Re-Orientalizing the Jew Zionist and Contemporary Israeli Masculinities

Yaron PelegRe-Orientalizing the JewZionist and Contemporary Israeli Masculinities

New Models, Old PatternsIn 2012, the young Israeli film director, Meny Ya’ish, made an extraordinary film called God’s Neighbors.

Fig. 1: Jewish Power: Avi (Ro’ee Assaf) in Meny Ya’ish’s God’s Neighbors (Israel, 2012).

Focusing on a violent gang of three Mizrahi men, new converts to the Breslov Hasidic sect,1 the film follows their attempts to impose the religious laws of their

1 Breslov is a branch of Hasidic Judaism founded by Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810) a great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. Like many Hasidic sects, members of the Breslov branch emphasize intense, joyous relationship with God. Despite a lack of central leadership, Breslovers, as their members are called, are very visible in Israel and in various Jew-ish communities abroad where they make public efforts to recruit Jews to their movement, usu-ally by playing loud music and fervently dancing in the streets.

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Re-Orientalizing the Jew 177

strengthened faith on members of their working class, urban neighborhood of Bat-Yam, near Tel-Aviv. Having been members of a criminal gang before, there is not much difference between their violence then and now, except that it is now sanctioned by religion. Yaniv (Itzik Golan) and Koby (Gal Friedman), led by Avi (Ro’ee Assaf), beat up drunks who disrespect the Sabbath, threaten local busi-nesses to keep the Sabbath as well, force neighborhood women to dress more modestly, and fight a rival Arab gang. The only force that finally stops them is love. When Avi falls in love with a young woman who moves into the neighbor-hood, he mends his ways somewhat and calms down, making his two friends follow him too.

God’s Neighbors is extraordinary not only because it is a very well made film. It is remarkable also for its construction, or reflection, of a contemporary Jewish Israeli masculinity that is informed by the past even as it defies and negates it. That Avi is what is commonly referred to as a “manly man“ or macho-man is very clear from his rugged, good looks, his rough working class occupation (he is a grocer), his cultivation of boxing as a sport, his broad, forthright mannerisms, the exclusive male companionship he keeps, and his aggression and violence. These traits mark Avi, as well as his two mates, not only as “manly men,” but espe-cially as Mizrahi men, Israeli Jews whose family background is non-European. Their Mizrahi identity does not only come from those associations, as well as from their darker complexion and the lower socio-economic Hebrew they speak,2 but especially from their religiosity, which usually marks Mizrahim in Israel.3 I want to juxtapose the masculinity of Avi and his mates in this chapter with some of the earlier models of Jewish masculinity, models that were developed by early Zionism under the New Hebraism imprimatur, with a particular focus on anti-semitism, effeminacy and orientalism, in order to describe some of the changes that these models underwent with the passage of time. I will also try to show how men like Avi represent a contemporary kind of Israeli masculinity that in many ways defies earlier Jewish masculine models and in some ways even inverts them. While Avi is decidedly a manly, daring, aggressive, and even violent Jew – all traits cultivated by New Hebraism, he is also oriental, that is, Arab-like, and religious – traits which were not favored by the early New Hebrew manly model, as I explain below.

2 On this fascinating linguistic phenomenon, see Henshke, “On the Mizraḥi Sociolect in Israel: A Sociolexical Consideration of the Hebrew of Israelis of North African Origin,” 2013, 207–227. 3 See my article on this film, Peleg, “Marking a New Holy Community: God’s Neighbors and the Ascendancy of a New Religious Hegemony in Israel,” 2013, 64–86.



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The Modern Discourse on Jewish Sexuality, Effeminacy, and OrientalismThe construction of a new Jewish masculinity by Zionism in the early part of the twentieth century is a well-established cultural phenomenon which has been explored fairly widely in the last few decades.

Fig. 2: Cover of the literary periodical Hakeshet, Vol. 1.2, 1903, issued in Berlin.

The studies of Daniel Boyarin from the 1990s, and the debates they engendered, make up some of the most interesting literature on the subject.4 Boyarin’s chief innovation has been his critique of New Hebraism, which for most of the twentieth century has been regarded in Zionist historiography as one of the most significant and revolutionary aspects of the movement and its ideology.5 Motivated by the deconstructive spirit of postmodernism and influenced by some of the excesses of Israeli military politics toward the end of the 1980s, especially in response to the first Intifada in 1987, Boyarin’s critique and that of others focused on the aggressive aspect of New Hebraism.6 As is well known, when they first developed

4 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997. 5 On the invention of the New Hebrew, see Almog, The Sabra, 2000. 6 On the impact of the Intifada on Israeli culture, see Peleg, Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas, 2008, as well as Taub, Hamered Hashafuf, 1997.




toward the end of the nineteenth century, ideas about a new Jewish masculinity, later known as New Hebraism, were part of an internal Jewish critique of negative images of Jews in the European national imagination.7 Two of the most negative traits that were associated with Jews at the time, and which later figured in the construction of a new Jewish masculinity, were effeminacy and orientalism.8 The new Jewish masculine model that was advocated by Max Nordau and others was deeply informed by these aspects, which later on, as the Jewish society grew and expanded in Palestine after the 1930s, determined the profile of the New Hebrew Man as well.

