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  • Embodying Hebrew Culture: Aesthetics, Athletics and Dance in the Jewish Community of Mandate Palestine by Nina S. Spiegel
  • Liora Bing Heidecker (bio)
Nina S. Spiegel Embodying Hebrew Culture: Aesthetics, Athletics and Dance in the Jewish Community of Mandate Palestine Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013. 256pp.

Aesthetic functions are always bound up with prevailing sets of norms and values at a given time and place. Consequently, far beyond their value as cultural anecdotes, their study helps to broaden our knowledge of a historical period. Nina S. Spiegel’s book does just that. Spiegel, Rabbi Joshua Stampfer Assistant Professor of Israel Studies at Portland State University, embarks upon an expedition to map out the aesthetic functions of distinctive physical aspects of life in the Yishuv, the pre-State Jewish community of Palestine, during the 1930s and 1940s. Research in these fields seems to be gathering momentum in recent years, with numerous Israeli scholars (such as sociologists Oz Almog and Amir Ben Porat, historians Anita Shapira and Boaz Neumann and dance scholars Liora Malka-Yellin, Dina Roginsky and Sari Elron) taking part. However, Spiegel’s project of combining the discussion of different corporeal (bodily) disciplines from an overarching cultural, sociological and political perspective will fascinate anyone interested in the cradle of Israeli culture.

“Central to the Zionist concept,” says Spiegel, “was the notion of transformation: Zionists aspired to create a new ‘Jew’ aiming to alter how Jews acted, thought, spoke—and looked” (p. 3). Consider, for instance, such questions as: What did the Jewish pioneers in Palestine regard as beautiful, desirable or even simply normative, in terms of masculine or feminine beauty? What kinds of corporeal attributes and physical behaviors were esteemed by the settlers, and which ones were disdained? How did these norms and values, so strongly infused with ideology, finally crystallize and translate into archetypal icons of national culture?

In order to tackle these questions, Spiegel takes an interdisciplinary look at four different “corporeal” test cases, or rather contests: a beauty contest, the Maccabiah games, a theatrical dance composition and a national folk dance festival. All these events had the added value of being the first of their kind, and they were taken seriously, since their outcomes were meant to set standards. Moreover, these national contests took place in the public arena and were therefore closely followed by journalists and enjoyed wide press coverage. The diverse reports about them not only illuminate [End Page 163] the final choices (made either by nominated adjudicators or by popular polls that were meant to indicate the audience’s “favorites”) but also echo the public cultural discourse. In summing them up and analyzing them, Spiegel succeeds in painting a full portrait of the “national body.”

Very early on in the book, it becomes apparent that arguments and dissents were at the very heart of the budding Hebrew society in Eretz Israel. Conscious attempts by the establishment to create a unified Hebrew culture continually and repeatedly accentuated the inherent conflicts that characterized the Yishuv, small as it was, splitting the pioneers into a plethora of political parties and dividing the community at large. The polarities of “old versus new” and “east versus west” and the dualities between traditionalism and modernism, orientalism and internationalism, cosmopolitan and nationalistic trends were intensified by conflicts between urban and rural settlers, Labor Zionists and capitalist immigrants. Thus, classical ballet, for instance, was often labeled bourgeois and decadent, as opposed to “free” modern dance, which was the bon ton of the time.

Even within the small modern dance community, arguments raged. Yardena Cohen, the controversial winner of the first theatrical dance contest, defining herself as an adherent of the Canaanites—a movement that sought cultural roots in the civilization predating the Hebrews in Eretz Israel—designed her choreography and teachings to echo what she took to be the sounds and rhythms of the land’s ancient, pagan culture. Others preferred a less Levantine, more European style. The conflicting desires to distinguish the emerging society from its neighboring Arab environment and to strike roots and become integrated within that very environment posed difficult, unresolved questions.

The crucial conflicts that Spiegel addresses in her book emerged from the logical contradiction between...

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