Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel (review)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 243–246 TOM SEGEV. Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel. Translated by Haim Watzman. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002. Pp. 167. Keter Books published this slender volume in Hebrew in 2001 as part of a series of works designed to present fresh, unconventional assessments of ‘‘the Israelis.’’ Its original title, Ha-tsiyonim ha-h .adashim (The New Zionists ), seems to refer with equal measures of irony to the two main types of Israeli Jews it depicts: 1) those who are discarding collectivist Zionist ideals and adopting individualistic, American-style values and 2) those who are trying to take Israel down a ‘‘road from Zionism to Judaism’’ (p. 97). The title and subtitle of the English version obviously focus on only the first of these categories. But whatever may have been the reason for this alteration, it is not a misleading one. Segev devotes much more attention to forces promoting the de-Zionization of Israel than those seeking its re-Judaization. Unfortunately, he sheds very little new light on either of these tendencies. Segev sets his account of the rise of ‘‘the new Zionists’’ against the backdrop of a hastily outlined sketch of the old Zionism. Among other things, he stresses how incapable this movement was of achieving its ultimate goal of rescuing masses of European Jews from anti-Semitic persecution. ‘‘The tragedy of Zionism in a nutshell,’’ he writes, with characteristic exaggeration, ‘‘is that while it may have foreseen the catastrophe , the solution it offered was irrelevant’’ (p. 31). Yet this dismissal of the Zionist movement does not preclude an acknowledgment of its considerable achievements. ‘‘In one hundred years of activity’’ it has ‘‘led a part of the Jewish people to partial independence in a part of the Land of Israel, and for all the downside, it’s a success story’’ (p. 12). This success would have been more complete, Segev seems to believe, if Theodor Herzl’s ‘‘somewhat dim, pale, moderate, and compromising, really not at all patriotic’’ outlook had not been eclipsed for too long a time by a very different ‘‘local breed of Zionism’’ (p. 17). Perhaps because he originally wrote this book for his fellow countrymen, who could be presumed to be well informed on the subject, Segev spends little time describing this inferior local Zionism. He refers to it mainly in the course of recounting Israel’s recent steps away from it. He gladly notes, for instance , how Israelis’ sense of their own distinctive personal identities has expanded in recent years. ‘‘They stopped being first person plural. They were I’s’’ (p. 69). 244 JQR 94:1 (2004) It is above all ‘‘the Americanization of Israel’’ that ‘‘has weakened social solidarity and, in contrast with original Israeli Zionism, has made the individual the centerpoint of life’’ (p. 49). That this should have happened requires hardly any explanation. In the twentieth century, everyone in the world tried, ‘‘to one degree or another, to emulate’’ the ‘‘American experiment’’ (p. 52). In his rather commonplace retelling of the Israeli chapter of this universal story, Segev betrays absolutely no regrets. He gladly takes the presence of a larger-than-life statue of Elvis Presley at a diner on the road to Jerusalem as a sign of the victory of America over ‘‘the Bolshevism of the early Ben-Gurion years’’ (p. 49). His portrait of today’s Herzliya, with its glass-and-steel office buildings and stores with ‘‘names like Tophouse, Columbus, and Beverly Hills,’’ concludes with a rapturous description of a large delicatessen specializing in pork-based cold cuts. ‘‘Huge crowds of Israelis shop there; on Saturdays every parking place in the vicinity is taken. Herzl would have been thrilled. Actually , if Herzl lived in Israel today, he too might be attacked as a postZionist . In many ways, in fact, Herzl was the first post-Zionist’’ (p. 15). This is surely not the heroic Herzl recently reconstructed by Yoram Hazony, and although Segev probably knows it, he does not bother to mention it. He pegs Hazony instead as...