Effeminacy and orientalism were related, of course, since during the colonial era Eastern cultures were regarded as more effeminate in comparison to Western cultures. Both the economic and eventually also the political subjugation of coun-tries in the Near and Far East, as well as the different gender roles within those cul-tures, made them appear more effeminate in Western eyes.9 Boyarin’s critique was probably written as a response to the mutation of these aspects in Israeli manhood later on, especially after 1967.10 By reconstructing a gentler, more effeminate Jewish-ness from Roman times onward, which supposedly (still) existed in Eastern Europe in the pre-Zionist era, Boyarin set up a counter model to the Zionist one. Using the alleged failure of the latter as epitomized by Israel’s increasingly harsh treat-ment of the Palestinians after 1967, Boyarin elevates the “losing” model of Jewish masculinity, faint remnants of which found their way to the United States with the Jewish immigration there, while the rest of it disappeared forever in the Holocaust, “I start,” he says in his preface to Unheroic Conduct,

7 See Mosse, Confronting the Nation, 1993, pp. 161–175; Zimmermann, “Muscle Jews versus Ner-vous Jews,” 2006, pp. 13–26; Reuveni, “Sports and the Militarization of Jewish Society,” 2006, pp. 44–61. 8 The two were conflated in the antisemitic imagination, which regarded Jews as both oriental and effeminate in comparison to Western, European social models, even before the imperial era with its own associations between orientalism and effeminacy. See the introduction to my study on the subject, Peleg, Orientalism, 2005.9 See Peleg, Orientalism, 2005, especially the introduction and chapter 1. 10 I am making a conjecture here based on the time of Boyarin’s critique, on its academic con-text, and the responses it engendered in the years that passed since then. Boyarin published his alternative Jewish masculine model during the 1990s, when the critical pendulum swung against Israel in its conflict with the Arabs, in Israel and abroad. Several post-Zionist critics in the 1990s, who were critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and lambasted the abuse of its power, cited Boyarin as an influence. For representative examples of such critique, see the journal Te’oria uvikoret 20 (Spring 2002), as well as Azoulay and Ophir, “100 Years of Zionism, 50 Years of Jewish State,” 1998, 68.



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with what I think is a widespread sensibility that being Jewish in our culture renders a boy effeminate. Rather than producing in me a desire to ‘pass’ and to become a ‘man’, this sensi-bility resulted in my desire to remain a Jew, where being a sissy was all right. To be sure, this meant being marginal, and it has left me with a persistent sense of being on the outside of something... but the cultural and communal place that a sissy occupied in my social world was not one that enforced rage and self-contempt. […] I want to use the sissy, the Jewish male femme as a location and a critical practice.11

In doing so, Boyarin also made use of the victimhood discourse that is part of postmodernism to elevate the status of passive Jewish masculinity, which until then was regarded as having lost to the Zionist model in the historical battle for cultural survival.12 It is impossible to say, whether Boyarin would have developed such a model had Zionism failed. What is certain is that the establishment of the State of Israel as well as its survival and success are due in large part to the endur-ance of New Hebraism, irrespective of its eventual metamorphosis.

As mentioned before, in order to grapple with their negative portrayal as effeminate and oriental, European Jews responded by calling for the cultivation of traits that would correct these so-called aberrations and make Jewish society correspond more closely to contemporary national models.13 Both critiques ema-nated from cultural trends that developed in Europe at the time, which involved the gendering of the middle classes and the forging of distinct national commu-nities out of the gendered bourgeoisie.14 Gendering involved the socialization, really, of the growing middle classes according to clearer and more distinct pat-terns that were based on the nuclear family. A novel idea at the time, the nuclear family became the foundation stone of a better defined and stable society which was also easier to govern and control. The division of society into distinct mas-culine and feminine realms served to create the nuclear family as a stable social unit, where men as husbands and fathers would be responsible for the family’s external affairs, including providing for and protecting the family; the women as wives and mothers would manage the family’s internal affairs, including raising and educating the children in the spirit of the new, middle class national com-

11 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, pp. xiii–xiv.12 By the so-called victimhood discourse I am referring to the rise of the concept of “Other,” or Subaltern, which figured prominently in the 1990s as part of the more general postmodern discourse, where it was used to undermine regnant or hegemonic discourses. Alain Finkielkraut writes evocatively about the Jewish aspect of it and from a very personal perspective in his, The Imaginary Jew, 1980.13 See Mosse, Confronting the Nation, 1993, as well as Brenner and Reuveni, Emancipation through Muscles, 2006. 14 For a lucid description of this fascinating process, see Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fic-tion, 1987.




munity. Later, as that spirit developed it was often defined negatively against non-European cultures which provided a useful contrast, allowing Europeans to extend their advancement in technology to the social, cultural, and finally also to the mental, spiritual, and moral realms. Finally, at the height of the imperial era, most if not all countries outside of Europe, certainly countries under the eco-nomic and political control of its colonial powers, where deemed inferior in some fashion in comparison to Europe.15

For various reasons, religious, cultural, and historical, Jews did not easily fit into these parameters or models. Firstly, a stable nuclear family as the basis of a “national” community was an old and integral component of Jewish communal organization since late antiquity, made necessary, among other things, by the precariousness of life as a minority.16 And while this could have recommended them to the new European national-social order, the gender divisions within the Jewish nuclear family did not correspond neatly to general, patriarchal European ones. While Boyarin exaggerates the agency and status women were given in traditional Jewish communities, the precedence given to religious study in those communities created a cultural ideal which, at least in principle, kept men study-ing indoors and women providing for the family without.17 This could have been one of the major reasons for the associations of Jewishness and effeminacy, as well, of course, as the general lack of Jewish political power and the inferior legal status of Jews in Europe and elsewhere.18

