Post-Post-Zionist Historiography

Assaf Likhovski Post-Post-Zionist Historiography1 ABSTR ACT In the 1980s and 1990s, a group of historians and sociologists revolutionized the study of Israeli history. hese scholars, often called collectively the Post-Zionists, sought to undermine “the founding myths of Israel”. he Post-Zionist paradigm has made important and lasting contributions to the understanding of Israeli history, but no historiographical trend is permanent. In the last decade, a new generation of scholars, sometimes called “the third wave in Israeli historiography”, or “the Post-Post-Zionists”, has produced works that difer in many respects from those of the previous generation. his generation studies new subjects, utilizes new types of sources and new writing styles, asks new questions about Israeli society, and its attitude to Zionism is often more empathic than that of the previous generation. he article analyzes some aspects of the new paradigm, which can be seen as a local, Israeli, manifestation of a more general approach—the new cultural history—that appeared outside Israel in the 1970s. I INTRODUCTION n 1989, a sociologist, Gershon Shafir, published Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli—Palestinian Conlict.2 Inspired by economic histories of European colonialism, Shair set out to reexamine the history of the irst waves of Zionist immigration to Palestine. A previous generation of sociologists emphasized the role of ideology, both socialist and nationalist, in shaping the unique collectivist nature of the new Zionist community that sprang up in Palestine. Shair contended that material interests, rather than ideology, should be used to explain the history of Zionist settlement and that the main force shaping the settlement process was the conlict between settler Jews and native Arabs over territory and work. Institutions 1 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 1 4/6/10 7:32 AM 2 • isr ael studies, volume 15, number 2 and practices that supposedly epitomized Zionist pioneering idealism, such as the kibbutz or the notion of redeeming manual labor (avoda ivrit), should be seen, argued Shair, as the expressions of exclusionary economic interests of the type that is familiar from other colonial settings. In 2003, another sociologist, Oz Almog, published an article entitled “From Blorit to Ponytail: Israeli Culture Relected in Popular Hairstyles”.3 Inspired by anthropological theory, Almog examined the history of Israeli hairstyles. Using oral interviews, popular newspapers and teen magazines, high school yearbooks and private photo albums, the article traced changes in Israeli male and female hairdos, and explained these changes using technological, environmental, and economic factors (e.g., the appearance of blow dryers in the 1950s), cultural factors (the rise of American inluence in the 1960s) and, in addition, ethnic (but also generational) conlict. he article then linked changes in Israeli hairstyles to changes in Israeli identity from the mandatory era and the present, arguing that changes in hairstyles should be seen as one indicator of the decline of collectivist ideology and the transition of Israel to a pluralistic liberal society beginning in the 1980s. Shair’s and Almog’s works epitomize two phases in the study of the Israeli past. Shair’s book was part of a wave of studies by critical sociologists and new historians that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. his wave was often called the “Post-Zionist” phase in Israeli historiography. he term “Post-Zionist” is problematic, because many of the people identiied with this wave were actually committed to some version of Zionist ideology, but it has been widely used in the literature, and I will therefore also use it here.4 Almog’s work belongs to a new paradigm that has emerged in the last decade, especially in the last few years.5 I call this paradigm, following Michael Feige and David Myers, “Post-Post-Zionist Historiography”,6 but it may also be called, following Boaz Neumann, “the third wave in Israeli historiography”, or “the post-revisionist phase”, or any other name that would signify the shift involved.7 New subjects, new sources and styles, new questions, and a new attitude—more complex and empathic—to Zionism characterize this phase. Most importantly, I argue, this new phase also represents a shift from an interest in political and economic history to an interest in the history of culture, a shift which occurred outside Israeli academia in the 1970s.8 Arguing that the scholarship on the Israeli past produced in the last few years has been characterized by a shift to an interest in culture runs contrary to some recent discussions that still divide the ield based on political categories. For example, in a recent book, Ilan Pappé characterized the 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 2 4/6/10 7:32 AM Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 3 1990s as the “moment of grace” of Post-Zionism generally, including PostZionist academic scholarship, and suggested that following the outbreak of the second Intifada, there will be a “period of darkness . . . in which neo-Zionism, a fundamentalist, uncompromising version of Zionism will reign in place of Post-Zionism.”9 A similar tripartite political framework (Zionism, Post-Zionism, Neo-Zionism) can be found in one of Uri Ram’s recent surveys of the current state of scholarship on Israeli society.10 However, many of the new works that have appeared recently cannot be easily placed in any of the three categories mentioned by Pappé and Ram. Instead, they seem to belong to a fourth category, one which moved the debate sideways from interest in politics and economics to an interest in culture. In this article, I examine the new paradigm. First, I briely describe some of the major characteristics of the previous, Post-Zionist phase, and some attributes of cultural history generally. I then discuss the impact of the cultural turn on Israeli historiography, analyzing the topics, sources, writing style, questions, and views of Zionism that characterize the Post-PostZionist paradigm. Finally, I suggest some possible reasons for the decline of the Post-Zionist paradigm, and the emergence of the more recent, PostPost-Zionist paradigm. Two caveats are in order. First, a number of scholars—Michael Feige, Boaz Neumann, Derek Penslar, and David Myers—have already mentioned the appearance of a new phase in Israeli historiography.11 While these scholars mention the appearance of this new phase, they do not analyze it in detail.12 his article attempts to provide a more detailed (although not comprehensive) analysis of many of the new works published in the last few years, trying to point to commonalities between at least some of these works. Second, trying to describe an emerging historiographical paradigm, or indeed any historiographical paradigm, is a risky enterprise. “Paradigms” are constructs. he borders between them may be blurred and amorphous (especially in history, where the appearance of one paradigm does not mean the demise of another). In our speciic case, the two “paradigms” that I compare are deined broadly. hey include historians, but also sociologists. hey are politically and methodologically diverse.13 It can be argued that the binary opposition that I am proposing has, in fact, many grades, and that Israeli historiography is better conceived as a single continuum rather than being composed of binary opposites. Still, despite their inherent inaccuracy, dichotomies are sometimes useful props for perceiving general trends, and such trends are what I am interested in this article. 