The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel

In this sharply argued volume, Orit Rozin shows that the conventional account of Israeli society in the 1950s, which portrayed the Israeli public as committed to a collectivist ideology, is inaccurate. In fact, major sectors of Israeli society espoused individualism and rejected the state-imposed collectivist ideology. Rozin draws on an array of traditional and popular sources to analyze black-market profiteers and the police officers who chased them, politicians and judges, middle-class homemakers, and immigrants living in transit camps and rural settlements. She also applies anthropological approaches to evaluate domestic interiors, food, feeding, and child rearing. Part of a refreshing trend in recent Israeli historiography to study the voices, emotions, and ideas of ordinary people, Rozin's book provides an important corrective to much extant scholarly literature, in Hebrew and especially in English, on Israel's transition to statehood and its early years.

Orit Rozin is a lecturer in the department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University.