The oriental associations, while more difficult to deal with, are easier to explain, as Jews never denied their Eretz-Israeli roots, that is, their Levantine origin, to use colonial parlance, which were deeply engrained in Jewish religious practices.19 This pride of uniqueness was very useful as long as Jews maintained separate and distinct communal structures, providing a source of pride for a discriminated minority. But when a majority of Jews sought integration into the emerging national communities across Europe in the nineteenth century, the “oriental” distinction became more problematic. Zionism offered a practical solu-tion to what came to be regarded as the essentialist “otherness” of Jews in Europe by suggesting to utilize this difference constructively and calling for the establish-ment of a separate Jewish state.20 The idea of constructive difference was also

15 This is essentially Edward Said’s argument in his well-known Orientalism (1978).16 For a general overview of this, see Biale, Eros and the Jews, 1997. 17 Boyarin, “Massada or Yavneh? Gender and the Arts of Jewish Resistance,” 1997, pp. 306–329.18 See Brenner/Reuveni (eds.), Emancipation through Muscles, 2006. Circumcision may be yet another factor, as Freud pointed out, see Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, p. 232. 19 Peleg, Orientalism, 2005, pp. 1–13. 20 A well-known early modern reference to Jews as Orientals is found in Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s 1781 treatise, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Rights of the Jews, 1957, p. 1. A more



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what Theodor Herzl had in mind, except that Herzl’s Jewish nationalism involved a fairly exact reproduction of European Western liberal nationalism on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, conducted in the German language and clad in an evening suit. Zionism, as it developed on the ground, chose other ways that dealt more practically with the oriental challenge.21

But while even the more pragmatic Zionists came to Palestine in the name of the Jewish “oriental” difference, they were thinking more of the biblical asso-ciations of Jews than any real connection to the Arab Levant.22 As Europeans, they came to Palestine as harbingers of its culture, even if they meant to create their own unique version of it there. And yet the Arab culture they encountered in Palestine, especially that of the Bedouins, inspired early Zionist pioneers to adopt some of its features in their attempts to forge a New Hebrew culture from scratch. Of those features, the Bedouin culture of combat, the Bedouin dress code as well as the Arabic language, were especially attractive to Zionist pioneers, who regarded the latter two as signs of biblicism and nativeness and the former as an inspiration for their own model of a “native” Jewish manly culture. It was at this juncture that the two Jewish anxieties, the oriental and the masculine, met.23 The charge of effeminacy, while not as simple to explain as the oriental one, was easier to deal with, because “all” it required, essentially, was for Jews to create their own national society and then mold it according to bourgeois national Euro-pean gender models. The process was not simple, of course, and required a lot of so-called social engineering. Even prior to the establishment of an actual national Jewish society in the Land of Israel, sports clubs and para-military organizations were set up in Jewish communities across Europe as a way to “rehabilitate” Jews, “mend” their ways, make them “healthier” according to the then regnant national ideals.24 Initially, these frameworks were established with a view to acculturate Jews to European nationalism and pave their way into it. When, later on, a viable

problematic association is found in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903), where Jews are denigrated as both effeminate and oriental. 21 Peleg, Orientalism, 2005, pp. 1–13. 22 A number of Zionist writers, thinkers, and politicians dabbled in these ideas at the time, in-cluding the publicist and activist R. Binyamin, journalist Hemda Ben-Yehuda, as well as would-be politicians, the Ben-Tzvis and David Ben-Gurion, see Peleg, Orientalism, 2005, pp. 34–35. 23 See, for example, the opening to my book, Orientalism, where I describe an enthusiastic reception Theodor Herzl met with on his arrival at one of the Jewish agricultural settlements, moshavot, he visited on his Palestinian trip in 1898. A bunch of young men from the moshava jumped on horses and galloped toward Herzl’s carriage, showing off some of the local Bedouin riding customs they adopted. Herzl was greatly impressed and later recorded the event in his diary, commenting on the metamorphosis of Eastern European Jewish peddlers into bold Jewish “cowboys.” Peleg, Orientalism, 2005, pp. 1–3. 24 See Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997.




Jewish community developed in Palestine, these traits were more naturally incor-porated into it as part of the natural life of the nation on its ancestral soil.25 Pal-estinian Bedouin culture had an important acculturating effect on this process early on by setting up an attractive model for Zionist pioneers that combined oriental biblicism and the spirit of combat. In a seminal essay about the Zionist immigration model, Itamar Even-Zohar sets it up as a unique model against that of the cultural export and cultural absorption models.26 The Zionist pioneers did not wish to export their Eastern European Jewish culture and reproduce it in Palestine because they rejected it. Neither did they consider the Arab culture of Ottoman Palestine as an example for emulation. However, in their attempts to create their own new Jewish culture, elements from the local Bedouin culture did initially inspire them to some extent, as I noted above.27

The direct influence of Bedouin culture did not last long after the new Jewish community in Palestine grew to a size that was sufficiently large to antagonize local Arabs and instigate what later came to be known as the Arab-Israeli Con-flict. The more the national character of the Yishuv developed, the more local Arabs began to occupy a similar role to that of the Jews in national Europe, an “Other” against which the emerging Hebrew community defined itself – Hebrew, not Jewish anymore.28 At the same time, anxiety over orientalism and effemi-nacy remained enduring aspects of New Hebraism. An often mentioned liter-ary instance of it occurs in Amos Oz’s first novel, My Michael (1968), when the heroine, Hannah Gonen, fantasizes about being raped by two Arab twins with a mixture of anxiety and titillation:

Two men appeared and carried me off in their arms. They were hidden in their flowing robes. Only their eyes showed, glinting. Their grasp was rough and painful... I was pushed down a long flight of stairs into a cellar lit by a dirty paraffin lamp... I was thrown to the ground […] Suddenly the twins threw off their robes […] They were dark and lithe. A pair of strong gray wolves... I was dumb. A darkness washed over me. The darkness wanted Michael [her husband] to come rescue me only at the end of the pain and the pleasure.29

25 See Almog, The Sabra, 2000. 26 Even-Zohar, “The Emergence of Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1884–1948,” 1981, 167–184. 27 See note 23.28 See Hillel Cohen’s book on the emergence and development of these tensions and rivalry, Tar-pat, shnat ha’efesh basichsuch hayehudi-Aravi [1929, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict], 2013.29 See Oz, My Michael [1968], 1972, pp. 46–47.



