A 'Coat of Many Colors' investigates Israel's first seven years as a sovereign state through the unusual prism of dress. Clothes worn by Israelis in the 1950s reflected political ideologies, economic conditions, military priorities, social distinctions, and cultural preferences, and all played a part in consolidating a new national identity. Based on a wide range of textual and visual historical documents, the book covers both what Israelis wore in various circumstances and what they said and wrote about clothing and fashion. Written in a clear and accessible style that will appeal to the general reader as well as to students and scholars, 'A Coat of Many Colors' introduces the reader both to Israel's history during its formative years and to the rich field of dress culture.

With a light touch and many wonderful illustrations, historian Anat Helman investigates "life on the ground" in Israel during the first years of statehood. She looks at how citizens--natives of the land, longtime immigrants, and newcomers--coped with the state's efforts to turn an incredibly diverse group of people into a homogenous whole. She investigates the efforts to make Hebrew the lingua franca of Israel, the uses of humor, and the effects of a constant military presence, along with such familiar aspects of daily life as communal dining on the kibbutz, the nightmare of trying to board a bus, and moviegoing as a form of escapism. In the process Helman shows how ordinary people adapted to the standards and rules of the political and cultural elites and negotiated the chaos of early statehood.

Practical Zionism in the Mandate era (1920-1948) is usually associated with agricultural settlements (kibbutzim), organized socialist workers, and the creation of a formal high culture. This book fills a gap in historical research by presenting a different type of practical Zionism in Jewish Palestine--urban, middle-class, and created by popular and informal daily practices. While research on Tel Aviv has so far been confined to "positivist" historical description or focused nostalgically on local myths, Helman's book reconstructs and analyzes the city's formative decades on various levels, juxtaposing historical reality with cultural images and ideological doctrines. Topics include the city's physical portrait, major public events, consumer culture, patterns of leisure and entertainment, and urban subcultures.

For many centuries Jews have been renowned for the efforts they put into their children's welfare and education. Eventually, prioritizing children became a modern Western norm, as reflected in an abundance of research in fields such as pediatric medicine, psychology, and law. In other academic fields, however, young children in particular have received less attention, perhaps because they rarely leave written documentation. The interdisciplinary symposium in this volume seeks to overcome this challenge by delving into different facets of Jewish childhood in history, literature, and film. No Small Matter visits five continents and studies Jewish children from the 19th century through the present. It includes essays on the demographic patterns of Jewish reproduction; on the evolution of bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies; on the role children played in the project of Hebrew revival; on their immigrant experiences in the United States; on novels for young Jewish readers written in Hebrew and Yiddish; and on Jewish themes in films featuring children. Several contributions focus on children who survived the Holocaust or the children of survivors in a variety of settings ranging from Europe, North Africa, and Israel to the summer bungalow colonies of the Catskill Mountains. In addition to the symposium, this volume also features essays on a transformative Yiddish poem by a Soviet Jewish author and on the cultural legacy of Lenny Bruce.

Food is not just a physical necessity but also a composite commodity. It is part of a communication system, a nonverbal medium for expression, and a marker of special events. Bringing together contributions from fourteen historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics, Volume XXVIII of Studies in Contemporary Jewry presents various viewpoints on the subtle and intricate relations between Jews and their foodways. The ancient Jewish community ritualized and codified the sphere of food; by regulating specific and detailed culinary laws, Judaism extended and accentuated food's cultural meanings. Modern Jewry is no longer defined exclusively in religious terms, yet a decrease in the role of religion, including kashrut observance, does not necessarily entail any diminishment of the role of food. On the contrary, as shown by the essays in this volume, choices of food take on special importance when Jewish individuals and communities face the challenges of modernity. Following an introduction by Sidney Mintz and concluding with an overview by Richard Wilk, the symposium essays lead the reader from the 20th century to the 21st, across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and North America. Through periods of war and peace, voluntary immigrations and forced deportations, want and abundance, contemporary Jews use food both for demarcating new borders in rapidly changing circumstances and for remembering a diverse heritage. Despite a tendency in traditional Jewish studies to focus on "high" culture and to marginalize "low" culture, Jews and Their Foodways demonstrates how an examination of people's eating habits helps to explain human life and its diversity through no less than the study of great events, the deeds of famous people, and the writings of distinguished rabbis.