conscious and reflective subjects? Do folkloric habits, customs, and traditions contribute anything to its universalism? This article proposes the term ‘folkloric civil sphere’ to describe a... more
Does the civil sphere consist merely of conscious and reflective subjects? Do folkloric habits, customs, and traditions contribute anything to its universalism? This article proposes the term ‘folkloric civil sphere’ to describe a non-intentional dimension of social life and of the civil sphere, composed of conventional rituals – such as those of holidays – that are followed without reflection or debate and that together form a collective ‘way of life,’ but which are nevertheless civil, in that they transcend primordial loyalties and encourage universalistic discourse. As opposed to the neo-Durkheimian focus on the meanings of delineated and emotionally moving performances, the article relies on ethnological history to develop a bottom-up model for grasping the civil meanings of conventional rituals. It suggests recreating the gradual chronological process in which conventions appear, are disseminated, turn into rituals and into group icons, and only then may acquire ambiguous meani...
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This chapter investigates the conditions in which a “buy national” campaign turns from a positive campaign for “our” prosperity into a negative one against “theirs,” that is, boycott. It uses the Zionist “buy national” campaigns in... more
This chapter investigates the conditions in which a “buy national” campaign turns from a positive campaign for “our” prosperity into a negative one against “theirs,” that is, boycott. It uses the Zionist “buy national” campaigns in interwar Palestine as a case in point. It explores the possible villains these campaigns could single out: the British imperial power, the rival Arab-Palestinian nationalist movement, and after 1933, Nazi Germany. Although Zionist “buy national” campaigns seldom called on consumers to boycott the products of a particular group, their intensity was directly linked to the intensity of the ethnonational conflict over Palestine and the immediate presence of a rival nationalist movement.
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This article is an anthropological history of the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony in the Yishuv and Israel of the 1940s and the 1950s, when this ceremony radically grew in terms of the space, time, and economic resources devoted to it, as well... more
This article is an anthropological history of the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony in the Yishuv and Israel of the 1940s and the 1950s, when this ceremony radically grew in terms of the space, time, and economic resources devoted to it, as well as expanded to include girls. To explain that shift, I suggest distinguishing classic rites of initiation from the system of life-cycle ceremonies typical of modern consumer culture, which emphasizes the transition between temporal markers rather than social statuses and imposes no task on the birthday celebrant. The article reconstructs the process by which, during the 1940s and the 1950s, the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony came to function more as an elaborate birthday party than as a rite of initiation. The historical reconstruction demonstrates how, during the late Mandate period and early years of statehood, a new grassroots Israeli culture emerged, shaped by the accommodation of Western consumer culture to Jewish traditions rather than by Zionist ide...
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This article aims to form a conversation between conceptual history and anthropological history, taking bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish girls, as a test case. The term is shown to have two main conceptual meanings:... more
This article aims to form a conversation between conceptual history and anthropological history, taking bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish girls, as a test case. The term is shown to have two main conceptual meanings: first, the new religious status that a Jewish girl acquires—that of an adult obligated by the precepts of Jewish law—and second, the event or ritual marking this milestone. The close examination of the concept’s various meanings in different Jewish languages tracks its development from its hesitant beginnings in the nineteenth century to its emergence as a key concept that refers to a central ceremony in the Jewish world of the twentieth century. From that point, the article follows the two lexical paths that bat mitzvah has traveled, in the United States and in Israel, and highlights a basic anthropological difference in the ceremony’s social function.
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This article offers an ethnographic-historical interpretation of Israeli public culture as reflected in the various forms in which Yom Kippur has been observed in the Israeli public sphere since the 1920s. The analysis demonstrates how... more
This article offers an ethnographic-historical interpretation of Israeli public culture as reflected in the various forms in which Yom Kippur has been observed in the Israeli public sphere since the 1920s. The analysis demonstrates how Israeli culture is an independent Jewish culture, which should be judged separately from other historical Jewish cultures and from its marginal groups, the strictly religious and the radically secular.
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The article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement... more
The article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement employed dominant contemporary assumptions about economic nationalism in attempts to politicize the economy of British Palestine, including through campaigns advocating ethnonational separatism in consumption. Unlike other “buy local” movements around the world, these were not directed solely against imports; rather, they were often “buy Jewish” campaigns waged against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethnonational sector in Palestine. Using a variety of archival and media sources, the article tracks the development of Jewish separatist consumption campaigns in interwar Palestine, uncovering a gradual amplification of their ethnonational emphasis that paralleled the escalation of the Arab–Jewish conflict. The cultural mechanisms used...