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 3 4/6/10 7:32 AM 4 • isr ael studies, volume 15, number 2 THE POST-ZIONIST PAR ADIGM Beginning in the 1980s two groups, the “new historians” and the “critical sociologists”, revolutionized the study of Israeli history and society, seeking to undermine the “founding myths of Israel”.14 hese two groups produced a very impressive and inluential body of works. Given the space constraints of this article, it is impossible to discuss these works in any detail. It would suice to say that the new historians focused mainly on the military and diplomatic history of the War of 1948, attempting to undermine the conventional Zionist view of the war. However, arguments about 1948 were merely part of a wider series of debates about the Israeli past, many of which were dominated by sociologists rather than historians. hese debates analyzed topics such as the relationship of Zionism to European colonialism, and the attitudes of Israelis to Mizrahi Jews, to Holocaust survivors, to the Diaspora, and to women.15 he arguments made by the new historians and critical sociologists produced heated debate in Israel. Questions were raised about the factual accuracy, theoretical underpinnings, and claims of novelty of the Post-Zionist paradigm.16 However, it seems reasonable to say that now, more than twenty years after the debate has begun, many of the arguments of the Post-Zionist paradigm have been accepted and assimilated by the Israeli academia and, to a certain extent, even by Israeli popular culture.17 Why did the Post-Zionist paradigm appear? Some attributed the appearance of a critical, Post-Zionist, stance to generational change, or to the use of archival sources that were not accessible to historians before the 1980s.18 Others linked the Post-Zionist paradigm to political changes within Israeli society in the 1980s as the secular and socialist Labor Zionist establishment lost power to the Likud party, or to changes in academic fashions outside Israel as the consensus-based approaches of the 1950s gave way in the 1960s to conlict-based and victim-focused approaches to the study of society.19 However, whether the appearance of the Post-Zionist paradigm was the result of micro or macro, internal or external factors, it seems that in the last few years an additional paradigm, created by a new generation of scholars, has appeared in Israeli historiography. One of main sources of inspiration for many of the new works has been the “cultural turn” that appeared in western historiography in the 1970s; I briely discuss this source of inspiration. 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 4 4/6/10 7:32 AM Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 5 THE CULTUR AL TURN here are many ways to distinguish diferent historiographical approaches. One is to diferentiate between two modes of viewing the past, which I will call, following Carl Schorske, the “cultural” and the “political” modes.20 hese two modes are ideal types that are in opposition to one another theoretically, although they often blend in the work of speciic historians or speciic historical schools (for example, one might think of social or economic history as an intermediate synthesis of the two ideal types).21 What is “culture”, and in what ways is the “cultural” mode of describing history diferent from the “political” mode? Culture “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”22 I use the term “culture” to designate a set of ideas, beliefs, symbols, values, customs, and practices that are often unconscious and are shared by most of the members of a given social group.23 his deinition identiies culture with widely shared ideas in contrast with another, very common, use of the word “culture”, which equates it only with the conscious, canonical products of elite artists, architects, musicians, and writers.24 Here, some of the diferences between the cultural and political modes of writing history are delineated.25 Culture, like language, is seen as created by society, not by speciic individuals. herefore, its history is told in a way that tends to minimize the role of individual agents. While cultural historians may be interested in individual biographies, they often view these biographies as a prism through which they can obtain a glimpse of the wider culture. History in the political mode, on the other hand, is more interested in the role of individual agents, often notable igures such as kings or generals; cultural history traces the history of unconscious ideas. Political history is interested in conscious and explicit acts; both cultural and political history are interested in change, but cultural history may be more prone to erecting a irmer boundary between the past and present (in a similar way to the boundary that anthropology used to erect between the primitive and modern). Cultural history seeks to describe past societies focusing on “the recurrent, the constant, and the typical”.26 Political history explains causes of speciic past events; cultural history is interested both in “public” and “private” topics. Political history is narrower, focusing mostly on more public events; cultural history is interested in socially-constructed limits and boundaries of human understanding that prevented the people of the past from viewing the world the way we do. It therefore assumes a diference between us and the people of the past that tends to prevent moral judgment. Political history is more interested in intentions and motivations 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 5 4/6/10 7:32 AM 6 • isr ael studies, volume 15, number 2 (and also tends to be more judgmental); the sources of cultural history can be texts produced by elite actors but also texts and other artifacts produced by mass culture. he sources of political history are narrower, conined mostly to oicial government documents, newspaper reports, and the like; cultural histories see history as related to literature. Political histories tend to view history in a more “scientiic” way. Of course, cultural historians can be interested in the political realm, but when they study it, they often study less conventional aspects of this realm. For example, they will examine political rituals or “political culture”, rather than relations of power between individuals, political parties, or interest groups.27 he roots of both modes of writing history can be traced back to the Greek world, but they are also found in the history of modern historiography. he latest phase in the story of culture history is the appearance of the “New Cultural History” in the 1970s.28 his approach was inspired by developments in anthropology, linguistics, and literary theory as well as the emerging discipline of cultural studies; its appearance was part of a wider trend in the humanities and the social sciences that is often called “the cultural turn” or “the linguistic turn”. Within this approach one can ind many varieties: histoire des mentalités, micro-history, history of the everyday, New Historicism, and approaches inspired by cultural Marxism and the work of Michel Foucault.29 One diference between the new culture history and previous phases is that contemporary views of culture often deine it in a more fragmented and contested way, and the border between culture and other ields such as politics is often seen as blurry. However, while contemporary views of culture are more complex, they still view culture as at least partly autonomous and thus distinct from power.30 What are the topics of the new cultural history? As historian Peter Burke noted, cultural historians are interested in topics such as “longevity, the penis, barbed wire and masturbation”.31 “Natural” aspects of life, which were previously seen as having no history, for example, the body, are now viewed as being socially-constructed in speciic times and places. Cultural historians therefore study the daily, automatic, unconscious aspects of human existence, analyzing meanings, values, practices, manners, and representations that individuals in a given social group share with other members of their group—distinctions between public and private, childhood and adulthood, proper male and female behavior, attitudes to health and illness, madness and death, emotions and sensations, imagination, dreams, and views of the past (collective memory).32 he new type of cultural history that appeared in the 1970s is arguably still the dominant mode of writing history today. In recent years, there 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 6 4/6/10 7:32 AM Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 7 has been growing interest in transnational, comparative, and global history. One can study these topics using a cultural approach (analyzing, for example, cultural encounters). However, the growing interest in these topics may also signify a pendulum swing away from cultural history and back to a more “political” and scientiic approach to historiography.33 THE POST-POST-ZIONIST PAR ADIGM: THE CULTUR AL TURN IN ISR AELI