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From Jewish to Israeli MasculinityIn looking at the continued development of Israeli masculinity and its metamor-phosis over the years, both of these anxieties remain important factors; important also for understanding Avi’s image in a film such as God’s Neighbors, that was made almost a century after this process began. I would like to suggest that the image of Avi is constructed as a response not only to the origins of Hebrew/Israeli masculinity, but also to the various ways it evolved since its emergence during the Yishuv period and in the way it was burnished in the War of Independence.

The successful outcome of the 1948 war as the first trial of Israeli manhood helped to establish it more securely, rooted it in the culture, disseminated it and began to mythologize it as well.30 But it was no doubt Israel’s next big war, the 1967 war with its spectacular military victory, which contributed more than any other single event to fix that image in the public’s mind in Israel and beyond. In other words, the military, aggressive traits of the New Hebrew man, which began to be cultivated already in Europe, which migrated to Israel with the Zionist pio-neers, and which slowly developed there also as a response to the escalating con-flict with the Arabs, finally came to epitomize Israeli manhood more than any other trait. So much so, in fact, that this process of masculinization was almost a necessary stage in the evolution and legitimization of two other underprivileged Israeli communities, the Mizrahi community and the national religious or settler community, as I show below.

An integral part of that New Hebraism was a strong anti-religious sentiment that was animated by the negative associations of traditional Judaism which in their turn encouraged the cultivation of typically non-Jewish occupations in the first place.31 Boyarin calls them Goyim-naches, using the derogatory Yiddish term for games non-Jews play, such as sports and war, which from the perspective of a religiously scholastic society are all a waste of time, of course.32 Israeli masculin-ity as an expression of New Hebraism was therefore also a very secular identity, which eventually came to epitomize Zionism’s animosity toward religion. The soldier was juxtaposed with the Yeshiva student, with the first representing the

30 See Almog, The Sabra, 2000. The image was mythologized after the 1948 War of Indepen-dence in stories, songs, illustrations, etc. Poet Natan Alterman’s famous poem about that war, Magash Hakesef [The Silver Platter], epitomizes this adulation. See Dan Miron’s analysis of the poem and its reception in Miron, “Magash Hakesef,” 1992, pp. 63–87.31 See Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, 1995, pp. 269–332. 32 “Goyim Naches” is literally the name of the first chapter in his book, see Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 1997, pp. 33–80.




apogee of the Zionist revolution and the future of Jewishness and the latter repre-senting its pitiful, ebbing remnant.

The oriental associations which were cultivated earlier as part of New Hebra-ism were completely abandoned at this stage, primarily because of the escalating conflict with the Arabs and the increasingly negative associations with them as a corollary.33 When Jews from Arab and Muslim countries began arriving in Israel after 1948, they, too, suffered from similarly negative associations. They were dis-paraged for being Arab-like, that is, primitive, uneducated, coarse, uncivilized, in other words, “non-European.” As a result, a competing Mizrahi masculinity emerged in Israel as a way to deal with the absorption pangs of Mizrahim and to compensate for the emasculating immigration experience.34 The loss of control over individual, family, and community life was channeled instead into the con-struction of an alternative fantasy of control, that of the macho male. Most elabo-rately articulated in the so-called Bourekas films – ethnic comedies that were pro-duced in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s and were practically the only public outlet of Mizrahi culture at the time – the Mizrahi masculine version combined a deliber-ate exaggeration of negative masculine traits, such as bravado, machismo, male chauvinism, and sometimes violence and criminality. These so-called “arsim” (sing., ars) came to represent an oriental counter-image of the wholesome Sabra (read: Ashkenazi), a “black” “Other” to the hegemonic “white” culture.

Surprisingly perhaps, religious affiliation was part of that image as well. Since most Mizrahim arrived in Israel after its establishment and were neither revo-lutionary socialists nor anti-religious, they suffered from none of the Ashkenazi anxiety over Jewish religious practice. And while the establishment of the new state frowned upon it, Mizrahim retained their religious affiliation nevertheless. The additional benefit that accrued to them from it was that it mitigated or coun-tered their Arab associations in a Jewish state and established them as bona-fide Jews in the eyes of the absorbing Ashkenazi culture. Eventually, the hegemonic culture suffered their religiosity, which was accepted as one of the only legitimate forms of Israeli Judaism until the rise of the settler movement and the growth and acculturation of the Israeli orthodox community from the 1980s onward.35 The emergence or cultivation of an exaggerated Mizrahi masculinity should also be seen in another context – the decline of the image of the heroic New Hebrew as exemplified by the Sabra after the establishment of the State and especially the transition into a more normal, national existence. As the old, Ashkenazi, Zionist, pioneering masculinity waned between 1960 and 1980 a new Mizrahi masculin-

33 Peleg, “From Black to White, Changing Images of Mizrahim in Israeli Cinema,” 2008, 122–145. 34 Peleg, “From Black to White,” 2008, pp. 126–141. 35 Peleg, “Marking a New Holy Community,” 2008, pp. 68–69.



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ity challenged it.36 It is worth noting, how both exhibited surprisingly similar patterns of development in which an image that is first formed as a response to adversity – antisemitism in the New Hebraic case and anti-Arabism in the Mizrahi case – eventually shapes culture and then history in a much more tangible sense.