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The article examines the genesis, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, of the current Zionist periodization, which separated the early decades of Zionist history into distinct immigration waves [Aliyot], and numbered them from the first to... more
The article examines the genesis, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, of the current Zionist periodization, which separated the early decades of Zionist history into distinct immigration waves [Aliyot], and numbered them from the first to the fifth. The anticipated mass immigration to Palestine right after the Balfour Declaration was numbered the “Third Aliya”, following the two biblical immigrations from Babylonia. Later, the linguistic convention of the “Third Aliya” was changed from a long-range perception of history to a short-range one, and two preceding immigration waves were retrospectively pinpointed in the late Ottoman era. The new periodization was disseminated in the Yishuv during the 1920s, when the sequence of immigration waves was extended with the beginning of the Fourth Aliya in 1924. The new Zionist periodization established the concept of Aliya as the measure for assessing Zionist history, employing a judgmental distinction between the oleh driven by nationalist motives, contrasted with the Mehager whose concerns were personal or limited to family well-being. It thereby explains the magnitude of the pioneer ethos in the middle class Yishuv society, and demonstrates the political, cultural, and social implications of linguistic processes.
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Familism is a model of a social organization that assigns the family an important role in individual and collective identity. This article proposes a historical analysis and interpretation of the Seder celebrations of Jewish Israelis, in... more
Familism is a model of a social organization that assigns the family an important role in individual and collective identity. This article proposes a historical analysis and interpretation of the Seder celebrations of Jewish Israelis, in order to explore what is unique about Israeli familism—that it imagines the entire nation as an extended family. This ritual continues to be widely practiced today by Jews of every sector—secular, traditional, and religious. As a result, it has a significant presence in Israeli popular culture. The focus is on two questions: (1) who celebrates? That is, what forum convenes around the table? (2) How is it celebrated? That is, what ritual is conducted during the festive gathering? The historical and ethnographic analysis shows that over the course of the twentieth century, the extended family became the preferred forum for celebration, and that the conformist reading of the Haggadah and the other parts of the ceremony continue on the whole to follow the Orthodox rules, even in secular families. This mode of celebration is analyzed here as an expression of the political image of the entire Jewish people as one large extended family and as a demonstration of the extensive use of Jewish familism in the construction of Jewish identity in Israel today.
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What do birthdays mean? Why are they so obligatory for modern people? Based on neo-Durkheimian perspectives on ritual, this article suggests the anthropological history of the western birthday as a key to understand its meaning. The... more
What do birthdays mean? Why are they so obligatory for modern people? Based on neo-Durkheimian perspectives on ritual, this article suggests the anthropological history of the western birthday as a key to understand its meaning. The article points at the unique ritual system developed by modern industrial culture, such as birthdays, jubilees, and other anniversaries—designated here as Rites of Temporality—which latch on to the numerical milestones marking the passage of time to which the celebrant (individual, institution, settlement, state, and so forth) is subject. Comparing the birthday with classical rites of initiation then reveals how over and above individualism, consumer culture, state bureaucracy, and historical consciousness, the birthday honors time’s most noticeable markers since the industrial era—numbers—thus objectifying conventionalized time as a central meaning maker for modern people.
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Concerned with how nationalist cultural codes are embedded in everyday life, studies of “nationalism-from-below” mistake nationalist meanings for the contents of official messages. Rather than studying the reception of spectacles and... more
Concerned with how nationalist cultural codes are embedded in everyday life, studies of “nationalism-from-below” mistake nationalist meanings for the contents of official messages. Rather than studying the reception of spectacles and symbols produced from above, the article suggests looking at unofficial nationalism and focusing on the nationalist meanings of traditions and customs—especially those related to ritual and food—that are common to broad strata of the population but have almost no state involvement. Using the anthropological history of Israeli Independence Day as an exemplary case, and focusing on how people spend their country’s national day, the article examines the failure of official nationalism to design the holiday’s popular traditions. Next it surveys the development of what has become the popular mode of celebrating the day—the picnic and cookout. In due course, this practice was ritualized and iconicized as representing “Israeliness,” an identity that is more ambivalent than the seamless images circulated from above suggest. I argue that the meanings of unofficial practices, because of their triviality, lie not in the symbolic codes they enact, but rather in the synchronicity that ritualizes and iconicizes a “way of life,” forms national solidarity, and imbues the performance with nationalist meanings.
