Israel in the Making

Stickers, Stitches, and Other Critical Practices

Hagar Salamon

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780253023087
• eBook ISBN: 9780253023285
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The brilliant kaleidoscope of everyday creativity in Israel is thrown into relief in this study, which teases out the abiding national tensions and contradictions at work in the expressive acts of ordinary people. Hagar Salamon examines creativity in Israel's public sphere through the lively discourse of bumper stickers, which have become a potent medium for identity and commentary on national and religious issues. Exploring the more private expressive sphere of women's embroidery, she profiles a group of Jerusalem women who meet regularly and create "folk embroidery." Salamon also considers the significance of folk expressions at the intersections of the public and private that rework change and embrace transformation. Far ranging and insightful, Israel in the Making captures the complex creative essence of a nation state and vividly demonstrates how its citizens go about defining themselves, others, and their country every day.

PART I

FOLKLORE IN THE ISRAELI PUBLIC ARENA

Part I Invitation

Bumper Stickers as a Podium in Motion

MY DAILY JOURNEY to campus on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem is more than a routine act of commuting. I usually follow a route that crosses the borderline, officially obliterated but socially still very much in existence, between West Jerusalem (which was under Israeli sovereignty prior to the 1967 war) and East Jerusalem (under Jordanian rule until that war). Sometimes the way is blocked as a result of political tension, demonstrations, or visits by foreign dignitaries. Then I take an alternate route, crossing a second dividing line within Jerusalem, between the neighborhoods inhabited by secular or moderately religious Jews, and those inhabited by ultra-Orthodox and often anti-Zionist Jews. In this case, I must avoid being delayed by an ultra-Orthodox demonstration, wedding, or funeral procession.

Even if my journey passes without incident, however, it offers an opportunity to consider the complex and multifaceted nature of Israeli political and religious reality as embodied by these dividing lines. The cars that pass me are plastered with political and religious stickers, creating a rich mosaic of terse slogans engaged in a dynamic and profound discourse. Thus, metallic vehicles of transportation are transformed into vehicles of political and religious sentiments. The cars on the road are emblems of the profound emotions of owners and audience alike. This phenomenon of folk politics and religion expressed in the dynamic and public genre of bumper stickers is not unique to Jerusalem and has become widespread throughout Israel over the past two decades. The personal experience that led me to investigate this field is one shared widely in Israel, where members of the public are involved as willing or unwilling participants in this popular discourse of the roads.¹ The changing nature of the sticker discourse reflects the ebb and flow of a variety of sociopolitical and religious sentiments in Israeli society.

Bumper stickers have become an increasingly common expressive medium throughout the postmodern world. In Israel, the principal themes of the stickers reflect the dominant preoccupations of the ever-changing society: during the peace process, and especially after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitsẖak Rabin in November 1995, the stickers were mainly of a political nature, while ten years later, in the second half of the first decade of the twenty-first century, a large number of religious stickers emerged. At the time of the writing of this book, religion has become the dominant theme of Israeli bumper stickers. This lively, animated, and often highly critical folkloristic political discourse offers an alternative and innovative perspective on major political and social developments, which, in Israel, occur at a dizzying pace.

In recent years, Israel’s roads (and highways) have turned into a public, open, and permanent sphere for discursive political and religious dialogues that give voice to strong feelings of identification and conflict. The private car has become a site in which the complex communication of schism and unity plays out, as well as a proselytizing billboard in which individuals proclaim their political and religious identities, often in charged terms that provoke onlookers to invent their own equally charged responses. At the same time, the popular and creative play with traditional and sacred language produces a powerful tension between these concepts and the rapidly shifting events to which the discourse refers.

In Israel, car stickers are concise texts with nearly no graphic images. As a visual expressive medium that must be read by its audience, they seek to convey complex social, political, and religious realities in a condensed, easily readable message. As in other forms of expressive folklore, they manifest a terse poetics that addresses a world of shared images. The audience, in turn, adds its own layers of meaning through attention to rhythm and rhyme, allusion and alliteration, and other properties.

Sticker slogans are formulated in a language that draws on a dense web of images and associations. Here, medium and message, form and content are inseparable. Complex realities are distilled into short slogans, which are then deciphered through equally complex processes, whose meanings are far from uniform or self-understood by participants. Beyond their diversity, however, the stickers artfully express taken-for-granted truths that underlie diverse identity commitments and orientations toward social reality. For example, the salience accorded to written texts in Israeli society is a centripetal force that draws participants to shared understandings and infuses the sticker discourse with vitality.²

An analysis of the discourse of stickers may cast light on social, political, and religious processes in Israel, and reflect the level of involvement of specific groups in this discourse and the relationships between them. These aspects are the background for studying bumper stickers as a folkloric phenomenon. In the following three chapters, in which a presentation of the sticker texts is combined with active exegesis gathered in the field, I invite the reader to listen to the many voices of the Israeli road and unravel their discursive nuances. Through this dual approach, we also explore the definition of folklore in the modern world; illustrate the flexible boundaries between folklore, popular culture, and media; and affirm the central place of folklore in plural societies.

