e essay ends by urging scholars to move from a definition of postmodernism as the sign of a depoliticized, late capitalist affirmation of the multiplication of difference along ever-widening axes of analysis, toward a critical redefinition of postmodernism as a form of anti-essentialist critical practice.
In “Politicizing Masculinities: Shahada and Haganah” Sheila H. Katz draws out parallel tropes in early Zionist and Palestinian nationalist discourses. She argues that the woman question in both nationalist discourses was keenly embedded in redefinitions of true modern masculinity. Sovereignty over one’s land and control of one’s destiny were framed as major themes in the politicization of masculine identity. The new political ideal, the nation, demanded the ultimate sacrifice from real men. In Palestinian nationalism this sacrifice was defined as “shahada,” or martyrdom, while in Jewish nationalism it was defined as “haganah,” or self-defense. Texts written almost entirely by Jewish and Arab men, both in-and outside Palestine, imagined the new collective communities as masculine. As leaders and propagandists, men defined problems and solutions in ways that linked nationhood to manhood. Zionism was configured as a transition from effeminate exilic passivity to self-assertion and independence. Both nationalisms defined themselves in relationship of rebellion or continuity with their fathers. Sacrificial heroism in both national discourses was naturalized as a condition for achieving security, freedom, and dignity.
In “The Double or Multiple Image of the New Hebrew Woman” Margalit Shilo proposes that the reinvention of the new Hebrew man in Zionism was inspired by a search for perfection modeled on the myth of biblical manhood, working the land and rooted in nature. The reinvented Hebrew man was entrusted with the preservation and promotion of land, language, and labor. The new Hebrew woman in the meantime was a default creation falling into three categories—the invisible woman, the traditional woman, and the new woman—each framed as a secondary, auxiliary, and complementary counterpart. The early settlements at the turn of the century did not live up to the professed commitment of Zionist ideologues to gender equality. For the most part, women of the first “aliya,” or wave of settlement, were the wives and mothers of farmers and agriculturalists, often excoriated for their passivity and bourgeois manners. Modernization and secularization as cherished Zionist ideals offered urban women few professional outlets, mostly as teachers in coeducational institutions. The liberated woman remained more an ideal than a reality even in the early military defense organizations and kibbutzim. In the 1920s, urban women’s organizations dedicated themselves to securing equal voting rights, while socialist, mostly single women had to insist on equal participation in public life. Defined in masculine terms, Zionism offered the female settlers the option of gender imitation or traditional marriage and reproduction. The conflicting options of revolution and traditionalism left many women frustrated in their struggle to support the Hebrew men’s national adventures, and to reinvent themselves in their new ancestral land. The heroines who emerged from the settlement period 1888–1948 were exceptions whose eventual fame hardly reflects the fate of most women who immigrated to Palestine during that period.
Judith T. Baumel’s “The Heroism of Hannah Senesz: An Exercise in Creating Collective National Memory in the State of Israel” subjects an icon of Zionist heroism to special scrutiny. Baumel studies the process of canonization that inscribed the memory of Hannah Senesz in the national historical interpretation of the Holocaust and Zionist resistance. Baumel traces the early biography of Senesz as a precocious idealist, who left Hungary on the eve of World War II to join a struggling kibbutz in Palestine under the British Mandate (1917–48). Contrary to national myth, Senesz was one of a larger group of Palmach (Jewish defense organization volunteers