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This chapter investigates the conditions in which a “buy national” campaign turns from a positive campaign for “our” prosperity into a negative one against “theirs,” that is, boycott. It uses the Zionist “buy national” campaigns in... more
This chapter investigates the conditions in which a “buy national” campaign turns from a positive campaign for “our” prosperity into a negative one against “theirs,” that is, boycott. It uses the Zionist “buy national” campaigns in interwar Palestine as a case in point. It explores the possible villains these campaigns could single out: the British imperial power, the rival Arab-Palestinian nationalist movement, and after 1933, Nazi Germany. Although Zionist “buy national” campaigns seldom called on consumers to boycott the products of a particular group, their intensity was directly linked to the intensity of the ethnonational conflict over Palestine and the immediate presence of a rival nationalist movement.
Research Interests:
This article aims to form a conversation between conceptual history and anthropological history, taking bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish girls, as a test case. The term is shown to have two main conceptual meanings:... more
This article aims to form a conversation between conceptual history and anthropological history, taking bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish girls, as a test case. The term is shown to have two main conceptual meanings: first, the new religious status that a Jewish girl acquires—that of an adult obligated by the precepts of Jewish law—and second, the event or ritual marking this milestone. The close examination of the concept’s various meanings in different Jewish languages tracks its development from its hesitant beginnings in the nineteenth century to its emergence as a key concept that refers to a central ceremony in the Jewish world of the twentieth century. From that point, the article follows the two lexical paths that bat mitzvah has traveled, in the United States and in Israel, and highlights a basic anthropological difference in the ceremony’s social function.
Research Interests:
This article is an anthropological history of the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony in the Yishuv and Israel of the 1940s and the 1950s, when this ceremony radically grew in terms of the space, time, and economic resources devoted to it, as well... more
This article is an anthropological history of the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony in the Yishuv and Israel of the 1940s and the 1950s, when this ceremony radically grew in terms of the space, time, and economic resources devoted to it, as well as expanded to include girls. To explain that shift, I suggest distinguishing classic rites of initiation from the system of life-cycle ceremonies typical of modern consumer culture, which emphasizes the transition between temporal markers rather than social statuses and imposes no task on the birthday celebrant. The article reconstructs the process by which, during the 1940s and the 1950s, the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony came to function more as an elaborate birthday party than as a rite of initiation. The historical reconstruction demonstrates how, during the late Mandate period and early years of statehood, a new grassroots Israeli culture emerged, shaped by the accommodation of Western consumer culture to Jewish traditions rather than by Zionist ideology or established religion.
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This essentially theoretical article suggests a novel way to conceptualise the middle spaces of people whose link to religion is perceived as partial and fragmentary – the vast majority of the population in the world of the twenty-first... more
This essentially theoretical article suggests a novel way to conceptualise the middle spaces of people whose link to religion is perceived as partial and fragmentary – the vast majority of the population in the world of the twenty-first century, who belong to a religious tradition but are quite selective in their observances. We first argue that current conceptualisation of the middle spaces suffers from a predisposition we view as ‘Christocentric’. As the key to an alternative and non-Christocentric approach, we suggest the concept of ‘traditionism’, which permits a new theoretical discussion of the meanings of religion for contemporary individuals who belong to a religious tradition but are not fully committed to its current authorities or affiliated with recognised denominations. As a case study to clarify the new, non-Christocentric conceptualisation, we suggest the religious identity of contemporary ‘Arab Jews’ – Jews whose families originated in the Muslim Middle East – to highlight the potential contribution of a certain Jewish perspective to an understanding of modern religion as tradition and of modern practitioners of religion who belong to no denomination as ‘traditionists’.