HISTORIOGR APHY NEW SUBJECTS he rise of cultural history has had a (belated) impact on Israeli historiography too. he new historians of the 1980s were mostly interested in traditional military and diplomatic events or, in cases when they ventured outside these ields, in social history.34 Critical sociologists often focused on economic factors. Culture did appear in some critical works inspired by the Saidian notion of Orientalism, and, more generally, by postcolonial theory.35 However, the main interest in culture in these works was its link to power. Culture was not explored in an anthropologically empathic way, but was often discussed as a tool to further the interests of an identiiable social group against other social groups. he narrative structure associated with such a study was one of heroes and villains.36 While the role of culture in Post-Zionist literature was, in this sense, limited, culture (more broadly deined) is a major concern of much of the work produced by the younger generation of Israeli historians. Here are three examples, each taken from one of the three major periods studied by Israeli historiography—late Ottoman Palestine, Mandatory Palestine, and post-1948 Israel. In Becoming Hebrew: he Creation of a Jewish Culture in Ottoman Palestine (2008), Arieh Saposnik traces the ways in which the Hebrew cultural revolution transformed the Zionist Jews of late Ottoman Palestine into modern Hebrews.37 Part of the book deals with the explicit ideas of elite thinkers, but Saposnik also devotes a portion of his discussion to describing the way these ideas iltered down to daily acts, rituals, and mannerisms out of which modern Hebrew culture was born, discussing topics such as kindergarten gymnastic lessons or Sephardi accents side by side with the more traditional analysis of elite nationalist ideology. his focus on daily practices allows Saposnik to provide a complex picture of Zionist identity, a picture that challenges previous, critical, arguments about the Orientalist nature of Zionism.38 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 7 4/6/10 7:32 AM 8 • isr ael studies, volume 15, number 2 In Urban Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel-Aviv (2007), Anat Helman analyzes some traditional topics of urban and social history such as the architectural styles of Tel-Aviv buildings or the structure of its civil society. However, she also discusses perceptions of cleanliness and dirt, sensations of smells and sounds, and attitudes to pets, holidays, shopping, and consumption.39 Helman’s Tel-Aviv is a place that is inluenced by the Arab-Jewish conlict and by Orientalist notions, but this conlict is merely one of many factors shaping the history of this town. Another example of a work that combines social and cultural history (as well as gender, legal, and more traditional political history) is Duty and Love: Individualism and Collectivism in 1950s Israel (2008) by Orit Rozin.40 Rozin studies the social and cultural history of Israel of the 1950s focusing on the austerity regime that regulated consumption in the irst years of the state. his topic had been previously analyzed by critical historian Tom Segev in his important book 1949: he First Israelis.41 While Segev devotes some attention to the ideas of ordinary people, the main focus of his discussion of the austerity regime is the acts of politicians and government oicials that created this regime. he major protagonists of Rozin’s book, on the other hand, are not politicians or even administrators. hey are ordinary Israeli housewives and their attitudes to food rationing. Another important topic of Rozin’s book is the attitudes of veteran Israelis to the new immigrants from post-holocaust Europe and the Middle East that looded Israel after 1948. In discussing this topic, Rozin seems to be following critical works that, beginning in the 1980s, already analyzed the attitudes of veteran Israelis to the mass immigration of the 1950s. However, the critical scholars analyzed these attitudes using arguments about material exploitation or employing the Saidian notion of Orientalism, understood as an ideological system.42 Rozin’s analysis discusses emotions rather than ideologies.43 Using anthropologically-inspired theories to explain the sense of disgust that some veteran Israelis felt toward the hygienic condition in the absorption camps of the 1950s, Rozin argues that while oicial Zionist ideology saw the absorption of the new immigrants as a vital interest of Zionism, and urged Israelis to sacriice personal comforts for the sake of the immigrants, many ordinary Israelis rejected the oicial ideology, rebelling against the austerity regime, and ultimately leading to its collapse. Hygiene, health and illness, psychology and psychiatry, genetics and eugenics, and more generally the Zionist and Israeli body and soul are important topics of many of the new works on the Israeli past produced in the last decade. As historian Rakefet Zalashik noted recently in her book on the history of psychiatry in Palestine and Israel, the last few years 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 8 4/6/10 7:32 AM Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 9 have witnessed the emergence of a set of studies on the history of scientiic knowledge in Palestine and Israel. Zalashik’s brief survey is conined to works dealing with health and medicine, but I would argue that these works are just part of a larger set of studies of professional knowledge that also explores issues such as Zionist statistics, social work, law, and rural and urban planning.44 Some of these studies can be classiied as belonging to the older PostZionist paradigm, merely expanding this paradigm to new ields, because they are based on critical notions of the relationship between culture (and knowledge) and power, they use a narrative of clear heroes and villains, and they view Zionism in ways that are at least as critical of it as those found in the older works of the 1980s and 1990s.45 However, at least some of the new works on scientiic and professional knowledge also it within the new Post-Post-Zionist paradigm. First, because of their focus primarily on “private” matters such as attitudes to the individual body (or the “soul”). Second, because unlike much of the older work, which sees power as concentrated in the hand of identiiable institutions and individuals, some of the new works are based on Foucauldian notions of power: they see power as dispersed in society rather than concentrated in the hand of a limited number of agents, embodied in everyday practices, and producing outcomes that are sometimes productive and benign.46 Once power is dispersed in such a way it becomes more diicult to tell a simple story of victims and victimizers, oppressors and oppressed. he new works therefore often tell a complex story in which the professional discourses analyzed enjoy relative autonomy from the state and from oicial ideology. hese discourses are often seen as contradictory and fragmented, and the relationships of the professionals discussed with the state and with Zionist ideology are sometimes described as symbiotic, but sometimes as antagonistic. he overall result is a more complex story. For example, Zalashik’s work on psychiatry is informed by a critical approach that seeks to expose the ideological background of psychiatry, but she also declares that her history attempts to “avoid a one-sided narrative of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, victims and aggressors . . .” hus, her discussion of the attitudes of Israeli psychiatrists to Mizrahi immigrants in the 1950s acknowledges the existence of Orientalist and racist stereotypes in psychiatric discourse, but she also argues that some aspects of Zionist ideology, such as the melting-pot and nation-building ideals, prevalent in the 1950s, mitigated some of the racial categorization schemes prevalent in European psychiatry.47 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 9 4/6/10 7:32 AM 10 • isr ael studies, volume 15, number 2 Another related topic is the history of the Israeli state and its institutions. While the study of the state seems to belong to the political mode of doing history, the study of the state can also be related to cultural history, when the focus is on the daily interactions of the state with its citizens rather