14. Westernization and the Decline of Collective Culture
‘Westernization’ is a complex term whose precise
meaning changes with location. For an American, the words
‘Oriental’ or ‘Eastern’ may conjure
up images of Japanese and Koreans; to an Israeli, however,
it is likely to mean Moroccans, Yemenites or Iraqis. Israel
has known two meanings of the word ‘West’;
increasingly, however, they are narrowing down to one.
For Israel, whose main dividing line is ethnic, a large
part of the relevance of the word ‘west’ relates
to Eastern Europe – the Ashkenazi ‘homeland’
– as the Western part of the line. The ‘West’
meant the beginnings of Zionism, the Eastern European
center and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe, the center
of Herzlian Zionism and daily Zionist politics. As the
Yishuv assumed an identity that was defined against both
the Arab East and the Jews who came from there, the Eastern
European character of the society was utterly clear. It
has already been mentioned that the early waves of Zionist
Zionist Aliyah, dominated totally by the Eastern and East-Central
European background of the Olim, defined their way of
life as a revolt against that of Eastern European Jewry.
Nevertheless, such an influence could not be dismissed
so easily.
The foods that the newcomers liked derived from there,
as did the melodies that they loved, and the writers who
influenced them were European. The society that developed
in the Yishuv was indeed different from the life that
they had known, but it remained European: an orchestral
concert featured Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and never
the classic songs of Um Kulthoum. An early feature of
the cultural life of Tel Aviv was the opera house. The
Hebrew University, so proudly opened in 1925, was built
according to a Western program of study. The same phenomenon
applied to many different spheres. ‘Western’
meant Eastern European or simply, European.
The situation has changed, however. Despite the demographic
reinforcement of many hundreds of thousands from Eastern
Europe in the last decades, the word ‘Western’
is perceived very differently today: it now denotes America
and the English-speaking world. The word ‘America’
retains the same quasi-magical attraction for many Israelis
as it had for those millions of emigrants from Tsarist
Russia who spurned Zionism and chose a different direction.
It is ironic that, for many Israelis, the word ‘Western’
now conjures up the same geographical reality as it did
for their great grandparents, despite the intervening
period of Eastern European ‘Westernization.’
There is another irony. While the early Zionist immigrants
lived a life influenced by the West (Europe), they would
have resisted the lure of Westernization. Their ideological
concern was to create their own, authentic, native Hebrew
culture, rather than copy that of other places. Thus they
would certainly have rejected the idea of the West (Europe)
as a cultural model for emulation, although this is precisely
what they did do to a large extent. In contrast, today
the attitude of a sizeable part of the Israeli population
is that America is the model to emulate and that, the
more this happens, the better off Israel will be.
A closely-connected development relates to the decline
of the predominantly collective culture associated with
early Zionism. The highest goal was the good of society,
the State and the collective. People were meant to work
for the good of the collective and individual goals were
perceived as somehow tainted. It was considered decadent
to seek individual comfort or to praise individual aesthetic
values. Any ambition had to be couched in terms of the
collective good, so politicians seeking office out of
personal ambition were regarded in a negative light: like
Moses, they were meant to be pushed into power by a higher
force – the needs of the collective.
A wonderful film that projects this tension in terms of
Israeli society in the early 1950s was Noa at 17(1981).
Its plot unfolds against the background of the ideological
changes of the 1950s and the disillusionment of the pioneering
generation with some of the principles that had guided
them for decades. The film’s central character,
Noa, is the daughter of a family caught up in this process.
She is an individualist at heart who challenges the entire
collective ethos of the society as represented by her
comrades in the Socialist Zionist youth movement. They
talk of “we”: she talks of “I.”
They talk of “duty;” she talks of “beauty.”
They talk of “love of country;” she talks
of personal love. The idea of this excellent film –
praising individualism rather than collectivism, but examining
its limits – is clear. The question that remains
is what time period it really reflects: is it a film about
the early 1950s, in which the story was set, or about
the early 1980s, when the film was made?
Another film that does the same thing but differently is
the fine, award-winning film Late Summer Blues
(1987). It tells the story of a group of Israeli teenagers
finishing high school in the shadow of the 1970 war of
attrition with Egypt, which claimed several hundred lives
at the Suez Canal. Each of teenager deals differently
with society’s expectations and their own personal
needs. The film explores the interaction between the personal
and the national, and the way in which each individual
tries to deal with potential and real contradictions between
the two. Also clearly depicted are both the pull towards
individualism and the Americanization of Israeli society
in the post-1967 years.
Such changes in Israeli culture have been substantial.
How did these changes occur? How did America replace Europe
(Eastern Europe) as the Israeli concept of ‘West’,
for much of the population? How did the West (America)
become an idealized model for ‘Westernization’?
Furthermore, how did the passage from the ethos of the
collective to that of the individual occur?
It is always difficult and, indeed, risky to try to anchor
long, complex processes of social change to key dates.
Nevertheless, it is possible to posit that the most significant
moment of change in Israeli culture was almost certainly
1967. At that point, more than at any previous time, the
country opened up to both the ideal and the reality of
America. The process had begun earlier: documentary films
clearly show discotheques and dance clubs in the main
cities before the war. However, the war caused a variety
of changes.
