Israel in the Making: Stickers, Stitches, and Other Critical Practices
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Israel in the Making: Stickers, Stitches, and Other Critical Practices
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Overview
The brilliant kaleidoscope of everyday creativity in Israel is thrown into relief in this study, which teases out the abiding national tensions and contradictions at work in the expressive acts of ordinary people. Hagar Salamon examines creativity in Israel's public sphere through the lively discourse of bumper stickers, which have become a potent medium for identity and commentary on national and religious issues. Exploring the more private expressive sphere of women's embroidery, she profiles a group of Jerusalem women who meet regularly and create "folk embroidery." Salamon also considers the significance of folk expressions at the intersections of the public and private that rework change and embrace transformation. Far ranging and insightful, Israel in the Making captures the complex creative essence of a nation state and vividly demonstrates how its citizens go about defining themselves, others, and their country every day.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253023285 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/27/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Hagar Salamon is Max and Margarethe Grunwald Chair in Folklore at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is author of The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia.
Read an Excerpt
Israel in the Making
Stickers, Stitches, and Other Critical Practices
By Hagar Salamon
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2017 Hagar SalamonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02328-5
CHAPTER 1
Folklore as an Emotional Battleground
Political Bumper Stickers
In the postmodern world, of which Israel and Jerusalem form an idiosyncratic but integral part, bumper stickers are an increasingly common expressive medium. The Israeli variant of this iconic phenomenon illustrates the rapid growth of the medium since the early 1990s, reaching new peaks of folk innovation and creativity in the context of the peace process, and above all following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitshak Rabin in November 1995. These stickers are predominantly political in nature. This lively and animated folkloristic political discourse offers an alternative perspective on major political developments, which occur at a dizzying pace in Israel, and an important complement to — and critique of — the hegemonic political discourse that takes place in this country (figure 1.1).
An analysis of the sticker discourse reflects the most pressing social and political issues processed in Israel. The cars on the road become vehicles of political sentiment — emblems of the profound emotions of owners and audience alike. This phenomenon of folk politics has become widespread throughout the country, and often evokes immediate and emotionally charged responses — both orally and in the form of new counter-stickers.
In this chapter, we attempt to unravel the multivocality embodied in this postmodern genre and discuss the relationship between this form of expression and the discursive nuances it embraces. This may further our understanding of such aspects as the definition of folklore in the modern world; the fluid boundaries between folklore, popular culture, and media; and the place of folklore in multicultural societies that are the arenas of covert and overt struggles between various groups representing competing political and even cosmological perspectives.
As with other forms of expressive folklore, stickers are phrased with terse poetics that address a world of shared images. In attempting to interpret the message, the audience further expands the exegetical game through attention to aural aspects (such as rhythm and rhyme), multiple meanings, and other actions. The survey aims to document the complexity and sophistication of this unique form of discourse, focusing on the experience of exegesis it inspires. The documentation process included open-ended and semistructured interviews. The enthusiasm with which interviewees tackled the task of interpreting the messages revealed an argumentative and sermonizing rhetoric in which dexterous textual analysis is rife with powerful emotions. Popular discussion of these short and transient messages also reveals a surprising measure of emotion that emerges in all the participating voices.
The present analysis positions folklore as a cultural arena in which the distinctions between addresser (deliverer) and addressee (audience) are constructed and deconstructed through an emotive process. The presence of affective affinities emerges as the central feature of folkloric discourse. Due attention to these affective affinities in theoretical discussion of the nature of folklore and the experience it embodies may help define this field and conceptualize its characteristic dynamics.
Shalom 'Akhshav and Shalom, Haver
The first documented political bumper sticker in Israel is usually considered to be the Shalom 'Akhshav (Peace Now) sticker, designed by Israeli artist David Tartakover in 1977 for the left-wing movement Peace Now. Since then political stickers have become a common mark on Israeli roads. The present chapter is based on material documented in Israel between November 1995 and May 1999, some twenty years after the first bumper sticker appeared. The material thus testifies to the generative qualities of the first sticker as expressed in the formation of the entire genre in Israel, and specifically the cluster of stickers on which this chapter focuses.
In early November 1995, in the midst of a controversial peace process, Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated in the main public square in Tel Aviv after addressing a well-attended support rally. The public reaction was one of extreme shock, which intensified after it emerged that his assassin was a young Jew, who had acted on the belief that he was obligated by religious law to stop the peace process. This brutal challenge to the foundations, boundaries, and adherents of Zionist nationalism would become a central theme in the public discourse that emerged on Israel's roads. Rabin's funeral was attended by numerous leaders from around the world. President Bill Clinton, a key partner in this peace process and arguably the most influential leader in the world, was among the mourners who made eulogies. He ended his speech dramatically when he repeated the Hebrew phrase from his response to the assassination just days earlier in Washington: moving the crowd in a sincere display of grief, he called out toward Rabin's coffin, "Shalom, Haver!"
