The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel
ISBN: 9781611680829
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Brandeis University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Collectivism; Individualism;

In this sharply argued volume, Orit Rozin reveals the flaws in the conventional account of Israeli society in the 1950s, which portrayed the Israeli public as committed to a collectivist ideology. In fact, major sectors of Israeli society espoused individualism and rejected the state-imposed collectivist ideology. Rozin draws on archival, legal, and media sources to analyze the attitudes of black-market profiteers, politicians and judges, middle-class homemakers, and immigrants living in transit camps and rural settlements. 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 on Israel's early years.

STEVEN J. RUBIN is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Adelphi University. He is the author of a critical biography of the American Jewish author Meyer Levin, and the editor of two previous anthologies: Writing Our Lives: Autobiographies of American Jews, 1890-1990 (1991) and Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry (1997).

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