Creating the labor-Zionist family: masculinity and marriage among urban labor-Zionist men in mandatory Palestin

• In Event: Jews, Labor, and the Politics of Work

Abstract

The issue of the family was a contradictory one in Zionist labor movement circles in mandatory Palestine. On the one hand, it was taken to be the emblem of old, exilic, bourgeois culture, meant to be overcome and extinguished in order for the new Jewish man to be born. On the other, the overwhelming majority of people affiliated with the Zionist labor organizations, particularly in towns, saw in creating a family a personal goal, a means to cope with the hardships of life and to cultivate a new, healthy generation.

Modern Jewish masculinity was studied so far mostly from an intellectual history perspective, based on the writings of well known political figures and writers, and described the ideal of the new Jewish man more than its realization in everyday life. A part of a wider research project, this paper will focus on the family as the central arena for creating and debating masculinity in an explicitly gendered setting, vis-a-vis women and children - i.e. none masculine actors.

Based on contemporary diaries, personal letters and other archival materials, the paper will discuss several examples of the process meant to lead to marriage and the establishment of a family, from the point of view of such men. This process reflected masculine desires and anxieties relating to marriage and its expected consequences - the responsibility for the livelihood, wellbeing and happiness of wife and children, as well as for the creation of the next generation of Zionist labor activists and citizens. The analysis of these desires and anxieties, both in cases when the process of getting married was going well and when it was interrupted, gives a more nuanced and contradictory view of the new Jewish masculinity that was created in mandatory Palestine.

author

• Matan Boord, Tel Aviv University