Almost immediately this phrase appeared as a bumper sticker. More than one million copies were distributed around Israel (whose population at the time was around five and a half million). The Shalom, Haver stickers, blue print on white, with the identical Biblical-style font used on the Shalom 'Akhshav sticker of twenty years earlier, were observed on a very high percentage of cars in Israel. This became a personal expression of mourning and separation on the part of the car owners, as well as a unifying ritual in the face of the divisions highlighted by the assassination. At the same time, stickers expressing opposition to Rabin's government and policies were quickly and quietly removed from many cars. However, it was not long before stickers began to appear that challenged the perceived messages of Shalom, Haver; stickers deriving from Shalom, Haver emerged, alongside other generative clusters (see figures 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5).
The research included long-term documentation of the Shalom, Haver cluster, which continued to expand and change. In addition, we asked drivers to comment on the stickers that appeared on their vehicles, and we presented the repertoire of stickers to some one hundred interviewees — men and women, young and old, some previously known and others randomly approached. Interviewees identified themselves with a wide range of political and religious positions within Israeli society. They were asked to discuss each sticker as well as the phenomenon of the discourse of stickers in general.
After a brief explanation, the interviewer pointed to each slogan, without reading it aloud, and the interviewees were asked for their comments. It was important not to verbally pronounce the slogan because standard modern Hebrew, based on an essentially consonantal alphabet, allows room for ambiguities and multiple readings. The interviewees, thus, were not directed to any particular reading of the text. The interviews concentrated on readings of the stickers associated with Shalom, Haver and with the unique popular experience expressed and indeed created by this folkloric discourse in an effort to develop a phenomenological theoretical perspective based in this folkloristic experience.
The interviews expressed the wealth and virtuosity of interpretations and the divergent and often contradictory directions taken by the interviewees. In consonance with the anonymity of the stickers for the audience, with the exception of the generative sticker in the cluster, "authored" by the US president, the present study is not concerned with the actual origin of each sticker — even assuming that such a creative moment can be traced.
During the research process, more than thirty different stickers were documented on the roads, all part of the popular political discourse that Shalom, Haver generated. The stickers were presented to the interviewees in a manner that created an internal research chronology that, while attempting to reflect the actual chronology on the roads, inevitably differs from the chronology of each individual's encounter with the stickers in the ethnographic field. Accordingly, the interviewees were asked to recall the interpretative experience they underwent in the original encounter, as distinct from the research context.
From the outset it was evident that the generative capacity of the apparently simple phrase Shalom, Haver is due not only to the powerful emotional context in which it entered public discourse but also to the inherent ambiguity of the two words. Above all, the complexities of the Hebrew word Shalom must be appreciated. Shalom may carry the meanings of the English words peace, hello, goodbye, and farewell; it is also a male first name and a family name. Haver is the masculine form of the word friend. The word may be used to refer to a specific personal friend, but it is also widely used in colloquial Hebrew as a generic and amicable term of approach to an unknown (male) stranger in the street. Haver may also mean "boyfriend," and in a specifically Israeli context it may refer to the member of various social and political institutions, in particular those closely identified with the Labor Party (Rabin's party) on the left wing of the Israeli political spectrum, such as kibbutzim, the General Health Fund, and the Histadrut (Israeli trade unions). In the specific and original context of the sticker, as known to everyone in Israel, Haver naturally refers to the late prime minister, by implicit reference to Clinton's address. The ambiguity and multiple meanings of this short text are central to the generative function of this sticker.
The list of thirty-two examples in table 1.1, included in the cluster of stickers generated by Shalom, Haver and presented to the interviewees, illustrates the vitality and diversity of this phenomenon. The English translation adopts the most probable interpretation.
The clarity with which the cluster of stickers generated by Shalom, Haver reveals itself as a cohesive group is reflected in the fact that all include at least one of the two words in the original slogan, and that all the stickers, without exception, use the same typography for the word Shalom — a typography that, as noted above, dates back to Shalom 'Akhshav and is reminiscent of the style used by scribes in preparing parchment copies of the sacred Jewish texts. In most cases, the text appears in varying shades of blue on a white background; these are the colors of the Israeli flag, and they are hence associated with Zionism, nationalism, and patriotism. In addition to the graphic design of the sticker — an important factor in unraveling the message — the discourse of stickers makes its interconnected nature evident in the use of common grammatical forms and syntactical rhythms. Thus, the slogans announce their belonging to a single family, however fraught the internal relationships may be. This will be of central importance in interpreting content and in the process of popular exegesis.
