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Two POPUL A R MEDI A IN A POST-NAT IONA L AGE Since the romantic writers, like all other writers, were products of their age, I want to consider in this chapter some of the cultural aspects that distinguished the last decade or so of the twentieth century in Israel. Of these changes, one of the most significant was the rise of a new press. The creation and proliferation of new media outlets did not only express and record the profound changes Israel was undergoing . Because the romantic writers participated in these new media early in their careers, their journalistic beginnings render important insights into their more enduring works. This chapter looks closely at one of the most important of these new media, the Tel-Aviv weekly Hair. First, because the magazine was prominent. Second, because it was published in and about Tel-Aviv, which, more than any other city in Israel, symbolized the new era. Third, because in the works of the romantic writers, all of whom lived in or around the city, Tel-Aviv is not only the background to their stories. In almost all of them it appears as one of the characters as well. The emergence of a new press in Israel in the 1980s as an expression of the rapidly changing times has been amply recorded, most comprehensively by Oz Almog in his encyclopedic 2004 Farewell to Srulik: Changing Values among the Israeli Elite.1 The local Tel-Aviv weekly paper Hair occupies an important place in Almog’s cultural analysis, although it is not the only newspaper he focuses on, of course. Another important bellwether was the daily Hadashot, started in 1984 and nicknamed the first “national local paper” (mekomon artzi).2 The daily earned the moniker because it was inspired by the successful local weeklies (mekomonim), among them Hair, that began four years earlier. Designed as a hybrid between a tabloid and a yuppie magazine, Hadashot was, as Almog put it, “a liberal, modern, young, urban, dynamic, witty, provocative, and critical” newspaper, styled after English and American models.3 As such, 32 Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas and as this long string of adjectives attests, it also meant that it was a “TelAviv ” newspaper—a paper which openly and unapologetically viewed the affairs of the country not from some “objective” national perspective as much as from a Tel-Aviv one, from within the Bubble, as the city is often called in Israel, because of its unique and independent nature and its perceived dissociation from the rest of Israeli culture in the way of many cultural urban centers (New York, Paris, Cairo). In some respects, Tel-Aviv was always a cultural bubble that stood apart from its immediate Israeli environment, a fiercely secular and doggedly hedonistic city, whose denizens saw themselves at one and the same time as Ur Zionists and as citizens of the (Western) world. While ideological and political Israel was fighting for survival, independence, and security—soldiers defended the borders, kibbutzniks made the desert bloom, new immigrants populated new frontier towns—the inhabitants of Tel-Aviv seemed always to be going to the beach, strolling leisurely in the streets, and especially to be drinking coffee, preferably espresso.4 Or so it seemed to the rest of the country.5 It was not that Tel-Avivians did not feel part of Israel; they did, but their insistence on leading a normal life in defiance of the country’s many abnormalities earned them this reputation. For people who lived outside of Tel-Aviv, this behavior did not seem right somehow. It was also seen as disrespectful of the sacrifices others were making. At the same time, residents of Tel-Aviv considered themselves not only models of normality but also model Zionists. Since one of the most powerful motives that animated early Zionism was to “normalize” Jewish life, Tel-Avivians held on to that creed even if sometimes they had to invent that normality.6 During the 1980s, this sense or view gradually gained momentum that was boosted and disseminated by the growth of the local weeklies and the adoption of their “local” sensibilities by national newspapers like Hadashot. This does not mean that Hadashot was a parochial rag that reported about local, Tel-Aviv matters. The paradigmatic shift it signaled was that, first, the solemn reporting about politics and the supreme affairs of the state, which occupied the media prior to that time, was pushed aside in favor...

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