Firstly, the resulting period of economic growth fostered
a developing consumer culture: there was more to buy and
more money with which to purchase it. Moreover, the value
of consumerism was increasingly legitimized. This was
important in a society where a rather Spartan attitude
had formerly been common in large sectors. Money had been
spent on national tasks rather than personal comfort.
Not only were many of the new goods that fuelled the consumers’
hunger American, but the very culture of consumerism was
largely associated with America and the West.
A significant parallel occurred in the development of a
youth culture that strongly differed from the pioneering
youth culture dominated by socialist, collective values
that formerly had prevailed. A trend toward individualism
developed among the youth and became increasingly legitimized
by general society, even while it was decried as decadent
by the leaders and ‘moral compasses’ of the
country. As in the West, boys’ hair began to lengthen
and a new narcissism became evident in the clothes worn
by youth of both sexes. Rock music took large sections
of the youth by storm. A mild drug culture began to develop.
Once again, these elements of youth culture were associated
with the West and, above all, America.
Perhaps these changes would have occurred anyway, but there
were important ‘agents of change’ at work
within Israel society that cleared a path for them. One
was the large group of Jewish volunteers, largely from
the English-speaking world, that flooded the country in
the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, particularly
those who worked on the kibbutzim and moshavim. The impact
of this group was felt far and wide. They were an interesting
mixture of elements old and new: on the one hand they
were aware of their Jewish identity and were strongly
Zionist: they came to the country because of the pull
of the collective society. However, they were also individuals,
many of whom had been strongly influenced by the youth
culture of the West. They looked and dressed Western:
they were a living representation of the West.
The older generations were happy to accept them. They came
from the Diaspora but did not represent the old idea of
the Galut that Zionism had rejected. These were not the
Eastern European Jews that Bialik and others had condemned
so eloquently: these were young, free Jews who lived in
the Diaspora and who could feel at home there, but who
were also connected with Israel, Zionism and idealism.
Their ways might be strange to many of the older generation,
but they were seen as positive nonetheless. The younger
generations were happy to accept them, partly for the
opposite reasons: they were ‘cool,’ had long
hair and listened to rock music. In these very different
ways, the fact that several thousand young people were
considered positive role models caused them to become
important agents of change.
Their influence – and that of the world from which
they came – was deep. They represented an idea of
‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’
that had long been ready to burst to the surface. Many
young Israelis were happy to break through the limitations
of a Puritanical establishment whose vocabulary stressed
such words as ‘duty’ and ‘obligation.’
A large number of the young had become aware of the gap
between the high ideals of their society and the behavior
of some individuals who used such language as a mask for
individual greed and ambition. It would take a full decade
until this tension exploded and the old Labor Party establishment
was kicked out of office after two generations of domination
and rule. In many ways, however, the seeds were sown in
this period.
Another crucial agent of change was the advent of television,
which began to be broadcast in Israel in 1968. This gradually
opened a window to the wider world, supplying visual information
about the West. The cinema had long played a part in shaping
the collective imagination of the secular population,
but the impact of television went deeper still: here was
something that could be watched on a nightly basis; this
was where one’s fantasies could be nurtured in private.
It took decades for television to begin to free itself
of the influences of the establishment that had brought
it to life. Nonetheless, this did occur gradually: first
black and white, then color; first one channel, then two,
and then cable television. Glimpses of the West had become
full exposure: the America that featured daily in Israeli
living-rooms was slickly attractive compared with the
routine of life in the Jewish State. With the multiplication
of channels, Israelis became increasingly exposed to commercial
advertising that was ever more seductive in its visual
sophistication.
The trend towards individualism that is connected very
strongly with the influence of American culture is so
pervasive that, predictably, it is impossible to single
out the most significant individual cultural figures who
represent it. Any attempt to be representative would involve
mentioning long lists of creative people in many disciplines.
Nevertheless, there is space here to note one film, one
song and one writer.
The writer is Etgar Keret, a superb interpreter of the
small, quirky corners of Israeli life and the Israeli
psyche. In a series of very short stories, idiosyncratic
and sometimes approaching the level of parable, he depicts
scenes from the Israeli reality that are in fact also
universal.
The song is Si Heiman’s extraordinarily moving mid-90s
version of her father Nahum’s wonderful song, Kmo
Tzemah Bar. Decades earlier, Hava Alberstein had
given this song, one of Israel’s most beautiful,
a straight, touching treatment, but when Si Heiman performed
it – a representative of a new generation –
she invested the beautiful melody with a soulful, bluesy
character that the original had not possessed. The distance
between the two versions says something about the distance
traveled by Israel in the course of a generation.
The film is the recent, award-winning Broken Wings,
one of the most beautiful Israeli films to have been produced
in years. It depicts a family that is struggling to recover
after the death of its father and husband. Significantly,
this man does not die in a heroic war accident or as the
result of some other ‘national’ cause; his
death has a more mundane cause – a bee-sting. The
film deals with real people living in the alienating routine
of an anonymous big city: in this case, Haifa. It is both
intensely Israeli and yet hauntingly universal, treating
as it does relationships, the need for love and the struggle
to live a normal life in a harsh social reality.
These three symbolize the new Israel. In large sectors
of society, earlier models and values have been replaced,
respectively, by America and individualism.