Yacoov Shavit and Shoshana Sitton offer a detailed case study on the purposeful invention of festive traditions in a society betwixt and between. Migrants to “Eretz-Israel”—that is, Jewish Palestine—brought with them diverse cultural memories and highly differential political, social, and religious ideologies. They also generally came from a context where a minority Jewish culture celebrated its festivities in the privacy of the home or the shelter of the synagogue. The migration background coupled with the availability of public space led to a sense of a “festive void” in modern Jewish society. Hence, in Jewish Palestine, public space could be, and, for a number of the individuals researched for this study, had to be imbued with a sense of collective meaning transported best through public stagings and performances. Shavit and Sitton seek then to add to the considerable literature on the linkage between state and/or nation building and festive invention through a particular focus on the nature of ritual stagings and the motivations of those formulating and implementing the stage directions. It is a study not of ritual communitas, its experience and the resulting collective national foundation, but of intent and its relative success in a highly reflexive and cerebral social context. Those familiar with Don Handelman’s theoretical contributions to the study of ritual know that Israel’s ritual life offers—perhaps precisely because the traces of invention are so close to the surface—excellent material for model building. Shavit and Sitton ultimately seek to offer steps toward model building of ritual invention with an applicability beyond Hebrew culture in Eretz-Israel.
The need to forge commonality through shared ritual experience had been evident already to the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, as quotes from his diaries cited here demonstrate. Shavit and Sitton seek, however, to go beyond this theorizing of how to create a national body. They focus on mechanisms of innovation deployed in rural and urban contexts and the efforts directed toward different age groups (but in particular also kindergarten and schools). They foresee three mechanisms that will sound familiar and hence applicable to other cases: (1) replacement (or adaptation) of extant forms, (2) integration of new elements in traditional forms (here for instance changes made to the wedding ceremony), and (3) innovation (with the birthday celebration, introduced and cemented in the first kindergartens, as a case in point). There is a difference from perhaps more familiar mechanisms of inventions such as those practiced through Christian missions as well as other colonial endeavors that sought to rule through ritual: the stagers in Jewish Palestine had to forge something for themselves rather than seek to win over an ethnic and religious Other. Part II of the study details these mechanisms in the realm of schools, in the urban public sphere with particular emphasis on Tel Aviv where both of the authors teach, and in the intentional community constituted by the Kibbutz.
As the authors note in their conclusion, the success of such processes of creation is confirmed when the scripts and the struggles amongst their creators have receeded or been altogether forgotten: at that point, the event has become “tradition” and is carried in a more or less collective fashion. Hebrew culture in Jewish Palestine up until 1948 is a special case, as here a festive lore and its performative realization was intentionally shaped and staged for different facets of an evolving society in a very compressed time span. Christel Lane’s study on the Soviet case and particularly Mona Ouzof’s examination of French revolutionary festive liturgy are the comparable studies that come to mind, though neither one was conceived with a similar goal of elaborating on the potential generalizable elements out of the specific case. Of particular value in this volume are the seven appendices offering proposals and actual stage directions for festive inventions. The availability of the material coupled with the analysis render the work a fine study one could potentially use and debate in the upper level undergraduate or graduate classroom. The clarity of the prose, perhaps enhanced through the translation from the Hebrew, further suggests such suitability of Stagings and Stagers.
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[Review length: 681 words • Review posted on October 10, 2006]