Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s

8 | Informality, Straightforwardness, and Rudeness

Informality, Straightforwardness, and Rudeness 8By now the reader must have noticed that Israelis often used casual and familiar forms of social communication. As we saw, informal Hebrew, although still shunned by high and official culture, became a coveted sign of nativity. Informality was apparent even in an institution commonly supposed to be hyperformal—the army. The line between informality and impoliteness was a thin one; Israeli brusqueness could easily become more aggressive, turning into unmistakable rudeness and even occasional violence conveyed, inter alia, in the long lines for rationed products, the bus, and the cinema. When a women’s magazine published a pictorial quiz about manners in 1954, the two questions shown on page 164 regarded the cinema and the bus. “Oneshouldnotenterthecinemarowwithone’sbackturnedtotheseated audience,” admonished the riddle’s solution, “and it is also polite to get up and allow the person arriving to have more space.” As for the bus scene, “It is extremely impolite for young men to sit comfortably in the bus while a mother carrying her child remains standing.”1 Yet given our close look at the Israeli bus and the Israeli movie theater, such pedantic demands seem rather out of place; behavior in Israeli buses and cinemas was characterized by inconsideration far harsher than turning one’s back or not offering one’s seat. Daily life in Israel was marked by an animated, unceremonious, noisy, disorderly atmosphere. It is hard to pinpoint specific “strategies” in this cluster of characteristics , which were usually expressed as part of some other activity or behavior rather than a separate field or an independent entity. The words in this chapter’s title are typically used as adjectives (informal, straightforward, and rude) rather than nouns. However, we could regard the Zionist ideal of the “new Jew” (sometimes known as the “new Hebrew” and, after the founding of the state, as the “new Israeli”) as a strategic setting, or even as a loosely defined strategic framework. Reforming the “old Jew,” healing and improving him, was not a novel 164 ■ b e c o m i n g i s r a e l i project. The exponents of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement , absorbed some of the external, non-Jewish criticism regarding the Jews, including on their morality and lifestyle, and desired to encourage Jews to embrace Enlightenment values. These maskilim depicted ideal Jews, complete men, revived with the aid of non-Judaic knowledge. Their ideal Jew maintained his Judaism while also performing his duty as a citizen in his state and sharing the universal cultural and moral values of Enlightened Europe.2 German maskilim intentionally attempted to reform the old Jew by increasing and facilitating his contact with non-Jewish society, by replacing Yiddish with German, and by changing the manner in which Jews dressed, talked, and interacted. Among other things, the ideal Jew of the Haskalah was supposed to be cleaner and more polite than the old Jew.3 When the maskilim attempted to spread their ideals in Eastern Europe (the “Half Orient,” as they called it), they depicted German culture and Eastern European Jewish culture as extreme opposites: Whereas civilization was identified solely with the modern West, Eastern European Jews were portrayed as backward, primitive, and superstitious. Whereas the maskilim had already adopted the German cultural ideal of self-control, Eastern European Jews lacked sobriety and were in need of serious reform.4 Similarly, when Eastern European Jews immigrated to the United States, efforts to Americanize them involved a “civilizing” process, whereby the Jew had to behave and appear “less Polish and more polished.”5 This process was promoted from the outside by German-Jewish as well as non-Jewish Americans and, perhaps even more significantly, embraced by the immigrants themselves. The Zionist new Jew was thus a national adaptation of an older theme. Zionists were united in their perception of the Diaspora Jew as a degenerated being (passive and fearful, incapable of resistance or self-help6) who had Detail from a pictorial quiz on proper manners. Laisha, July 21, 1954. Informality, Straightforwardness, and Rudeness ■ 165 to be regenerated, even saved, by a national transformation. Still, historian Anita Shapira discusses different models of the Zionist new Jew. The model adopted by most Zionist factions, including socialist Zionists (who created their own specific variant), was the one influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas. This new Jew was supposed to be active, live close to nature, and be strong...