The rise of the settler movement in the 1980s changed this dynamic again and was yet another stage in the development of Israeli masculinity. The settlers saw themselves as inheritors of the early Zionist pioneers, with one exception.37 They replaced the virulent anti-religiosity of the New Hebrews with messianism. But as mentioned above, New Hebraism had evolved by then, shedding its former farming associations and retaining mostly its military, aggressive aspects, epito-mized by the image of the soldier. Thus, the new combination articulated by the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was a combustible concoction of reli-gious fervor and military aggression which came to represent the next stage in the development of masculinity in Israel. For more than twenty years, from the 1980s to the 2000s and beyond, the most visible strand of masculinity in Israel was that which the settlers exhibited. From the perspective of the original they claimed to inherit, that was of course a gross distortion. Unlike the Zionist pioneers, the settlers by and large did not work the land, they simply built on it and populated it. Neither did they defend the country from its enemies but arguably jeopardized its security by antagonizing Palestinians and perpetuating the conflict with the Arabs. In other words, the settlers betrayed original Zionism twice, first by aban-doning its secularity, and second by exposing it to danger rather than defending it. It is precisely against these excesses that Boyarin suggested his alternative, more benign model of Jewish masculinity.

As we shall presently see, the character of Avi in God’s Neighbors is the next, contemporary stage in the evolution of Israeli masculinity, because during the twenty or so years of settler reign, Mizrahi masculinity as a cultural idiom was relatively inconspicuous. Having forged their identity during the heady times after Likkud’s rise to power in 1977, Mizrahim began to be slowly incorporated into Israeli culture as part of a natural absorption process.38 As a result, some of the more radical expressions of Mizrahi masculinity as epitomized by the Israeli Black Panther movement, for instance, eventually lost steam, mitigated by

36 Peleg, “Marking a New Holy Community,” 2008, pp. 131–134. 37 On the ideological origins of the settler movement, see Aran, Kookism, 2013. 38 The degree of integration is a controversial issue in Israel. Mizrahim have certainly made inroads into the country’s politics, as evidenced by the popular SHAS party, for instance, as well as into its culture, as evidenced by the legitimacy and popularity of Mizrahi music, for instance. For a critical view of Mizrahi integration, see Shemer, Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contem-porary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel, 2013. On the advent of Mizrahi music, see Regev and Serousi’s, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel, 2004.




acceptance and cultural inclusion.39 An important exception to this process was the development of a distinct Mizrahi orthodoxy, represented from the mid-1980s onward by the rapidly expanding SHAS movement. Modeled after Ashkenazi Hasidism, the SHAS phenomenon was an attempt by the religious authorities of the Sephardi/Mizrahi community in Israel to confront the religious crisis brought on by immigration as well as the continued discrimination of Mizrahim in Israel.40 Promising to restore the old Sephardi glory (ליושנה עטרה SHAS offered a ,(להשיב closely-knit communal support system that bypassed the state even as it used state money to do so. It also developed a curious hybrid model of masculinity, which offered former “arsim” a way back to a better or more fully integrated citi-zenship in the Jewish nation-state by becoming orthodox but remaining Mizra-him at the same time. For Shasniks, as they are called, are in fact “black” Hasidim, a native Israeli Mizrahi version of an originally Eastern European Ashkenazi phe-nomenon that underwent a unique development in Israel after the Holocaust.

But if the original “ars” was politically identified with the Right in Israel, most often Likkud, Shasniks were initially unaffiliated politically. Their main agenda was cultural and economic, to help Mizrahim get a bigger portion of the national pie. It was only later, when they grew substantially and SHAS became a major political player from the early 1990s on that they threw their lot more often with the Likkud, motivated by the political affinity of a majority of their voters as well as by political expediency. Compared to the settlers, however, who were intensely political and shrewdly used politics for gains that far exceeded their electoral power, the power of SHAS came first and foremost from its popularity, a popularity that was augmented by the movement’s vague, or “opportunistic” political affiliation.

The 1990s, then, saw two major and very different models of Israeli masculin-ity. The first model was the one offered by the settlers, a mutated model of New Hebraism, whose two main features now were aggression and religious fervor. Or phrased historically, the allegedly timid and cowardly Jew of yore, who recre-ated himself in Palestine as a forthright and brave Hebrew, was now a religious “soldier” for the causes of his state. The second model was that offered by SHAS, a mutated model of the “ars,” whose main feature was a return to faith comple-

39 The picture is more complex than this. For more on this, see Smooha, “Jewish Ethnicity in Israel: Symbolic or Real?,” 2004, pp. 47–80. See also, Shemer, Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel, 2013. The book looks primarily at Israeli cinema but has useful socio-historical insights on Mizrahim in Israel. 40 See Peled, “Aryeh Sha’ag, Mi Loh Yirah?: SHAS Vehama’avak al Hayisre’eliyut” [SHAS and the Struggle for Israeli Identity], 2002, pp. 272–287, as well as Leon, “Dat Vechiloniyut” [Religion and Secularity], 2006, pp. 63–87.



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mented by a retreat from national politics. Speaking historically again, the orien-tal “Otherness” of the non-Ashkenazi Jew was toned downed and “Jewified” by clothing it in Ashkenazi garb and “defanging” it politically, as is demonstrated in the image of Avi in God’s Neighbors.

The Continued Evolution of Jewish-Israeli MasculinityOne of the most interesting aspects of the film God’s Neighbors for this discussion is its display of yet another stage in this gender evolution that combines or binds masculinity and Jewishness in a more positive way that leaves out militarism.

