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Imagining the Beloved: Gender and Nation Building in Early Twentieth‐Century Hebrew Literature
Author(s) -
Pinsker Shachar
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
gender and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-0424
pISSN - 0953-5233
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2007.00507.x
Subject(s) - hebrew , ideology , judaism , masculinity , hebrew bible , poetry , sociology , literature , jewish literature , palestine , history , aesthetics , jewish studies , gender studies , biblical studies , law , politics , art , political science , archaeology , ancient history
This article traces the gender dimensions of Zionist nation building by examining literary texts written in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It offers a gender‐oriented analysis of a range of canonic and marginal literary texts and their historical contexts, and pays special attention to the ways in which literary production in general, and in Hebrew in particular, became an essential component in the effort to create an image of a ‘New Hebrew Man’. This highly gendered image was a central foundation of the Zionist project of nation building in Europe, and in the Jewish community in Palestine. Hebrew poems, stories and novels produced and sustained the symbolic economy of gender of the Zionist cultural project. At the same time, I argue that some Hebrew writers resisted the overt and implicit ideological demands of this project by calling attention to the internal contradictions inherent in the feminine figuration of the nation and the attempts to transform Jewish masculinity.