Overview

The Tel Aviv annual Purim celebrations were the largest public events in British Palestine, and they played a key role in the development of the urban Jewish experience in the Promised Land. Carnival in Tel-Aviv presents a historical-anthropological analysis of this mass public event and explores the ethnographic dimension of Zionism. This study sheds new light on the ideological world of urban Zionism, the capitalistic aspects of Zionist culture, and the urban nature of the Zionist project, which sought to create a nation of warriors and farmers, but in fact nationalized the urban space and constructed it as its main public sphere.

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9781618113511

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Carnival in Tel Aviv: Purim and the Celebration of Urban Zionism presents a lucid and engaging study of an invented Hebrew tradition that drew on the Hebrew Bible and the greater Jewish tradition of Purim celebrations to become the largest urban public event in British Palestine. Shoham's carefully documented and theoretically informed discussion of the carnival's history and multilayered meanings explores the creativity and the tensions that underlie the Purim Carnival within the context of Zionist ideology, Tel Aviv's vibrant and rapidly developing bourgeois culture, the national secular Hebrew culture of the Jewish society in Palestine during the first decades of the twentieth century, and gender politics. This book is a major contribution to the growing field of Israeli cultural history. --Yael Zerubavel, Professor of Jewish Studies and History and author of Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Culture

Carnival in Tel Aviv: Purim and the Celebration of Urban Zionism presents a lucid and engaging study of an invented Hebrew tradition that drew on the Hebrew Bible and the greater Jewish tradition of Purim celebrations to become the largest urban public event in British Palestine. Shoham s carefully documented and theoretically informed discussion of the carnival s history and multilayered meanings explores the creativity and the tensions that underlie the Purim Carnival within the context of Zionist ideology, Tel Aviv s vibrant and rapidly developing bourgeois culture, the national secular Hebrew culture of the Jewish society in Palestine during the first decades of the twentieth century, and gender politics. This book is a major contribution to the growing field of Israeli cultural history. Yael Zerubavel, Professor of Jewish Studies and History and author of Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Culture

Author Information

Hizky Shoham is a cultural historian of Israel and Zionism. He is a research fellow in the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

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