Fig. 3: The new “muscular Jew”: athletic, muscular AND religious. Ro’ee Assaf as Avi in Meny Ya’ish’s film, God’s Neighbors (2012).

The director, Meny Ya’ish, replaces the kind of problematic Ashkenazi mascu-linity as epitomized by the settlers with a more benign and “genuine” Mizrahi masculinity that lacks overt nationalistic characteristics. Avi, the intense hero of God’s Neighbors, is a simple guy, an unsophisticated street thug, who relates to the God he recently found as a kind of gang leader, whose command(ment)s must be loyally obeyed. At the same time, his religious beliefs do not seem to inform his political opinions or stand in the way of his natural physical urges. As opposed to Pini, for example, a young Yeshiva student and a settler in the religious action-




adventure film, Time of Favor (dir. Joseph Cedar, 2000), who plots an anti-Muslim terrorist attack after he is spurned by the girl he loves, when the girl Avi fancies rebuffs him in God’s Neighbors, he simply woos her, like the “real” man he is, until she accepts him.

I would like to suggest that this seemingly superficial analogy nevertheless exemplifies the differences between the two masculinities and their relation-ship to Zionism. Against the fraught Israeli Ashkenazi masculinity, forged in the crucible of European antisemitism, changed by the country’s prolonged state of emergency into overt military machismo and finally mutated into the settlers’ evil super-Jew, the Mizrahi masculinities in Ya’ish’s film seem uncomplicated and benign by comparison. As former street gang members, with their menacing looks, masculine bravado, and adolescent group behavior, Avi and his friends may play homage to the stereotype of Mizrahi men as criminals. At the same time, their religious affiliation tames them. But this is not anymore the Mizrahi tra-ditionalism of previous decades. In order to break out of this mold, Avi and his friends adopt a form of ostensibly Ashkenazi religiosity – Hasidism.

In some ways, the three former gang members have simply changed one gang for another. Instead of a group of thugs who deal drugs and collect protection money, they attend Torah study and then go out and impose on their neighbors the Jewish laws they learn. The film’s opening scene is a chilling demonstration of their ruthless vigilantism, an example of their personal interpretation of God’s laws.

The film begins on a peaceful Friday evening with Avi, a rough-looking but attractive young man, who performs the ritual of Kiddush, or sanctification of the wine, that ushers in the Jewish Sabbath. When he is done eating alone with his father, Avi retires to his room to study scripture, basking in the sweetness of the Torah and relishing the peace and quiet of the holy day after a long week of hard work. But his blessed reverie is soon interrupted by loud music that comes from the street below. Looking down, he sees a group of young Russians drink-ing and making merry in the yard to the sound of booming music. Faint cries by neighbors in surrounding flats to keep the music down in honor of the Sabbath are rebuffed vulgarly and dismissively by the carousing Russians. This incenses God’s first neighbor, Avi, who calls on God’s two other neighbors, his friends Koby and Yaniv, to help him drive the Russians out. What follows is probably one of the most articulated action scenes in Israeli cinema to date, a rapid action sequence, in the course of which the Russians are violently beaten and forced to leave, bleeding and humiliated, to the sound of cheering neighbors.

This jihadist mode repeats itself several times in the film, as they break the bones of a porn CD seller, shut down a local hairdresser who stays open after sundown on the Sabbath, and bully a young woman to dress more modestly.



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But their religious affiliation also holds the promise of amelioration and, even-tually, the laws they purport to uphold indeed tame them. Essentially, Avi and his friends are in a religious group therapy. They are pretty wild at the begin-ning of the film, but by the end of it, Avi certainly improves and mends his ways somewhat. He avoids killing a rival Arab gang member during a vendetta, and gets together with his girl at the end, disbanding in effect the piety patrol he ran throughout the film.

Comparatively speaking, then, Judaism seems to have different effects on these two different masculinities, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. Or put another way, the two kinds of masculinities interpret and incorporate Judaism in different ways. Whereas in the case of the settlers, religion seems to bring out the mean-ness and aggression that was inherent in the [Ashkenazi] New Hebrew, religion seems to contain and tame the aggression inherent in the stereotypical Mizrahi “criminal” masculinity. At the end, Jewish religion becomes the most identifying characteristic of these three young men, which defines them as Israelis. This is not an identity created as a reaction to a negative impetus in the way Zionism’s New Hebraism was a reaction to antisemitism, and the settlers’ neo-Hebraism or neo-Zionism was a reaction to a crisis of faith.41 Rather, it is an identity that combines a subjective or personal particularity (Mizrahi) with a bigger communal identity (Jewish and national). That it is Hasidism, a specific Ashkenazi kind of Judaism, that forms the basis for this identity, is all the more important, for it may suggest a genuine hybrid form of Israeli Judaism, one that is not divided by ethnic or sectarian differences anymore. By joining a Hasidic sect, Avi and his Mizrahi mates transcend the narrower definitions that always stood in the way of true integration. Their ascendancy in the film may perhaps also mark the final death of mamlachtiyut, or statism, and its discourse of ethnicity, which religion seems to have usurped as a national organizing principle.42

In fact, the film distances itself also from the kind of Mizrahi antagonism that animates sectarian parties like SHAS, in that it does not set up a state apparatus against which the characters in the film rail, as was usually the case before, in the 1970s and 1980s. In the absence of a “gripe,” then, it is difficult to see them as fighting or reacting against an alleged discrimination. Their religiosity is per-ceived in the film as an attempt to fill the void of a grand, national narrative,

