Israel in the Making: Stickers, Stitches, and Other Critical Practices by Hagar Salamon (review)

Bumper stickers, embroidery, and jokes: three categories of folkloric expression that may not seem an obvious trio. In Israeli folklorist Hagar Salamon's words, however, all three reflect a focus on "the seemingly marginal, the unremarkable things at 'the side of the road' that indeed reveal profound perceptions and deep-rooted emotions" (p. 7). Through deep ethnographic study and sharp theoretical analysis, Salamon identifies the ties that bind these creative forms as vivid expressions of social belonging and identity negotiation in contemporary Israel.

Uniting disparate research projects that Salamon began in 1993, Israel in the Making: Stickers, Stitches, and Other Critical Practicesoffers an extended study of Israeli creative practice covering public and private spheres and the ambiguous spaces in-between. Divided into three sections that contain a dynamic diversity of materials, the book offers part-narrative, part-theory "invitations" that open each section, followed by raw ethnographic dialogue through the voices of her interviewees that act as center-weights for each case study. Salamon closes with "recapitulations" that weave each section into the larger tapestry of her whole argument. The variety in Salamon's text makes her work accessible through different entry points.

Part I, "Folklore in the Israeli Public Arena," offers a case study of "Bumper Stickers as a Podium in Motion," an examination of individual engagement with Israeli politics, social strife, and sovereignty through the creation, consumption, and circulation of cultural commentary in bumper sticker slogans. Examining the myriad sticker slogans in Israel that riff on iconic lines from political speeches, Salamon views cars as "vehicles of political sentiment" that allow for ongoing, multivocal "folk political debate" (pp. 19, 46), expressions that straddle folklore and popular culture through attempts to connect with or dissociate from by identification with a particular platform. Recent examples of bumper sticker dialogue echo and alter religious verses, pushing the public boundaries of the sacred and profane into the streets in bold ways. From a vehicle with a political message to a "mystical chariot," the car in this new context brings God "from heaven down to earth to fulfill the function of the national tranquilizer—an amulet that ensures the collective voyage" (pp. 104-5). Individuals transcend political battles on the ground through a new focus on the divine, affirming the power of public expression through renewed vehicular aesthetics.

Part II, "Expressions in the Intimate Arena of Embroidery," examines the relationship between female identity and the art of embroidery through examples of a women's group, a single artist's life story, and a single object's transitional journey. Salamon highlights the importance of a private, domestic art that is often dismissed as "women's work" carried out by "bored housewives" to demonstrate how "women embroidered their selves while engaging a complex feminine consciousness" (pp. 120, 142). In the case of a Jerusalem-based women's group, the relationship between genre and gender is probed through examples of material, ritual, and verbal expressions that illustrate diverse ways in which "women's work" challenges assumed male/female dichotomies. The life story of Zohar Wilbush, a "founding mother" of Israeli embroidery groups, further explores the boundaries of identity by considering perceptions of the Orientalist Others embedded in the histories of handcrafs and tradition that Wilbush's life story confronts. This section's closing study of gobelins, "industrial prints of well-known paintings, which were precision embroidered stitch by stitch, by women in Israel" (p. 166), tracks the rise and fall of this object as an expression of modernity, fantasy, and shame. Displayed in homes, dismissed to storage, and discarded in flea markets, the gobelinis a "transitional object," a commentary on its makers' positions as women and mothers, moving across private and public spaces, bridging the modern and traditional, and journeying through acceptance and resistance in new lands.

Part III, "Between the Public and the Private—the Mirrors of Ambivalence," explores how humorous narratives and women's gatherings within...