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This article offers a cultural analysis of the traditional initiation rites for Jewish teenagers in Israel—the bar mitzvah for boys and bat mitzvah for girls. With regard to the main format of the celebration, the two are quite similar,... more
This article offers a cultural analysis of the traditional initiation rites for Jewish teenagers in Israel—the bar mitzvah for boys and bat mitzvah for girls. With regard to the main format of the celebration, the two are quite similar, with the actual focus an extravagant party in the spirit of consumer culture. Nonetheless, the references to them in Israeli popular culture—in literature, theatre, film, television, popular music, and how-to manuals—reflect differences in the meanings assigned to the rituals for the two sexes: in its depictions in popular culture, the bar mitzvah is mostly associated with a formal rite of initiation, an event often seen as comic, exotic, or unimportant, that happens to accompany the party. The bat mitzvah, by contrast, is portrayed, if at all, as simply a more elaborate birthday party. This article asks why, in a society that abandoned so many traditional customs, the male ceremony is at all performed. It suggests that as a result of the elimination of the ceremony’s traditional and historical meaning—induction into the male world of religious obligations—the Israeli mainstream has made the bar mitzvah a link in the series of the male initiation rites into acceptance of duties and challenges, which runs from circumcision to military conscription; whereas the bat mitzvah has no such cultural links and therefore contains no aspects of an initiation ritual. The gender difference in the patterns of initiating young people into Israeli adult culture illuminates the patrilineal aspects of Israeli Jewish culture, which places the burden of handing on the culture mainly on the shoulders of its menfolk.
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Familism is a model of a social organization that assigns the family an important role in individual and collective identity. This article proposes a historical analysis and interpretation of the Seder celebrations of Jewish Israelis, in... more
Familism is a model of a social organization that assigns the family an important role in individual and collective identity. This article proposes a historical analysis and interpretation of the Seder celebrations of Jewish Israelis, in order to explore what is unique about Israeli familism—that it imagines the entire nation as an extended family. This ritual continues to be widely practiced today by Jews of every sector—secular, traditional, and religious. As a result, it has a significant presence in Israeli popular culture. The focus is on two questions: (1) who celebrates? That is, what forum convenes around the table? (2) How is it celebrated? That is, what ritual is conducted during the festive gathering? The historical and ethnographic analysis shows that over the course of the twentieth century, the extended family became the preferred forum for celebration, and that the conformist reading of the Haggadah and the other parts of the ceremony continue on the whole to follow the Orthodox rules, even in secular families. This mode of celebration is analyzed here as an expression of the political image of the entire Jewish people as one large extended family and as a demonstration of the extensive use of Jewish familism in the construction of Jewish identity in Israel today.
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The article tracks the fin de siècle development of planting ceremonies as the most frequent festive format of Tu Bishvat, directly influenced by the North American Arbor Day, alongside the general motif of the tree, adored in modern... more
The article tracks the fin de siècle development of planting ceremonies as the most frequent festive format of Tu Bishvat, directly influenced by the North American Arbor Day, alongside the general motif of the tree, adored in modern European nationalist movements. The ceremonies were invented in the cities, for urban children, as a nostalgic reference to the peasants and agricultural life. The latter appeared as a nostalgic object already in the urban society of late ottoman period. The tension between the urbanized reality and the agricultural nostalgia constituted Tu Bishvat as the planting festival and nourished its cultural vivaciousness.
The article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement... more
The article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement employed dominant contemporary assumptions about economic nationalism in attempts to politicize the economy of British Palestine, including through campaigns advocating ethnonational separatism in consumption. Unlike other “buy local” movements around the world, these were not directed solely against imports; rather, they were often “buy Jewish” campaigns waged against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethnonational sector in Palestine. Using a variety of archival and media sources, the article tracks the development of Jewish separatist consumption campaigns in interwar Palestine, uncovering a gradual amplification of their ethnonational emphasis that paralleled the escalation of the Arab–Jewish conflict. The cultural mechanisms used to attribute ethnic qualities to objects and define them as either “Jewish” or “foreign” are analyzed with particular attention to the conceptual contradictions in the definitions of a Jewish product, which were shaped by economic conflicts and the diverse political conceptions of Jewish identity. The study of separatist consumption sheds new light on the “dual society” thesis, revealing the deep grip of separatist approaches across multiple layers of the Jewish middle class in the Yishuv.