than grander events (such as elections or wars). Such an approach rejects the view that the state is a powerful, unitary, top-down sovereign entity, and shifts our attention from formal institutions, structures, and procedures to the way in which the power of the state is dispersed and shared with other non-state institutions. Contemporary Israeli examples of works that are based on such an approach can be found in Rozin’s discussion of the attitudes of ordinary Israelis to the austerity regime and the way the state reacted to them, and in my own work on the history of the way the state tried to inluence tax morale in Israel of the 1950s.48 In conclusion, Post-Post-Zionist historians are interested in mentalities, rituals, mannerisms, emotions; the trivial, private, mundane; the body (and soul) and their social construction; in disgust and desire; in attitudes to garbage and hair; in views of food and consumption; in statistics and vaccinations; in the ideas of housewives, but also lawyers, statisticians, psychoanalysts, and nurses (but not the politician, the soldier, the general). NEW SOURCES AND STYLE One of the characteristics that often distinguish cultural history is its more literary style.49 While many of the older works produced in the 1980s and 1990s used a more “scientiic” writing style, at least some of the new works that are associated with the new Post-Post-Zionist history are written using a more literary approach. One factor causing this new style may be the new types of sources used. For example, Almog’s work (mentioned in the introduction) is based on photos, school yearbooks, and popular magazines, sources that were not utilized by the older critical works that were often based on traditional sources such as government documents found in oicial archives. Similar types of sources can be found in many other new works.50 However, the use of new sources is not the only reason for the stylistic diference. Diference may also be the result of a new approach to the writing of history. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this phenomenon is found in Tamar Berger’s work. In 1998 Berger published a book on the history of Dizengof Center, a shopping mall in Tel-Aviv, tracing the micro-history of the land on which this mall now stands, from the mandatory period to the present.51 Combining economic, social, urban, and cultural history, it was based on a methodology that viewed history as local, 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 10 4/6/10 7:32 AM Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 11 fragmentary, anecdotal, and literary.52 One of the major topics of the book was the Palestinian refugee problem, epitomized in the story of the original Arab owner of the land on which the mall was ultimately built. However, the micro, biographical, and detailed nature of the story told by Berger, in which ethnic and class lines blur (the Arab was a wealthy landlord, while the Jews were poor tenants living in a shantytown in the middle of TelAviv), produced a diferent narrative than the military-history approach of historians such as Benny Morris.53 he same literary style evident in Berger’s irst book is also found in her new book, In the Space Between World and Playing: he Model in Israeli Culture,54 in which she explores a large range of “models” found in Israeli culture including toys, urban warfare models, old maps, theme parks, the biblical temple, and Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland. Most of the book is devoted to an analysis of contemporary Israeli culture, but one of the chapters, entitled “Sleep, teddy bear, sleep”, examines Israeli collective memory.55 Unlike previous discussions of collective memory, Berger examines this issue as a Benjaminian lâneur, taking the reader on a stroll through a park in Petach Tikva, a suburb of Tel-Aviv, analyzing along the way such topics as the history of taxidermy and of zoos.56 Berger uses this stroll to ind in the speciic sites she visits clues to the nature of Israeli collective memory, using lexical deinition, poetry, photos, and the like.57 NEW ANSWERS AND NEW QUESTIONS What is the relationship of the new Post-Post-Zionist histories to the older works? Some new works engage with the themes suggested by the older, Post-Zionist, approach, but reach more complex conclusions about the past. For example, when Nadav Davidovich and Shifra Shvarts examine the history of the vaccination campaigns of the new immigrant population that arrived in Israel in the 1950s, they note the fact that vaccination was a major component in western colonial practices. he link between Zionism and colonialism seems at irst glance to place them squarely within the older Post-Zionist approach to history, but for the fact that in this context, the colonial project is portrayed as well-intentioned and benign.58 Another example is found in Dafna Hirsch’s work. She notes the Orientalist assumptions that were inherent in Zionist public health practices in mandatory Palestine, for example, in discussions concerning the health of Mizrahi Jews. However, unlike previous critical works, Hirsch also shows the ambivalence of the discourse she analyzes, which excluded the Mizrahi and Orthodox Jewish communities of Palestine, but at the same time also sought to include them within the new Zionist community.59 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 11 4/6/10 7:32 AM 12 • isr ael studies, volume 15, number 2 A complex analysis of Zionist Orientalist discourse is found in some other works. As Derek Penslar has noted, while Orientalist discourse existed in Zionism, there was a fundamental diference between Zionist attitudes to the Orient and the attitudes of European colonizers. Unlike European colonizers, Zionists often saw similarity rather than diference between them and the native Arabs and, in addition, Zionism’s civilizing mission “was directed primarily internally, at themselves, not at the indigenous Arabs of Palestine.”60 his argument has been developed in many recent works examining issues such as the Hebrew language, literature, hygiene, and law.61 A second type of studies reverses the questions that were proposed by the Post-Zionist paradigm. For example, while some earlier, critical, discussions of Israeli society assumed as a given that Israeli society and the Israeli state were collectivist, and the question that was asked was “What were the roots of this collectivism?”, a new approach, emanating, perhaps, from the growing individualist nature of Israeli society in the last few decades has turned the question upside down. he question is no longer “How and why was Israeli society collectivist?” Instead, the question is “How and why were at least parts of Israeli society individualist, even in the 1950s?” Many of the works that ask this question are written by legal historians, who examine liberal notions in Israeli law or the way in which a strong civil society relied on a liberal rights discourse against a weak state in Israel of the 1950s.62 Another interesting aspect of some recent works is the tendency to reject a uniquely Jewish perspective of the history of Israel/Palestine, and thus depart from what was one of the main characteristics of both the old and new history, both establishment and critical sociology. It is true that at least some critical sociologists expanded the framework of their narratives to include the conlict between Jews and Arabs, but like the old historians and establishment sociologists, Arabs were still missing from the picture because they were often not accorded agency—they were merely passive templates of a story that ultimately focused on Jews and their institutions.63 In some of the new works, written by Israelis as well as non-Israelis, the Arabs and Jews of mandatory Palestine are portrayed as mirroring each other, both societies involved in an attempt, typical of groups on the periphery of the western world in the 19th and 20th centuries, to come to terms with modernity using nationalism as a way of modernizing themselves while retaining a particular “authenticity”. Derek Penslar has argued that this is a better way to understand the nature of Zionism, and Sandy Suian briely analyzed a speciic instance of such an approach in her discussion of the similarity of Jewish and Arab medical nationalism—the attempts to 