All three chapters are based on documentation and photography of stickers and interviews with a variety of Israeli interlocutors. The stickers were photographed and the texts shown to interviewees. As technologies developed, photographs were also shown on computer screens. The photographs and the saturation of the public sphere with the stickers ensured that the message was never divorced from its graphic representation. Thus, the interviews engendered shared reflection on the form and esthetics of the stickers and not merely on their verbal content. The interlocutors often provided political and religious self-classifications as part and parcel of their interpretations. These make an interesting statement on the major fault lines in Israeli society.

The voiced reactions to the stickers were varied, passionate, and often mutually exclusive. Those reactions provide additional voices not always visible on bumper stickers. They are also opportunities for individuals to express anger, solidarity, skepticism, or faith in ways that may be seen as reproductions of everyday discourses. Because the medium of the written word, especially if it invokes sacred texts, rarely leaves Israelis indifferent, the spoken interpretations of the stickers often tell us as much about the individuals and the dynamic nature of their political and religious commitments as they do about collective processes in Israeli society.

The popular nature and accessibility of the medium (stickers, cars) make it a forum for constant innovation and creativity, inviting a wide variety of expressions. Stickers can cut and paste, quote or parody. It is an open game. In placing them on one’s car (and arranging them along with other stickers), reading, interpreting, and removing them, stickers blur the distinction between creators and consumers. This mutual activity between performers and audience make them an exemplary folkloric subject.

The three chapters in this part reflect research conducted over more than a decade. We may track the appearance of new clusters of stickers, the disappearance of certain themes, and the references to previous sticker texts. Chapter 1 follows the stickers that appeared immediately following Rabin’s death and demonstrate how a particular slogan (Shalom, H̲aver) developed and incurred reactions and counterreactions both in composition of new slogans and in the interpretations provided for them. Chapter 2 focuses on Ha‘Am (the people), a term whose popularity emerged in a sticker in support of retaining the Golan Heights. Chapter 3 unfolds the religious discourse appearing on cars, which increasingly has taken center stage and continues to proliferate on Israel’s roads. These stickers are charged with popular energy, and the interlocutors we spoke with link traditionally sacred expressions with varied and even subversive meanings.

The aforementioned discursive transformations over the course of two decades reflect changing orientations within Israeli society, each building on and echoing previous practices. Whereas in other cultural contexts, stickers serve as an element of popular culture, manifestation of personal identity, what makes Israeli stickers particularly vibrant and powerful is the sanctity and gravity granted to texts in general as well as an intensive, almost obsessive preoccupation with questions of politics and shared identity. Perhaps the latter is a function of the small size and high density of the country and its roads, and a penchant for disputatiousness hard-wired into Israelis’ “cultural DNA.” The polyphonic discourse encouraged by the stickers may draw on a traditional Talmudic culture of polemics and express the contentiousness of contemporary Israeli life.

As we take to the road, we provide a diachronic view of changes in stickers and reflect on their interrelationships. What understandings of Israeli society are expressed? How do the form and content of the stickers interact? How closely do positions of interlocutors correspond with their self-identified religious and political positions? The mutations of the stickers over time and the salience of their rhetorical strategies shows collective Israeli identity—as it is formulated in the discourse of the stickers—to be a dynamic process, informed by history and filled with passion. On Israel’s roads, political and religious views are always close to the surface, always in debate, and, like the vehicles that bear those views, constantly on the move.

Notes

1. On public folklore, see Kodish (2012).

2. This quality of folklore was beautifully phrased by Briggs (1988, xv): “Folklore performances provide common ground between a shared textual tradition and a host of unique human encounters, thus preserving the vitality and dynamism of the past as they endeavor to make sense of the present.” On the centrality of texts in everyday life of Jewish communities, see Goldberg (1987, 315–29).

1 Folklore as an Emotional Battleground

Political Bumper Stickers

IN THE POSTMODERN world, of which Israel and Jerusalem form an idiosyncratic but integral part, bumper stickers are an increasingly common expressive medium.¹ The Israeli variant of this iconic phenomenon illustrates the rapid growth of the medium since the early 1990s, reaching new peaks of folk innovation and creativity in the context of the peace process, and above all following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitsẖak Rabin in November 1995. These stickers are predominantly political in nature.² This lively and animated folkloristic political discourse offers an alternative perspective on major political developments, which occur at a dizzying pace in Israel, and an important complement to—and critique of—the hegemonic political discourse that takes place in this country (figure 1.1).³

An analysis of the sticker discourse reflects the most pressing social and political issues processed in Israel. The cars on the road become vehicles of political sentiment—emblems of the profound emotions of owners and audience alike. This phenomenon of folk politics has become widespread throughout the country, and often evokes immediate and emotionally charged responses—both orally and in the form of new counter-stickers.

In this chapter, we attempt to unravel the multivocality embodied in this postmodern genre and discuss the relationship between this form of expression and the discursive nuances it embraces. This may further our understanding of such aspects as the definition of folklore in the modern world; the fluid boundaries between folklore, popular culture, and media; and the place of folklore in multicultural societies that are the arenas of covert and ov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Studying Israeli Folklore
• Part I. Folklore in the Israeli Public Arena
• Part II. Expressions in the Intimate Arena of Embroidery
• Part III. Between the Public and the Private—the Mirrors of Ambivalence
• Closing Words: The Birth of Public Enunciation from the Spirit of Everyday Life
• Bibliography
• Index