In this article, I examine the “cultural biography” of hummus in Israel from the Mandate period to the present, focusing on the changing place of Arabness in the signification of the dish. Contrary to accounts that regard food consumption as metonymic of political relations, I argue that, because food items move in several fields, both their consumption and signification are overdetermined processes. Rather than taking hummus to be the essential “food of the Other,” I show that the Arab identity of hummus functions as a resource, employed by social actors embedded in various political, social, and economic projects.

In this article, we consider Connell's theory of masculinity through a phenomenon we encountered in our respective research projects, one focusing on the construction of masculinity among early Zionist ideological workers and the other focusing on present-day military masculinities and ethnicity in Israel. In both contexts, a bodily performance which marks the breach of "civilized behavior" is adopted in order to signify accentuated masculinity. In both, a symbolic hierarchy of masculinities emerges, in which Arabs-and in the case of Golani soldiers, also "Arab Jews," that is, Jews who descended from Arab countries-are marked as more masculine than hegemonic Ashkenazi men (i.e., men of European descent). Thus, while our case studies support Connell's argument that masculinity may be practiced in various ways, the hierarchical relationship between masculine styles appears to be more multilayered than Connell's theory suggests. We connect the tension between masculine status, understood as a location within a symbolic hierarchy of masculinities, and social status in our case studies to the contradiction at the heart of modern masculinity. We argue that in order to account for this tension, which may arise in specific interactional contexts, we need a concept of masculinity as a cultural repertoire, of which people make situated selections. The repertoire of masculinity is where the elements and models that organize both

Thus wrote Dr. Asher Goldstein in the Hebrew daily paper Haʾaretz (The Land) in 1935, lamenting the disregard for hygiene among Palestine's Jews. In Goldstein's text, hygiene is metonymic to Western progress, which the Jews were to bring with them to Palestine. Yet the Jews in this text occupy an ambivalent position: they are not only to bring the West to the “entire backward Orient” but also to themselves. A hygienic way of life, far from being a secured component in their cultural compendium, is presented as a goal yet to be achieved. Indeed, it constituted a project in which Dr. Goldstein—author of several hygiene manuals and editor of the health column in Haʾaretz—played an important role.

Hummus-an Arab dish adopted by Jews in Israel and made into a 'national dish' and a culinary cult-was first industrialized in Israel in 1958. In this article we look at the impact of the food industry on shaping both consumption patterns and the signification of the dish. Contrary to accounts that contrast mass production to authenticity and tradition, fast to slow food, globalized trade to local production, we regard the industrial and the artisanal as interdependent and mutually constitutive realms of production and consumption. We argue, first, that the Israeli food industry has played a crucial role in turning hummus into a national symbol and a culinary cult. Second, we argue that the growing popularity of industrial hummus not only did not replace the consumption of artisanal hummus, but the other way around. Third, we argue that the industry is simultaneously an agent of globalization and of localization of hummus: it expands the spread of hummus globally and at the same time it sometimes tries to fix to it a local ('national') identity.

Personal hygiene has pride of place in two of the most important scholarly conceptualizations of the modern body: that of Norbert Elias and that of Michel Foucault. This article analyzes hygienic practices among early Zionist ideological workers -halutzim (lit. 'pioneers'). Contrary to the image of the healthy and vigorous manual worker, physicians lamented the disregard for hygiene among the halutzim -a behavior which they attributed to the latter's ignorance and indifference to matters of health. The halutzim, on their part, construed their hygienic misbehavior as signifying proletarization. However, a close examination of the practices of halutzim, and the meanings they attached to them, reveals a complex and contextual repertoire. As I argue through the case study of the halutzim, rather than a mere instance of discipline (Foucualt) or self-control (Elias), hygiene was a cultural repertoire which was open for appropriation and re-signification in various ways and for various purposes.