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Nostalgia Jewishness is a lullaby for old men
CONTRAVERSIONS
DANIEL BOYARIN
MORITZ STEINSCHNEIDER,
founder of nineteenth-century
ISRAELI SOCIETY
MEIRA WEISS
Weiss, Mcira
The chosen body: the politics of the body in Israeli society I Meira Weiss.
p. em.- (Contraversions-Jews and Other Differences)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3272-7
1. Body, Human-Social aspects-Israel. 2. National characteristics, Israeli.
3. Jews-Israel-Identity. 4. Halutzim-Social aspects. 5. Sabras-Social aspects.
6. Body image-Social aspects-Israel. 7. National characteristics, Israeli.
I. Title. II. Series.
GT497.175 W45 2002
306-4-dc21 2002009776
INTRODUCTION 1
NOTES 145
REFERENCES 157
INDEX 175
IX
THE CHOSEN BODY
with his penis, with the nation's penis, the army's, so that
victim, what will you be, if you get to be, when you're older?
v
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Lock, Gelya Frank, Emily Martin, Myra Bluebond Langer, Jean Comaroff,
Sarah Franklin, Ruth Behar, Lois Wacquant, Paul Willis, Efrat Tseelon, Ruth
Tsoffar, Jeanne Katz, Judith Lorber, Debora Gordon, Aliza Kolker, and Matti
Bunzel. Special thanks go to the two manuscript reviewers, Ruth Linden and
Ronit Len tin. During my visit to Norway I was fortunate to have wonderful
meetings with the writer Susan Senstan. Later she became an important
reader of my work, and I thank her for that. I wish to thank Ann Louise and
Benedicte Ingstad too. In a visit to Turkey I met Aklile Gursoy and her stu-
dents, whose anthropological insights were very significant in the context of
Middle Eastern studies.
I thank my friends and colleagues at the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at the Hebrew University ofJerusalem: Amalya Oliver, Baruch
Kimmerling, Boas Shamir, Don Handelman, Don Seemen, Dani Rabino-
witz, Daniel Maman, Eyal Ben-Ari, Erik Cohen, Gideon Aran, Harvey
Goldberg, Hagar Salmon, Judith Shuval, Michael Shalev, Nachman Ben-
Yehuda, Nissim Mizrahi, Orna Sasson-Levy, Sigal Gooldin, Tamar Elor,
Tamir Sorek, Vered Vinitzky Seroussi, Victor Azarya, Yoram Bilu, Yehuda
Goodman, and Zeeve Rosenhek. I also thank my friends outside the Hebrew
University: Dafna Izraeli, Dan Baron, Michael Gluzman, Yehuda Hiss, Yona
Tenenbaum, Chen Kugel, and Ilan Goor Arie. My talks with Israeli artists are
interwoven through this book. I particularly thank Meir Gal and Yuval
Caspi. They stimulated my thinking more than anyone.
Last but definitely not least, I thank my husband Shraga and my children
Tami and Shay for their love and support. They were-as always-a source
of hope and light. I also thank my beloved family in New York: Gladys and
Donald Stone, Shirely and Arnold Bart Elinor, and Bob Rosenblat. I thank
my friend from Pennsylvania, Lynn Uram, whose daily phone call to
Berkeley made the difference in my writing, and my "foster parents" in
Berkeley, Dalia and Shuka Etzion.
This study was supported by generous funds from the Minerva Center
for Human Rights and the Scheine Research Center.
I have used several of my previously published studies as sources for sec-
ondary analysis conducted for this book's purposes, and they are repro-
duced with the permission of the publishers: for pages 52-53 of Chapter 2,
"War Bodies-Hedonist Bodies: Dialectics of the Collective and the Indi-
vidual in Israeli Society," American Ethnologist, 24, 4 (1997): 1-20; for pages
66-71, Chapter 3, "Bereavement, Commemoration and Collective Identity
VI ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
in Contemporary Israeli Society," Anthropological Quarterly, 70, 2 (1997):
91-101; for pages 103-10, Chapter 4, "Engendering the Gulf War: Israeli
Nurses and the Discourse of Soldiering;' Journal of Contemporary Eth-
nography, 27, 2 (1998 ): 197-218, and for Chapter 6, "'Writing Culture' Under
the Gaze of my Country," Ethnography, 2, 1 (Mar. 2001): 77-91.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VII
INTRODUCTION
THE ZIONIST REVOLUTION that aimed to create a new people fit for a new
land had a unique bodily aspect. Zionism was not just a national, political,
and cultural movement of liberation, but also a bodily revolution. For early
Zionist thinkers like Max Nordau and Aharon David Gordon, returning to
Israel and working the land would restore the health of Jewish bodies. The
Zionist revolution involved a "return" to Zion, to nature, and to the body.
Agriculture, land, territory, and military power were seen as an antidote to
what was perceived as the passivity and spirituality of Jews and Judaism in
the diaspora. The essential feature of the Jewish collectivity, namely, learn-
ing, was traditionally disembodied; Zionism regarded itself as a revolution-
ary attempt to re-embody the Jew, reposition him in history, striving for a
worldly redemption. In Nordau's term, coined as early as 1898, Zionism was
to be "Judaism with muscles." 1 The "muscle Jew" was to replace the pale-
faced and thin-chested "coffeehouse Jew;' and to regain the heroism of his
forefathers in the land of Zion.
