The article explores the Zionist cultural economy in interwar Palestine, by studying the emergence of the field of consumption as an arena for political struggles among Jews and between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish nationalist movement employed dominant contemporary assumptions about economic nationalism in attempts to politicize the economy of British Palestine, including through campaigns advocating ethnonational separatism in consumption. Unlike other "buy local" movements around the world, these were not directed solely against imports; rather, they were often "buy Jewish" campaigns waged against the consumption of commodities produced by the rival ethnonational sector in Palestine. Using a variety of archival and media sources, the article tracks the development of Jewish separatist consumption campaigns in interwar Palestine, uncovering a gradual amplification of their ethnonational emphasis that paralleled the escalation of the Arab-Jewish conflict. The cultural mechanisms used to attribute ethnic qualities to objects and define them as either "Jewish" or "foreign" are analyzed with particular attention to the conceptual contradictions in the definitions of a Jewish product, which were shaped by economic conflicts and the diverse political conceptions of Jewish identity. The study of separatist consumption sheds new light on the "dual society" thesis, revealing the deep grip of separatist approaches across multiple layers of the Jewish middle class in the Yishuv. N OT E S Author's note: I express my deep gratitude to my two academic homes in the last few years: the program for Judaic Studies at Yale University and the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. I am grateful to the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and its president, David Ariel, for the kind support. The project was also funded by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Kobi Metzer, Relli Shechter, Nahum Gross, Nahum Karlinsky, Liora Halperin, and Debbie Bernstein gave useful advice in different stages of the project. Galya Hasharoni, Andrea Stanton, and Sherene Seikaly generously shared unpublished works. Donna Divine, Derek Penslar, and Orit Rozin made important comments on conference presentations and Dafna Hirsch read an earlier version and offered valuable insights. I am grateful to the editors and readers of IJMES for their meticulous reading and constructive comments. Most of all, I am grateful to Professor Paula E. Hyman( for her immense encouragement and endless support, to this particular project and so much else. Paula was a pathbreaking scholar, a passionate intellectual, and a dedicated and generous mentor. I miss her.