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 12 4/6/10 7:32 AM Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 13 invent authentic medical terminology in Hebrew and Arabic during the mandatory era.64 Another example is found in my comparison of the attitudes of Jewish and Arab lawyers in Palestine to English law.65 he very same move might also be applied to Jewish society. Agency can be found not merely in discussions of the Arabs of Palestine, but also in works dealing with internal Jewish topics, which do not only show hegemony and discipline being imposed by elites from above, but also resistance and “anti-discipline” emanating from below. For example, Rozin describes female resistance to the austerity regime. Davidovich and Shvarts show immigrant resistance to government vaccination policies. Razi inds resistance among abandoned children in mandatory Tel-Aviv, and I discover it among taxpayers in 1950s Israel.66 NEW ATTITUDE TO ZIONISM he critical scholarship produced in the 1980s and 1990s viewed Zionism and the Israeli state using a moralizing and judgmental framework. he rhetorical framework was one in which there were heroes and villains, the Zionists playing the role of villains. he tone and attitude of many of the works belonging to the new paradigm that appeared in the last few years seems to be more complex and less moralizing. One inds such a tone in some of the works mentioned before. For example, in Rozin’s book, while the feeling of disgust of 1950s Israelis toward the new immigrants is meticulously documented, Rozin also sees this feeling as creating a liberal individualist mentality that undermined the oppressive collectivist ideology of the state, thus leading to a morally complex approach to the story told. In addition, Zionist ideology is portrayed in this book in a positive rather than a critical way, because it called on veteran Israelis to assist the new immigrants. Similar examples of this attitude can also be found in recent works dealing with the history of Zionist and Israeli science and in more traditional intellectual histories of Zionist ideology.67 Even writers such as Berger, who are explicitly antiZionist politically, produce works whose narrative presents Zionism in an ambivalent rather than critical way.68 Perhaps one of the reasons for the diference in the attitude to Zionism can be found in the fact that the older history was based on a top-down approach focusing on politicians and oicials (with whom most of us tend not to identify). he goal of the bottom-up and more polyphonous approach of the new paradigm, on the other hand, is to recover the voices and views of ordinary people who are more diicult to easily categorize as 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 13 4/6/10 7:32 AM 14 • isr ael studies, volume 15, number 2 heroes or villains and immediately place in the moralizing rubrics of “good” or “evil”.69 Another reason may be that the anthropological methodology upon which the new paradigm is ultimately based tends to be empathic, morally relativist, and non-judgmental. Anthropology assumes the otherness of its subjects, an otherness that prevents us from clearly judging them. he local, concrete, and anecdotal nature of some of the new works may also be a reason for a less judgmental attitude.70 EXPLANING THE PAR ADIGM SHIFT Trying to explain historiographical changes is a dangerous exercise, which often leaves its practitioners stranded between the banal and the inaccurate, the uninteresting biographical observations and unconvincing linkage to grand political or intellectual trends. Nevertheless, I will venture into this territory, listing a few factors that have been important in the rise of the new paradigm. One reason for the appearance of the new paradigm has to do with generational change. Post-Zionist historians were, as Gershon Shair once put it, the “generation of 1967”.71 hey relected the adversarial political and academic attitudes that emerged in the west during the student revolts of the 1960s. When scholars belonging to this generation irst published their works in the 1980s, they were untenured radical scholars bravely attacking the bastions of the Israeli academic establishment. Now many Post-Zionist scholars are older tenured academics. hey are in a sense the new orthodoxy, and can no longer claim the mantle of innovation. Alternatively, one might argue that the controversy generated by some Post-Zionist scholarship, and the impact it had on the academic careers of those involved, has moved some of the new research in the direction of less-controversial subjects such as culture.72 here were also shifts in the general political context. Some of the work of the scholars associated with the Post-Zionist paradigm represented the concerns of Israeli society of 1973 or perhaps 1982. he Post-Zionist historians grew up in an era in which the Labor party, which is today but a sad shadow of its former self, was still dominant in Israeli politics, and in which the Israeli elite was predominantly Ashkenazi. However, history is always presentist, and present Israeli society is very diferent from that of the late 1980s or early 1990s. Changes in Israeli society have been extremely rapid in the last twenty years and have made some of the political motivations that drove Post-Zionist history less pressing. he rise of the Likud party 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 14 4/6/10 7:32 AM Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 15 to power in 1977 was followed by the appearance of a Mizrahi political elite on the local and national level and later by a massive wave the Russian immigration, which created a new underclass. hese changes meant that issues such as the attitudes of veteran Israelis to Mizrahi Jews (or to Holocaust survivors) are politically less central and less controversial today than they were in the 1980s. In the same manner, explaining the collectivist nature of Israeli society is less relevant today, when Israeli society is far more individualistic. he appearance of the Post-Post-Zionist paradigm may also be a relection of wider loss of interest in grand political meta-narratives, either national or anti-national.73 Such a move from politics to the local and private was also evident in literary works produced by a younger generation of Israeli authors in the last two decades.74 Interest in apolitical topics was perhaps exacerbated by a loss of hope in a political solution to the ArabIsraeli conlict as a result of the decline of the Oslo process and the outbreak of the second Intifada.75 Finally, a major cause in the rise of the new Post-Post-Zionist paradigm was simply the fact that the Post-Zionist paradigm—the military or diplomatic history of the type practiced by the new historians, or the neo-Marxist conlict theories that have informed the work of some critical sociologists—appeared in Israel at a time when such approaches were already less dominant in western historiography. here was a time-lag in the inluence of the New Cultural History on Israeli historians, but ultimately this approach also reached Israel.76 In this sense, the move from the study of topics such as colonialism to topics such as the history of hair, and from politics and economics to anthropology as a source of inspiration, a move that is evident in the comparison of Shair’s and Almog’s works that began this article, was not a frivolous move, nor was it merely the result of personal tastes or even of speciically Israeli political factors. his move was also a relection of broader intellectual trends in western historiography. Of course, no historiographical trend is permanent, and fashions in history are often cyclical. It may be the case that outside Israel there is a resurgence in the interest in more “scientiic” (and political) aspects of history, and if this will indeed be the case, there will, perhaps, be a time lag again until the impact of these approaches is felt on Israeli historiography.77 How should we view the appearance of the new Post-Post-Zionist paradigm? Obviously, evaluations of the new paradigm will be partly based on one’s politics and one’s conception of the role of historiography in Israeli society. Some might see the move from politics to culture as an alarming development, because it weakens the ability to use history to spur political 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 15 4/6/10 7:32 AM 16 • isr ael studies, volume 15, number 2 change in the present. Others would argue that it was actually the PostZionist paradigm that was guilty of this sin.78 Some might understand the new wave as part of an escapist attempt to ignore the centrality of conlicts, violence, and oppression in shaping the Israeli past as well as the Israeli present. Others would claim that the new approach provides an important counter-balance to the previous over-emphasis on conlicts, both external and internal. However, whatever our moral or political assessment of the new paradigm, it seems that its time has arrived. Notes 1. I thank Orly Erez-Likhovski, Ron Harris, Pnina Lahav, David Myers, Neil Netanel, Nahshon Perez, Orit Rozin, and Arieh Saposnik for comments on earlier drafts, and Rivka Brot, Gabriel Juarez, and Nory Loeung for their assistance in obtaining relevant materials. I would also like to thank Neil Netanel, Mitchell Bard, and the Schusterman Foundation for their support. 