The dictum of "Judaism with muscles" was accepted and elaborated by
many passsionate Zionists in the following years. Ze' ev Jabotinsky, the influ-
ential leader of right-wing revisionist Zionism, to cite just one of many
examples, lamented in his essay "Silk and Steel" (1924) that "the Hebraic
man, who has not been taken care of throughout the generations, has been
spoiled and become a caricature. Bent backbone, pointed chin, low lip-
These are his characteristics. You [Zionist mothers of Israel] will rebuild the
generation:' Doctor Binyamini, house physician of the famous Herzliya
Gymnasium, the first Hebrew school in Tel Aviv, wrote in his 1928 diary that
"Zionism was accepted only by compatible men and women who were
whole-bodied and physically fit .... Our people are currently experiencing
a natural process of selection." Doctor Rupin, head of tile Israeli Office of
the World Zionist Organization, wrote in his book The Sociology of Jews
(1934) that "while in Europe many are calling for a eugenic policy, the Jews
... have never engaged in a 'self-cleansing' of their race, but rather allowed
every child, be it the most sickly, to grow and marry and have children like
him. Even the mentally retarded, blind and deaf were allowed to marry. In
order to keep the purity of our race, such Jews must abstain from child-
bearing."
From the 192o's on, the healthy and happy baby, "little Samson" as he was
called in the posters of the day, figured regularly in mainstream Hebrew lit-
erature on parenting and child care, where he served as an antithesis to the
degeneration of the diaspora. Women were defined, following 1948, as
responsible for bearing as many children as possible "for the glory of the
State of Israel:' For many women, the revolutionary turn of Zionism there-
fore culminated in a return to a traditional gender role, namely, mothering.
Today, Israeli society is still obsessed with fertility. The prestate zeal for
community eugenics and the post-independence craving for quantity and
quality have found their contemporary consummation in genetic screening,
testing, and counseling. Israeli women hold the world record for fetal diag-
nostics. About 6o percent of pregnant women in Israel undergo some kind
of diagnostic test before delivery. Israel has the world's largest number, on
average, of tests per pregnancy. It is the first in the world in the rate of
amniocentesis (undertaken by about 20 percent of pregnant women). 2 In
addition, Israel has more fertility clinics per capita than any other country
in the world, not because of high rates of infertility but because of the cen-
trality of reproduction. Finally, Israeli parents are prone to prefer abortion
even in cases of relatively mild impairments, such as cleft lip, and in cases of
relatively low risk, such as 5 percent risk of mental retardation. This shows
that the Israeli obsession with fertility involves not just quantity but also
quality.
All this reproductive activity revolves around the birth of a healthy baby.
The many tests conducted before and during pregnancy are meant to guar-
2 INTRODUCTION
an tee a perfect child. Contemporary Israelis, according to geneticists, are the
most enthusiastic about new prenatal diagnostics, and the first to spend
money on them.' Every new test is immediately put into use, with the result
that the number of administered prenatal tests increases threefold each year.
Israeli geneticists no doubt have a vested interest in this popular medical
industry. Their attitudes toward abortion are, on average, more positive and
accepting than those of their international colleagues. For example, fully 68
percent of them agree that giving birth to a child with a serious impairment
is socially wrong. In contrast, geneticists around the world usually regard
the decision to abort a deformed fetus as primarily personal. An astounding
14 percent of the Israeli geneticists agree that "the role of genetics is to puri-
fy the human genetic pool" (Wertz 1998). Such a view is ethically problem-
atic, indicating as it does a geneticist's directive involvement in the decision-
making process of individuals. It flouts the international code of ethics of
genetic counseling, which stresses non-directiveness. Representatives of in-
ternational adoption agencies agree that Israelis are the most critical in the
world when it comes to considering a candidate for adoption and would re-
fuse to adopt a child because of minor external impairments! Eugenics,
then and now, is a social discourse that has gained prominence in Israel
through the ideology of the "chosen body."
What is at issue here is the ideology of the chosen body in Israel, an idea
that has been long and consistently cherished by Israeli society and, as some
argue, also by Israeli sociology, which has always taken an active part in the
Zionist project of nation-building. The same themes, in contrast, have been
sharply criticized by Jewish American observers like David Biale, Daniel
Boyarin, and Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. Biale (1992a), for example, opens
his book Eros and the Jews with a discussion of Philip Roth's notorious 1969
novel, Portnoy's Complaint, "the outrageous and hilarious confession of a
sex-obsessed American Jew." Biale reminds us that, for Roth, the Jews as "the
quintessential People of the Book" live in symbolic exile from their own
body. At the end of the novel, Portnoy therefore chooses to escape to the
healthy sexuality of the Jewish state and seeks an affair with a sturdy female
Israeli soldier. Roth combines here two powerful elements in the myth of
modern Israel: Eros and the military.
Portnoy's object of pursuit, however, turns out to be depressingly puri-
tanical. This should remind us that "erotic Israel" is a sexual stereotype in
American Jewish culture. For commentators like Biale, Boyarin, and Eil-
INTRODUCTION 3
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