After discussing various aspects of the sticker medium as a folkloristic genre, I progress to a concrete illustration of the interpretative discourse relating to the cluster of stickers examined in this chapter. The reader will best appreciate the interrelationships between the stickers by reviewing the entire cluster presented below. This illustration in turn leads to a concluding discussion relating to the discursive and emotional aspects of this contemporary folkloric discourse, and the manner in which these are embodied in the connection between medium and message in new genres.
Characteristics of the Genre
The Car and the Road
Since Israeli cars are often encountered traveling bumper-to-bumper, the bumper sticker is in most cases raised to the rear windshield. The selection of the car as the forum for folk politics requires specific attention. In terms of the specific political discourse, the road and car — as path and vehicle leading from one place to another — mirror the "process," while the concept of movement, with its associations of political movement, adds to the explicitly political organizing spectrum of meaning. The experience of the rapid encounter between messenger and audience — sometimes for a fleeting moment and sometimes during a prolonged period of staring — constitutes a significant component in the intertextual encounter.
Participation in the encounter exemplifies a grassroots struggle articulated through myriad voices and a particularly vital process of generativity. Yet the very arena for this struggle includes a unifying potential, articulated by the single, shared road along which all travelers pass, as well as the fact that within this discordant and divergent cluster of stickers not one dared deviate from the identical biblical graphic design of the word Shalom.
One of the respondents relates the following:
I sometimes play a kind of game with myself, a sort of quiz. While I am still quite a long way behind another car, and can't yet see exactly what stickers they have, I try to guess their political orientation. For example, I go by the type of car, how many people are sitting in it, or whether there are a lot of children. Sometimes — and I can really get mad at myself about this — I even go according to how they are driving: if they're driving badly, I tell myself that they must have a particular political leaning. I know all these generalizations are really dangerous, but unfortunately in most cases it turns out to be true. ... All this happens at once. Sometimes I get a chance to see the face of the driver and the stickers, and check whether I was right — I mean, whether the face matches the stereotypes.
Similar comments, with numerous variations, were made throughout the interviews. They must be understood in the unique Israeli context, where the orientation of an individual as left-winger or right-winger, and their oft-related identification as secular or religious, may in many cases be inferred from aspects of physical appearance. On one level, such comments reflect a need to identify and categorize in an exegetical structure centered on the political dialectics of Left-Right and secular-religious. On another level, however, the combination of the diachronic axis of time and distance, and the competitive nature of driving in Israel — almost to the point of a struggle for survival — with the synchronic axis that seeks to cope simultaneously with information from differing and opposing directions, constitute a constantly changing popular arena for political debate.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Israel in the Making by Hagar Salamon. Copyright © 2017 Hagar Salamon. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Studying Israeli Folklore
Part One: Folklore in the Israeli Public Arena
Part One Invitation: Bumper Stickers as a Podium in Motion
1. Folklore as an Emotional Battleground: Political Bumper Stickers
2. "We the people": "Ha'Am" in the Turbulent Sphere of Israeli Roads
3. Kinetic Cosmologies: Sovereign and Sovereignty
Part One Recapitulation: Public Interaction on the Move
Part Two: Expressions in the Intimate Arena of Embroidery
Part Two Invitation: Embroidering Identity—Needlework and Needle-Talk
4. Embroidering Their Selves: Femininity and Embroidery in a Jerusalem Women's Group
5. Life Story as a Foundation Legend of Local Identity
6. The Intimate Career of a Transitional Object: Needlepoint Embroideries
Part Two Recapitulation: Needle Texts—Knowledge, Passion, and Empowerment
Part Three: Between the Public and the Private—The Mirrors of Ambivalence
Part Three Invitation: Emplacing Israeliness—Shifting Performances of Belonging and Otherness
7. The Floor Falling Away: Dislocated Space and Body in the Humor of Ethiopian Immigrants in Israel
8. What Goes Around, Comes Around: Rotating Credit Associations among Ethiopian Women in Israel
9. "David Levi" Jokes: The Ambivalence over the Levantinization of Israel
Part Three Recapitulation: Between Longing and Belonging—The Folkloric Expressions of Ambivalence
Closing Words: The Birth of Public Enunciation from the Spirit of Everyday Life
Bibliography
Index