The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 232–237 OZ ALMOG. The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew. Translated by Haim Watzman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xv Ⳮ 313. In Amos Oz’s now-classic story of generational struggle between Israeli fathers and sons, ‘‘The Way of the Wind’’ (1962), the aging but still virile Shimshon Sheinbaum, honored ideologue of the labor movement, expresses the following evaluation of his son Gideon Shenhav and his peers: The second generation grew up in the shadow of our achievements; that’s why they’re so confused. . . . I feel so sad when I think of Gideon and his friends: they exude such an air of shallow despair, of nihilism, of cynical mockery. They can’t love wholeheartedly, and they can’t hate wholeheartedly, either.1 The story as a whole, and its violent, cathartic ending—hinting at the symbolic demise of the next generation—could serve as an epilogue and cautionary corrective to the largely celebratory tone of Oz Almog’s The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew. This rich sociological study examines what is arguably one of Zionism’s central achievements—the figure of the Sabra. Almog’s point of departure is that the Sabra is best understood as a culturally constructed category, not as a biological term denoting actual nativeness. This observation alone, and its fleshing out through the book’s impressive scholarly sweep, is almost enough. Almog incorporates journalistic material, archival records and letters, private and published memoirs, accounts of patterns of dress and language, excerpts from school textbooks and children’s literature, and various materials produced by the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund. The study does an excellent job of relating the development and characteristics of Zionist society to Judaism and religion generally. Drawing on Robert Bellah’s study of civil religion in the United States and the work of Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don Yehiye on Zionism’s affinity for the structures of traditional Judaism, Almog convincingly demonstrates how elements of Jewish culture, such as holidays and life-cycle rituals, were adopted and transformed by the new, ostensibly secular guardians of a nascent Israeli 1. Originally appeared in Artsot ha-tan: Sipurim (Tel Aviv, 1965). This translation from Until Daybreak: Stories from the Kibbutz, ed. Richard Flantz (Tel Aviv, 1984), 258. ALMOG, THE SABRA—MANN 233 culture. Indeed, according to Almog, Zionists ‘‘did not deny the metaphysical and deterministic elements of Judaism. On the contrary, in many senses they accepted them as fundamental and used them as emotional engines to motivate the masses—especially after the establishment of the state’’ (p. 41). This same attachment to tradition is at the root of both the Sabra’s preoccupation with history and the elaborate memorial culture that developed in the wake of 1948, a watershed year for an entire generation (p. 50). The result of this intensive socializing process was the figure whose generational biography has occupied the center of the Israeli imagination for decades—the Sabra or ‘‘new Jew,’’ free of the neuroses of Diaspora Jews, indeed a bit embarrassed by the old-world customs of his exilic cousins, an anti-intellectual who could nonetheless recite poetry from memory, physically adept, an agile and stoic defender of his new home and homeland with a gentle core, a straight-talking prankster whose vernacular borrowed blithely from the Yiddish of his parents and the Arabic of his new neighbors, who wore the sensibility of a Russian peasant beneath the garb of an Arab fellah. For English readers with little background in Jewish or Israeli culture and history, The Sabra will provide a fascinating example of an ostensibly revolutionary society’s attempt to socialize its young. The book is a welcome and erudite addition to the relatively short list of serious academic studies of Israeli culture and deserves a place on both undergraduate and graduate course syllabi on modern Jewish and Israeli history. Readers who are more familiar with the subject matter will find an enormous catalogue of evidence, drawn from popular culture as well as private journals and...