41 The term “neo” is not used in the discourse. I use it here in the sense of “revived,” “modi-fied,” following its sense in “Neoconservative.” 42 Mamlachtiyut or Statism is the Israeli version of what George Mosse called the “civic religion of nationalism” and which was defined and promoted by Israel’s first prime-minister, David Ben-Gurion, in an attempt to forge a distinct civic culture in Israel during the first decades of state-hood, see Mosse, Confronting the Nation, 1993, pp. 121–130.




which seems to have disappeared by the 2000s.43 The entire ethnic infrastructure of yore is discarded in this film, as we see in one of the most amusing scenes in the film: Avi and his gang-mate, Koby, discuss inter-Mizrahi ethnic supremacy while playing backgammon one evening. Naming pop culture Mizrahi celebrities, they compete for the most accomplished ethnic minority. This is a farcical scene, of course, that makes light of the very premise and dismisses it through humor, and significantly, too, by centering it on a backgammon game in an outside cafe. Playing backgammon has epitomized Mizrahi slothfulness since the early 1960s: grown men idling away hours of each day in a cafe playing games instead of working and feeding their families.44 The film amplifies these associations only to toss them aside as amusing references to a bygone past that no longer dictates either image or reality.45 To the extent that it is consciously retained in the film, Mizrahi identity is constructively folded into Avi’s image as a roman-tic hero. Moreover, Avi’s obvious sexuality is not problematized anymore, as the sexual nature of Mizrahim was in the past.46 The problematic Mizrahi sexuality (oversexed, promiscuous, vulgar) has now turned into sexiness, which is some-thing completely different. This is precisely the shift suggested by the film. In the forty years that have elapsed since the 1970s, attitudes toward sex and sexuality have undergone big changes. This is especially true for businesses like the film industry, which relies on the sexiness of stars and cultivates a celebrity culture to maximize profits. Avi’s oozing sexual appeal is no longer a stumbling block on the way to acceptance, as it was regarded in an earlier and different Israel. It has now become a pronounced aspect of his personality, and his beautiful physique is deliberately put on display in the film. Thus, toward the end of it, we see him

43 The film was very well received in Israel and attracted a lot of chatter, in the daily press as well as the blogosphere. Many of the reviews referred precisely to this point, to the ultimately positive role of religion to control, tame, appease, and fulfill. Although they do not say so ex-plicitly, I would like to suggest that such assessments flag the absence of responsible or more meaningful national frameworks. For a selection, see, Anderman, “Extreme violence in the ser-vice of God: Coming soon to a theater near you,” Ha’aretz, June 9, 2012, http://www.haaretz.com/culture/arts-leisure/extreme-violence-in-the-service-of-god-coming-soon-to-a-theater-near-you-1.449802; Hochner, “Hamashgichim – tsa’ir ve’achshavi” [God’s Neighbors – Young and Contemporary], Seret.co.il Portal, November 13, 2013 http://www.seret.co.il/critics/moviere-views.asp?id=1184; Raveh, “Hamashgichim, bikoret” [God’s Neighbors, A Critique], Sinemaskop, July 13, 2012, http://cinemascope.co.il/archives/10327.44 This happens in the seminal film Sallah Shabati (dir. Ephraim Kishon, 1964). 45 Avi is portrayed as a hardworking man who runs a fresh produce stand together with his father. References to the work of other members of the gang are not made. 46 Raz Yosef dedicates considerable space to what he defines as the sexualization of Mizrahim in many bourekas films, to their portrayal as essentially invigorating mates to listless Ashkenazi women, see Yosef, Beyond Flesh, 2004, 84–117.



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actually taking his clothes off, stepping naked into the sea after praying to God for guidance. Avi and his pronounced working class (i.e. Mizrahi) features are exposed to viewers in all their glorious authenticity, muscles, scars, tattoos, and all. Except – and this is an important difference – they are connected here not only to the Zionist culture of the body as it was inherited from European youth movements, but also to a Jewish ritual, that of purifying oneself by dipping in a Mikve, a ritual bath.47

God’s Neighbors also makes a political statement by staying out of politics, by stripping Avi and his vigilante-mates of any overt political affiliation, despite the combustible potential for it. Toward the end of the film, two of Avi’s mates summon him to join them in a vendetta against Arabs from a rival gang. Getting all worked up, they pack weapons, get into a car, and speed away to Jaffa. When they spot members of the Arab gang on one of the streets, they hurl a Molotov cocktail at them, and then jump out of the car with drawn guns, ready to kill. But this is where the story suddenly takes an unexpected turn. Trembling with rage and pointing a gun at one of the Arabs, who is lying down, expecting his life to end any second, Avi deliberately misses and shoots at the ground next to him. He has chosen not to kill his enemy, despite the eager calls from his surrounding gang members to do so, to go ahead and pull the trigger.

Avi’s motivation is not immediately clear because he has been portrayed as hot-headed and violent up to that point. One of the most obvious explanations for the change in his behavior, which is the last in a series of gradual changes, is his strengthening relationship with his girlfriend, Miri. This is, again, a generic cliché: the girl as a mitigating factor, a beast charmer after the manner of Delilah. Avi’s burgeoning romance is certainly a softening factor. But it is only part of the picture. A bigger part of it, and certainly narratively more significant, is the little space given to the rivalry between Arabs and Jews in the story. Already before we get to this point in the plot, the Chekhovian gun, so to speak, looms intermittently and ominously in the shape of a car full of defiant Arab gang members. Driving occasionally by the kiosk where Avi and his mates hang out and play backgam-mon, the Arabs slow down and crank up the volume of their ethnic music, which spills onto the street, and look provocatively at the Jews. This annoys Koby at one point, who begs Avi to go after the bastards and get them and their “ugly music.” But Avi is not interested, dismissing both the Arabs and Koby’s childish antics.