2. Gershon Shair, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conlict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge, 1989). For an earlier work using the same approach, see Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: he Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics (Berkeley, 1983). For a more recent summary of the argument see Gershon Shair and Yoav Peled, Being Israeli: he Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge, 2002) 16–37. 3. Oz Almog, “From Blorit to Ponytail: Israeli Culture Relected in Popular Hairstyles,” Israel Studies, 8.2 (2003) 82–117. 4. On Post-Zionism, see Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two People, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2006) 253–71; Laurence J. Silberstein, Postzionism: A Reader (New Brunswick, NJ, 2008); Uri Ram, “he Future of the Past in Israel: A Sociology of Knowledge Approach,” in Making Israel, ed. Benny Morris (Ann Arbor, 2007) 202–30. Another term used to describe this approach was “Israeli Historical Revisionism,” see Anita Shapira and Derek J. Penslar (eds.), Israeli Historical Revisionism: From Left and Right (London, 2003); Derek J. Penslar, Israel in History: he Jewish State in Comparative Perspective (London, 2007) 28. his phase can also be simply called “the critical phase”. For comparative discussions of this phase see José Brunner, “Pride and Memory: Nationalism, Narcissism and the Historians Debate in Germany and Israel,” History and Memory, 9.1/2 (1997) 256–300; Stephen Howe, “he Politics of Historical ‘Revisionism’: Comparing Ireland and Israel/Palestine,” Past and Present, 168 (2000) 227–53; Daniel Levy, “he Future of the Past: Historiographical Disputes and Competing Memories in Germany and Israel,” History and heory, 38.1 (2002) 51–66. 5. On “paradigms” in the humanities and the social sciences, see Uri Ram, 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 16 4/6/10 7:32 AM Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 17 he Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology: heory, Ideology and Identity (Albany, 1995) 7–9. 6. See p. 215 in Michael Feige, “Dionysus in the Center and a Diferent Look at Israeli Historiography,” Teorya u-Vikoret, 26 (2005) 201–34 [Hebrew] (for an earlier, English, version, see his “he Names of the Place: New Historiography in Tamar Berger’s Dionysus at the Center,” Israel Studies Forum, 19.2 (2004) 54–74). See also p. 345 in David N. Myers, “Between Israel and the Nations: Relections on the State of Jewish Historical Scholarship in Israel,” Tsiyon, 74 (2008/09) 339–52 [Hebrew]. For a diferent use of the term “Post-Post-Zionism”—to designate a resurgence of Zionist ideology in Israeli politics following the Second Intifada—see Tom Segev, Elvis in Jerusalem (New York, 2001), and p. 27 in Hillel Halkin, “Israel’s New Reality,” Commentary 122.3 (2006) 21–7. 7. Boaz Neumann, “he New Zionists,” Yediot Ahronot Literary Magazine (24 November 2006) 27 [Hebrew]. 8. On the relationship of Israeli historiography to broader historiographical developments outside Israel, see Penslar, Israel in History, 27–8, 32. he argument that the New History was “critical” but not “new”, because it did not represent a new methodological approach, was already made in 1993 by Pappé in “he New History of the 1948 War,”Teorya u-Vikoret, 3 (1993) 99–114 [Hebrew]. See also Howe, “he Politics,” 243–4 (claiming that there was no impact of the “linguistic turn” on Israeli historiography as of 1999). 9. Pappé, A History, 286. 10. Uri Ram, “he Future of the Past”. See also Ram, he Time of the ‘Post’: Nationalism and the Politics of Knowledge in Israel (Tel Aviv, 2006) [Hebrew]. 11. Feige, “Dionysus,” 215, 229 (review of Tamar Berger’s Dionysus at Dizengof Center, arguing that it is a unique example of a new type of Israeli history “which may even be termed ‘post-post-Zionist’ ” but which “may not lead to a change in the way Israeli historiography is written”); Neumann, “he New Zionists”; Avner Shapira, “Without Judging Germany,” Ha’aretz (30 April 2007); Avner Shapira, “he Birth of Zionist Desire,” Ha’aretz (24 September 2008); Avner Shapira, “And hy Desire Shall Be To hy Land,” Akhbar ha-‘Ir (30 June 2009); Orit Prag, “he Pioneers Within,” Ha-Daf ha-Yarok (3 July 2009) (in which Neumann argues that a new generation of young Israeli historians—“the third wave” of Israeli historiography—has recently appeared, and that this generation rejects the anti-Zionist sentiment of the previous, critical, generation) [all in Hebrew]. See also Penslar, Israel in History, 33 (“younger scholars are beginning to write the gender and cultural history of the Yishuv and early state”); Myers, “Between Israel and the Nations,” 345 (“PostPost-Zionist” historians have shifted the focus of attention from political history to urban, cultural, and gender history and, instead of accepting Zionist ideology or rejecting it, they view Zionism in a more complex and fragmented fashion). 12. Two additional works mentioning a “new” phase in Israeli historiography are Rakefet Zalashik, History of Psychiatry in Palestine and Israel, 1892–1960 (TelAviv, 2008) 12–3 [Hebrew] (noting the emergence of a new body of works on the 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 17 4/6/10 7:32 AM 18 • isr ael studies, volume 15, number 2 history of health and medicine) and Nahum Karlinsky, “Beyond Post-Zionism,” Israel Studies, 9.3 (2004) 169–81 (reviewing books by Jacob Metzer and Deborah Bernstein). 13. Ram, “he Future of the Past,” 215–20 (diversity within the Post-Zionist paradigm). 14. he term is taken from Zeev Sternhell, he Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton, 1999). Two important texts announcing the birth of the new paradigm were Benny Morris, “he New Historiography: Israel Confronts its Past,” reprinted in Morris, Making Israel, 11–28 and Ram, Israeli Society: Critical Perspectives (Tel-Aviv, 1993) [Hebrew]. While the work of the new historians emerged in the 1980s, some critical sociological works already appeared in the 1970s. 15. See generally Silberstein, Postzionism. 16. See Pinhas Ginossar and Avi Bareli (eds.), Zionism: A Contemporary Controversy (Sde Boker, 1996) [Hebrew]; Ephraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: he ‘New Historians’ (London, 2000); Tuvia Friling (ed.), An Answer to A Post-Zionist Colleague (Tel-Aviv, 2003) [Hebrew]; Shapira and Penslar (eds.), Israeli Historical Revisionism; Penslar, “Zionism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism,” Journal of Israeli History, 20.2–3 (2001) 84–98; S. Ilan Troen, “De-Judaizing the Homeland: Academic Politics in Rewriting the History of Palestine,” Israel Afairs, 13.2 (2007) 872–84; Gideon Shimoni, “Postcolonial heory and the History of Zionism,” Israel Afairs, 13.4 (2007) 859–71; Yoav Gelber, “he History of Zionist Historiography: From Apologetics to Denial,” in Morris (ed), Making Israel, 47–80. 17. See Penslar, Israel in History, 25–6, 37, 44–5; Myers, “Between Israel and the Nations,” 334. See also Alon Hilu, he House of Rajani (London, 2010) (an example of the inluence of the paradigm on contemporary Israeli literature). On resistance to the paradigm in Israeli education, see Eyal Naveh and Esther Yogev, Histories: Towards a Dialogue with the Israeli Past (Tel-Aviv, 2002) [Hebrew]; Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “History Textbooks and the Limits of Israeli Consciousness,” in Shapira and Penslar (eds), Israeli Historical Revisionism, 155–72. However, see p. 2 in Anita Shapira, “Hirbet Hizah: Between Remembrance and Forgetting,” Jewish Social Studies, 7.1 (2000) 1–62 (literary works discussing the Palestinian refugee problem were studied in Israeli schools in the 1960s). 