The article seeks to revitalize the concept of tradition and re-claim its usefulness for contemporary sociological thought and research. Instead of ontological entity, tradition is defined here as an assigned temporal meaning, i.e., a... more
The article seeks to revitalize the concept of tradition and re-claim its usefulness for contemporary sociological thought and research. Instead of ontological entity, tradition is defined here as an assigned temporal meaning, i.e., a symbolic activity in which various social groups attribute traditional qualities to certain sectors of life that are understood as binding together different times. The article analyzes two incompatible approaches with which tradition was hitherto conceptualized in sociology: (1) tradition as the anti-modern, and (2) tradition as synonymous with “culture.” The analysis introduces a few middle-ground options that support the theory of tradition as assigned meaning.
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בנקודת המפגש בין אנתרופולוגיה ולימודי תרבות לבין מדעי היהדות, בוחנת אסופת המאמרים בספר זה את ה"טקסטואליות היהודית", דהיינו, את הפנייה לטקסט, ואת השימוש והמשמעות הסמלית המיוחסת לטקסט הדתי ביהדות לגווניה. המאמרים בוחנים כיצד קהילות יהודיות... more
בנקודת המפגש בין אנתרופולוגיה ולימודי תרבות לבין מדעי היהדות, בוחנת אסופת המאמרים בספר זה את ה"טקסטואליות היהודית", דהיינו, את הפנייה לטקסט, ואת השימוש והמשמעות הסמלית המיוחסת לטקסט הדתי ביהדות לגווניה. המאמרים בוחנים כיצד קהילות יהודיות מפרשות את הטקסטים הקאנונים וכיצד פרשנותם מחדשת את התרבות; כיצד הפרשנות יוצרת תרבות; וכיצד הפרשנות משפיעה על המערך החברתי. המאמרים בספר יוצאים גם אל מחוץ למחוזות הלימוד והפרשנות: אל מגוון קהילות שונות, סידורי התפילה, הטקסים, המשפחתיות ואורחות החיים, וגם אל מרחבי הרשת, בכל המקומות הללו יוצרת הטקסטואליות קוסמולוגיות מקומיות והיא נוכחת ומשפיעה על האופנים שבאמצעותם מובן העולם. בחינת טיב המפגשים עם הטקסט מראה כי הם אינם "רק" ביטוי של מחקר בתחום היהדות, אלא מצביעים על הזדמנות ייחודית לפרשנות אנתרופולוגית גדושה. המפגש עם הטקסט יוצר אירועים של רפלקסיה, רגעים שבמהלכם ניתן לחשוב ולהרהר על מהות תרבותנו.
רובין, ניסן ושלמה גוזמן (עורכים).2021. כוחן של מילים, אנתרופולוגיה של
.טקסטואליות יהודית. ירושלים: כרמל
Rubin, Nissan and Guzmen-Carmeli, Shlomo (Eds.). 2021. The Power of Words: Anthropology of Jewish Textuality. Jerusalem: Carmel Press [Hebrew].
רובין, ניסן ושלמה גוזמן (עורכים).2021. כוחן של מילים, אנתרופולוגיה של
.טקסטואליות יהודית. ירושלים: כרמל
Rubin, Nissan and Guzmen-Carmeli, Shlomo (Eds.). 2021. The Power of Words: Anthropology of Jewish Textuality. Jerusalem: Carmel Press [Hebrew].
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Sociology of Religion, Jewish Studies, Ethnography, Israel Studies, and 12 moreJewish Philosophy, Judaism, Jewish Cultural Studies, Modern Judaism, Ethnographic Research, Scripture, Modern Jewish Thought, Sacred Scripture, Anthropology of Judaism, Anthropology of Jewish communities, Anthropology of Religion, and Talmud and Rabbinics
Israel Celebrates is about the intersection where Israeli inventiveness and Jewish tradition meet: the holidays. It employs the anthropological history of four Jewish holidays as celebrated in Israel in order to track the naturalization... more
Israel Celebrates is about the intersection where Israeli inventiveness and Jewish tradition meet: the holidays. It employs the anthropological history of four Jewish holidays as celebrated in Israel in order to track the naturalization of Jewish rituals, myths, and symbols in Israeli culture throughout " the long twentieth century " of Zionism and on to the present, and to demonstrate how a new strand of Judaism developed in Israel from the grassroots. But could this grassroots Israeli culture develop into a shared symbolic space for both Jews and Arabs? By probing the political implications of the minutiae of life, the book argues that this popular culture might come to define Jewish identity in Israel of the 21st century.
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יום העיון השנתי של קהילת צריכה ותרבות באגודה הסוציולוגית, אוניברסיטת בר אילן, 3 ביוני 2018.