47 On the connections between early Zionism and contemporaneous European youth move-ments, such as the Wandervogel, see an illuminating article about male bonding and Zionist pioneering by Kafkafi, “Misublimatzia shel hanashiyut lesublimatzia shel ha’imahut: shlabim beyachaso shel hashomer hatza’ir lenashim” [The Attitude of the Shomer Hatza’ir Youth Move-ment to Feminism], 2001, pp. 306–349.




Coming, as it does in the story, before the clash with the Arabs, this scene prepares us perhaps for the subsequent twist that occurs when the proverbial gun is finally used. Cinematic gang conventions appear to lead us toward yet another articulation of the seemingly endless Middle Eastern conflict, as portrayed in countless Israeli films. Yet with a heroic gesture, taken from the conventions of another genre, as we shall presently see, Avi passes his “trial,” curbs his urge to kill, and by doing so terminates the cycle of violence.

Given the dramatic makeup of the story, Avi’s abstention should not really be surprising. Since the Arabs do not figure in the drama significantly, it would make little sense for him to kill one of them now and upset the story’s narrative balance. The fact is that the story has marginalized the Arab presence to such an extent that it constitutes a minor and insignificant part of it. Does the minor role of Arabs in the film point to the ascendancy of a new Jewish religious ethos over the older Zionist one? Perhaps Avi’s refusal to participate in the gang war, and symbolically the bigger Middle Eastern conflict, represents a disengagement of sorts from the Israeli here and now, an attempt to suspend “Zionist” historical time and return, at least partly or temporarily, to Jewish religious time. Does God’s Neighbors suggest a new religious national ethos, in which national politics lose some of their centrality, making more space for the politics of religion instead?

This claim is powerfully made already in the opening scene of the film, men-tioned earlier. The fight with the Russians, who represent aggressive secularism and a disconnection from Israel, stages an Israeli show of force, during which the invading and polluting outsiders are repelled from the midst of the “holy” com-munity. The Russians exhibit aggressively un-Israeli behavior, as Friday evenings are among the most peaceful times on the Israeli calendar, when many Israeli Jews get together with their families and eat a festive meal. Public drinking of alcohol is also a rarity in Israel, or at least was so until fairly recently. Speaking Russian loudly, drinking alcohol in public, and especially disrespecting the eve of Sabbath all paint the Russians as foreign and alien to the Israeli space. Avi’s fight against them and their defeat are readily perceived, therefore, as a triumph not necessarily of a religious agenda but of a civic Israeli one.

Despite being religious, Avi is fully integrated into the community and his religiosity is not regarded as an obstacle to social integration as it is often the case with the Orthodox in Israel, as can be seen in such recent films as Ushpizing (dir. Gidi Dar, 2004) and Fill the Void (dir. Rama Burstein, 2012), to name a few recent ones. If anything, and especially after the terrific violence he displays in the opening scene, religiosity is seen as calming and therapeutic. His religious schooling provides a positive framework that curbs his violent tendencies and harnesses his negative energy. Better a Hasid, as it were, than a gangster. Moreo-ver, Avi’s Hasidic affiliation also gives him a leadership role. Since the working-



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class Mizrahi community he lives in is already traditional, studying Torah elevates him and adds a value to him that he formerly lacked. Toughened and sexualized by a Mizrahi masculinity, and ennobled by the study of Torah, Avi is not simply a leader but also a Jewish leader.

This is another reason why it is not only his love for his girl Miri that tames the shrewish Avi but religion as well. The local neighborhood beauty would probably not have considered the menacing gangster as a lover had his religious observance not evoked in her a gentle nostalgia for her own traditional upbring-ing, as she confesses to him one night when the two sit and coo lovingly on a park bench. So in spite of her unpleasant encounter with him at the beginning of the film, when he exhorts her to dress more modestly, religion is also what brings them together. At the end Miri too becomes enthralled by religion, and she finds a respite from her troubled life in its comforting bosom.

Finally, then, the Hasidic or naïve narrative elements in God’s Neighbors become a story for and of the nation at large, not just a simple tale about the faith of one righteous couple in a small and exotic religious community. The trials Avi is put to, his clash with the Arabs, and his happy union with Miri at the end make up the naïve elements of the tale as well as the modern love story. Gener-ally speaking, such narrative features are unusual for Israeli cinema, where most ethno-national clashes end badly, and where happy endings are an even greater rarity. God’s Neighbors flouts this pattern and breaks it, and in so doing proposes a different national pattern, one in which Jewish religious time and Jewish reli-gious practices figure more prominently as determining factors than political reality.

These new parameters are elegantly suggested in the film, whose closure neatly complements its opening. Whereas the film opens with the ritual of Kiddush, the sanctification of the wine that ushers in the Sabbath, it ends with the ritual of Havdala, which announces the end of the Sabbath and the beginning of the new work week. The opening scene “sanctified” Avi and anointed him as a kind of local Jeanne d’Arc, who goes out to fight for god and country. The con-cluding scene shows that he has matured and learned to differentiate – to liter-ally make a havdala, which means separation in Hebrew. Both scenes take place around the Sabbath table. In the opening scene, Avi and his father dine alone. In the concluding scene, Miri has joined them as Avi’s bride-to-be. This neat and happy ending is a reward for Avi’s good behavior and a fulfillment of his quest for meaning and purpose. That it is the Jewish religion and not the Israeli state that provides both is certainly ironic. And whether it is a wish or a warning remains an open question until the very end.



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Re-Orientalizing the Jew Zionist and Contemporary Israeli Masculinities