18. Morris, “he New Historiography”. 19. Ram, “he Future”. 20. See pp. 409–10 in Carl E. Schorske, “History and the Study of Culture,” New Literary History 21 (1990) 407–20. See also Robert Darnton, he Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1985) 3. 21. Other terms, for example, “classical” and “romantic”, might also be used here. On this binary dichotomy and its application to the history of sociology see Eduardo de la Fuente, “he Place of Culture in Sociology: Romanticism and Debates about the ‘Cultural Turn’,” Journal of Sociology, 43.2 (2007) 115–30. 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 18 4/6/10 7:32 AM Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 19 22. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised ed. (New York, 1983) 87–93. 23. A shorter deinition may be a “collective cast of mind”. See Adam Kuper, Culture: he Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge, MA, 1999) 227. 24. On the varieties of the term “culture” and its use (and rejection) in the anthropological literature see William H. Sewell, Jr., “he Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell & Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1999) 35–61; Kuper, Culture. On the problem of distinguishing between “elite” and “mass” culture see Peter Burke, What is Cultural History, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA, 2008) 27–9, 103–4. For histories of elite Israeli culture see Zohar Shavit (ed), he Construction of the Hebrew Culture in the Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Israel ( Jerusalem, 1998) [Hebrew]. 25. See some (but not all) these distinctions in Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, 1998), 1–5, 21–31, 250–1. 26. Burke, What is Cultural History, 8. 27. Ibid., 3, 8, 25, 37, 105–8. 28. “New” may be a misleading term here, since it seems that every several decades during the last two centuries a “new cultural history” school has appeared. See pp. 92–4 in Donald R. Kelley, “Cultural Turns in Historical Scholarship,” Intellectual News: Review of the International Society for Intellectual History, 8 (2000) 91–7. 29. See Lynn Hunt (ed.), he New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989); Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (eds.), Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New York, 1995); Bonnell and Hunt (eds.), Beyond the Cultural Turn; Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography: An Introduction (London, 1999) 145–7; Miri Rubin, “What is Cultural History Now?” in What is History Now?, ed. David Cannadine (Houndmills, 2004) 80–95; Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientiic Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, MA, 2005) 97–133; Burke, What is Cultural History, 74–6. 30. Kuper, Culture, 19, 23–2, 245–7. See also pp. 1485–6 in Ronald Grigor Suny, “Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn?” American Historical Review, 107.5 (2002) 1476–99; Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge, 1997), 183–212; What is Cultural History, 22–3, 31–3; Sewell, “he Concept(s) of Culture.” 31. Burke, What is Cultural History, 3. 32. Kelley, “Cultural Turns,” 94–7. 33. On the current state of cultural history see Burke, What is Cultural History, 102–43; See also p. 10 in Peter N. Stearns, “Social History Present and Future,” Journal of Social History, 37.1 (2003) 9–19. Suny, “Back and Beyond” (on the future of cultural history). 34. Pappé, “he New History”. he interest in social history is mostly apparent in Segev’s work, although recently Pappé has also moved in this direction; see A History. 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 19 4/6/10 7:32 AM 20 • isr ael studies, volume 15, number 2 35. For a partial list of works (critical and non-critical) discussing Orientalism in the Israeli context, see p. 578 note 3 in Dafna Hirsch, “’We are Here to Bring the West, Not Only to Ourselves’: Zionist Occidentalism and the Discourse of Hygiene in Mandate Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 41 (2009) 577–94. For other examples of the use of postcolonial theory see Teorya u-Vikoret, 20 (2002); 26 (2005) (special issues on postcolonial theory in Israel). 36. On empathy’s role in anthropology see Kuper, Culture, 215. 37. Arieh B. Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew: he Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (Oxford, 2008). 38. For similar arguments see Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (Ithaca, 2005) (literature). See also pp. 361–5 in Assaf Likhovski, “he Invention of ‘Hebrew Law’ in Mandatory Palestine,” American Journal of Comparative Law 46(2) (1998) 339–73 (law). 39. Anat Helman, Urban Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel-Aviv (Haifa, 2007) [Hebrew]. See Barbara E. Mann’s recent book on the urban and cultural history of Tel-Aviv, A Place in History: Modernism, Tel-Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford, 2006). For other recent works that focus on the local history of Tel-Aviv see p. 311n18 in Tami Razi, Forsaken Children: he Backyard of Mandate TelAviv (Tel-Aviv, 2009) [Hebrew]; “Special Issue: Tel-Aviv Centenary,” Israel Studies, 14.3 (2009); “Special Issue: Tel-Aviv Centenary,” Zmanim, 106 (2009). 40. Orit Rozin, Duty and Love: Individualism and Collectivism in 1950s Israel (Tel-Aviv, 2008). For a review and critique see Assaf Likhovski, “Individualism in Israel in the 1950s,” Zmanim, 107 (2009) 104–7. Another important characteristic in both in Helman’s and Rozin’s work is the interest in the Israeli middle class. For earlier discussions of this topic see Amir Ben-Porat, History of the Israeli Bourgeoisie ( Jerusalem, 1999) [all in Hebrew]. 41. Tom Segev, 1949: he First Israelis ( Jerusalem, 1984) [Hebrew]. 42. For a combination of both approaches see Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,” Social Text, 19.20 (1988) 1–35. 43. On the history of Zionist emotions see also Boaz Neumann, Land and Desire in Early Zionism (Tel-Aviv, 2009) [Hebrew]. 44. A (partial) list includes Nadav Davidovich and Shifra Shvarts, “Health and Hegemony: Preventive Medicine, Immigrants and the Israeli Melting Pot,” Israel Studies, 9.2 (2004) 150–79; Nadav Davidovich & Avital Margalit, “Public Health, Racial Tensions, and Body Politics: Mass Ringworm Irradiation in Israel 1949–1960,” Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, 36 (2008) 522–9; Dafna Hirsch, “’Interpreters of Occident to the Awakening Orient’: he Jewish Public Health Nurse in Mandate Palestine,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50.1 (2008) 227–55; Raphael Falk, Zionism and the Biology of the Jews (Tel-Aviv, 2008) [Hebrew]; Dafna Hirsch, “Zionist Eugenics, Mixed Marriage and the Creation of a ‘New Jewish Type’,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15.3 (2009) 592–602; Razi, Forsaken Children; Anat E. Leibler, “Statisticians’ Ambition: Governmentality, Modernity and National Legibility,” Israel Studies, 9.2 (2004) 121–49; 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 20 4/6/10 7:32 AM Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 21 Etan Bloom, “he ‘Administrative Knight’—Arthur Ruppin and the Rise of Zionist Statistics,” Tel-Aviv University Year Book for German History, 35 (2007) 183–203; Eran J. Rolnik, History of Psychoanalysis in Jewish Palestine/Israel 1918–1948 (TelAviv, 2007) [Hebrew]; Zalashik, History of Psychiatry; Ron Harris, Alexandre Kedar, Pnina Lahav, and Assaf Likhovski (eds.), he History of Law in a Multicultural Society: Israel 1917–1967 (Dartmouth, 2002); Derek J. Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: he Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918 (Bloomington, 1991); S. Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion; Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement (New Haven, 2003); Smadar Sharon, “Planners, the State and the Shaping of National Space in the 1950s,” Teorya u-Vikoret, 29 (2006) 31–57 [Hebrew]. 