Labor in Israeli culture

Abstract

This issue seeks to bring into focus a perspective not often considered in the study of Israel: that of labor and class. The post-Zionist turn of the late 1980s saw the rise of critiques of Israeli national ideology and modes of inquiry that adhered to its precepts. The critique of national ideology was accompanied by growing scholarly interest in perspectives that were until then marginalized – centrally, the Palestinian one. Yet the perspective of labor and class did not fare well in this transformation, as a result of the prevalence of class discourse in early Zionism. Some scholars maintain that socialist aspirations were systematically made secondary to those of nation-building; or that class discourse was deployed simply to serve the ends of the national project. Thus, the perspective of labor has come to occupy an ambivalent place in the postZionist transformation. Perhaps for this reason, studies that did put front and center the perspective of labor by itself – such as Tamar Gozansky’s Hitpathut ha-kapitalism befalestina or Amir Ben Porat’s The State and Capitalism in Israel – received comparatively less attention, even when they share the critique of Israeli national ideology. In comparison, post-Zionist works for which labor considerations are means toward demonstrating a different form of marginalization, as in Gershon Shafir’s work on exclusionary earlyZionist labor practices, occupied the center of academic discussion. The perspective of labor by itself, in other words, seems to not count as a marginalized perspective for most scholars of Israel, even when they themselves argue for its secondary or subservient status under Zionism. This issue seeks to bring labor and class perspectives into the center of the inquiry. Any questions can be raised about these perspectives. For example, can – and should – the perspective of labor be disentangled from its older articulation with labor Zionism? Can that perspective be distinct from both Zionist and Post-Zionist approaches? Or does it necessarily belong in one of these camps? What kind of questions would one ask in exploring Israeli history, society, and culture, if one approached it from the perspective of labor? Each of the contributions to this issue reflects on at least some of these questions, in its own way. The article “Constructing a Classed Community,” by Dani Filc and Rami Adut examines the intriguing question of class formation, which the writers try to make less illusive by localizing their research and focusing on a suburban neighborhood in the Israeli city of Holon as a case study. The main question the writers ask is whether the