45. See, e.g., Etan Bloom, ‘‘What ‘he Father’ Had in Mind: Arthur Ruppin (1876–1943), Cultural Identity, Weltanschauung and Action,” History of European Ideas, 33.3 (2007) 330–49 (Zionist racial theory); Leibler, “Statisticians’ Ambition”. 46. Wendy Brown, “Power after Foucault,” in he Oxford Handbook of Political heory, ed. John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Philips (Oxford, 2006) 65–84. See also Suny, “Back and Beyond,” 1487. 47. Zalashik, History of Psychiatry, 10, 192, 225–6, 230 (compare to the discussion of the attitudes of veteran Israelis to Mizrahi Jews in Shohat, “Sephardim”). See other examples in Morris-Reich’s critique of Bloom’s portrayal of Ruppin, “Ruppin and the Peculiarities of Race: A Response to Etan Bloom,” History of European Ideas, 34.1 (2008) 116–9, or in the treatment of Zionist genetics and Zionist eugenics in Hirsch, “Zionist Eugenics”, and Falk, Zionism. Even in works that are explicitly committed to the critical approach, there is a complex story about the relative autonomy of the professional discourse examined. See Sharon, “Planners”. 48. Rozin, Duty and Love; Likhovski, “’Training in Citizenship’: Tax Compliance and Modernity,” Law and Social Inquiry, 32.3 (2007) 665–700”. Additional works that may belong here are Tami Razi’s examination of the social work department of the Tel-Aviv Municipality, Dafna Hirsch’s work on pre-state Jewish nurses, or Anat Leibler’s history of the Central Bureau of Statistics. See Razi, Forsaken Children; Hirsch, “Interpreters”; Leibler, “Statisticians’ Ambition.” 49. Burke, What is Cultural History, 8. 50. Helman, Urban Culture; Rozin, Duty and Love; Likhovski, “Training in Citizenship”. As Feige notes, such sources can also be found in the works of Segev, one of the Post-Zionist historians, perhaps because of his position outside Israeli academia. See Feige, “Dionysus,” 220n25. 51. Tamar Berger, Dionysus at Dizengof Center (Tel-Aviv, 1998). For a discussion of the book as a pioneering example of Post-Post-Zionist historiography see Feige, “Dionysus”. 52. he book, and Berger’s later work, is inluenced by a Benjaminian approach to history. See Berger, Dionysus, 21–2. 53. Compare Berger, Dionysus, 17, 25, 33, 103, 107, 112, 114, and Morris, he Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge, 1987). 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 21 4/6/10 7:32 AM 22 • isr ael studies, volume 15, number 2 54. Tamar Berger, In the Space Between World and Playing: he Model in Israeli Culture (Tel-Aviv, 2008). 55. he chapter was translated into English. See Berger, “Sleep, Teddy Bear, Sleep Independence Park, Petach Tikva: An Israeli Realm of Memory,” Israel Studies, 7.2 (2002) 1–32. 56. For an important previous analysis of the Israeli collective memory see Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1995). 57. A somewhat similar approach can be found in Mann, A Place in History. 58. Davidovich and Shvarts, “Health and Hegemony,” 169. 59. Hirsch, “Interpreters,” 255. 60. Penslar, “Zionism,” 86–94. 61. Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew; Peleg, Orientalism; Rozin, Duty and Love; Hirsch, “We Are Here”; Likhovski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill, 2006). See also Tal Kohavi, “Doing Postcolonialism in Israel,” Teorya u-Vikoret, 29 (2006) 219–28. 62. Menachem Mautner, he Decline of Formalism and the Rise of Values in Israeli Law (Tel-Aviv, 1993) [Hebrew]; Pnina Lahav, Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century (Berkeley, 1997); Eli Salzberger and Fania Oz-Salzberger, “he Secret German Sources of the Israeli Supreme Court,” Israel Studies, 3.2 (1999) 159–92; Rozin, “ ‘he People’s Voice’: Portrait of a Struggle,” in Be Quiet, Someone is Speaking, ed. Michael D. Birnhack (Tel-Aviv, 2006) 71–128 [Hebrew]. Interest in the cultural history of law was part of a more general “cultural turn” in the study of Israeli law. See pioneering theoretical discussions in Mautner, Law and Culture in Israel at the hreshold of the Twenty First Century (Tel-Aviv, 2008); Yoram Shachar, “Criminal Law and Culture,” Plilim, 7 (1998) 77–120 [all in Hebrew]. 63. One attempt to go beyond conventional focus on Jewish society that still belongs to the Post-Zionist or critical phase is found in the concept of relational history ofered in Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine 1906–1948 (Berkeley, 1996). For a critique, see Karlinsky, “Beyond Post Zionism.” See also Pappé, A History, 1–13 (arguing for a “common” or “binational” version of the history of Palestine that would include the history of both Jews and Arabs); Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, he Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, MA, 2003). 64. Penslar, “Zionism”; Sandy Suian, “Deining National Medical Borders: Medical Terminology and the Making of Hebrew Medicine,” in Reapproaching Borders: New Perspectives on the Study of Israel-Palestine, ed. Mark LeVine and Sandy Suian (Lanham, MD, 2007) 97–119. 65. Likhovski, Law and Identity. See also Feige, “Dionysus,” 215 (on Jews and Arabs as twin victims of modernization in Berger’s work). 66. Rozin, Duty and Love; Davidovich and Shvarts, “Health and Hegemony”; Razi, Forsaken Children; Likhovski, “Training in Citizenship”. 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 22 4/6/10 7:32 AM Post-Post-Zionist Historiography • 23 67. Falk, Zionism (on Zionist eugenics and genetics); Yotam Hotam, Modern Gnosis and Zionism ( Jerusalem, 2007) [Hebrew]. 68. Feige, “Dionysus,” 211. 69. Gadi Algazi, “Between the Man and the Place [review of Dionysus at Dizengof Center],” Ha’aretz Literary Supplement (6 April 1999) 13 [Hebrew] (criticizing Berger’s inability to link her story about ordinary people to bigger political issues such as colonialism and economic inequality). 70. here may also be psychological explanations. For a psychoanalytic reading of previous phases on Israeli historiography, see Brunner, “Pride,” 291–2. 71. Shair, Land, Labor (paperback ed., Berkeley, 1996) xxi. 72. One example is the Tantura case. Compare Pappé, “he Tantura Case in Israel: he Katz Research and Trial,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 30.3 (2001) 19–39, and Yoav Gelber, Palestine 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 2nd ed. (Brighton, 2006) 319–27. he generational change has been accompanied by a gender shift. While there were some important female sociologists and historians associated with the critical paradigm, it seems that women are more dominant among the generation of scholars that has emerged in the last decade. One possible feminist approach would perhaps argue that the “diferent voice” of the new works—the shift in interest from military and economic conlict to a history that looks at the daily and mundane, as well as in the more ambivalent moral tone—may be partly due to this gender shift. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological heory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA, 1993). 73. A process that had already happened outside Israel in the 1970s; see p. 21 in Joseph Mali, “Introduction—he Time of Zmanim: he Cultural Revolution in the New Historiography,” in New Times: Studies in Modern Historiography, ed. Joseph Mali (Ra’anana, 2008) 7–33 [Hebrew]. 74. On the general loss of interest in politics see Segev, “Israel and Palestine: Eternal Enmity?” New York Review of Books, 57.1 (2010). On the de-politicization of Israeli literature see Yaron Peleg, Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas (Austin, 2008). For an earlier discussion see Gadi Taub, A Dispirited Rebellion: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture (Tel-Aviv, 1997) 47–137 [Hebrew]. 75. On the impact of the Second Intifada on Israeli historiography see Neumann, Land and Desire, 11–2. 76. Journals such as Zmanim and History and Memory may have been important sources. See Mali, “Introduction,” 24; Penslar, Israel in History, 28. Perhaps the work of the Unit of Cultural Research at Tel-Aviv University was an additional source of inluence. 77. On the cyclical nature of historiography see Kelley, “Cultural Turns,” 94. 78. Daniel Gutwein, “Left and Right Post-Zionism and the Privatization of Israeli Collective Memory,” in Shapira and Penslar (eds.), Israeli Historical Revisionism, 9–42. 1-IS15.2 Likhovski (1-23).indd 23 4/6/10 7:32 AM