Introduction Excerpt for Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets

Introduction

By the conclusion of the 1960s, Israel’s susceptibility to American influence became fodder for rich, habitually scornful commentary. Journalist Ruth Bondi, an astute observer of social trends, averred, “Any breeze above the American continent raises dust on Israeli roads, whether nude advertisement or ecological holocaust, smoking drugs or New Left, Black Panthers or faded jeans.”¹ Another discerning commentator, Amnon Rubinstein, a law professor and future member of cabinet, critically reflected on the seemingly rapid absorption of American culture. Examples included the branding of products with English names, the integration of American idioms into Hebrew (“running for election,” “selling Israel abroad”), and the immense popularity of American paperbacks such as Leon Uris’s Topaz (20,000 copies), Arthur Hailey’s Airport (20,000), and James Michener’s The Source (35,000). Time sold more magazines in Israel—in per capita terms—than in any European country. Other newly arrived customs included tipping waiters and the transition in university classrooms from formal lectures to ostensibly more egalitarian “round-table” exchanges.²

For Hillel Halkin, a young immigrant to Israel who reflected on his experience in the pages of the American Jewish magazine Commentary, the country seemed profoundly altered from its earlier self and yet, it inspired a sense of déjà vu, of time travelling to early 1950s America: rooftops sprouting forests of television antennas, frozen food, superhighways, Muzak wafting out of office-building elevators. Friday-night gatherings often shifted from discussions of current affairs to new appliances, washing machines, dishwashers, their prices, their comparative merits, a couple mulling over moving to the suburbs, someone getting a divorce, another in therapy.³ Even Prime Minister Golda Meir offered her contribution to the genre. “With what joy we swallow everything that comes from abroad,” she sighed. “Heaven help whoever dares criticize any of that—whether light songs, theater, attire.”⁴ Meir was baffled by the miniskirt fad for women and long sideburns for men. But upon receiving an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University she warned more gravely against the threat to national unity if Israeli students and intellectuals pitched battles against the “establishment” as their counterparts abroad had done so disruptively.⁵

These remarks indicated lingering apprehensions and prevalent ambivalence about Israel’s growing exposure to the outside world, especially the United States. Despite their critical tone, such comments often underestimated the depth, complexity, and political ambiguity of the transformation Israeli society underwent because of its engagement with all things American—much beyond the imitative reflex and the casual embrace of fleeting fashions. How, for instance, its iteration of the Black Panthers, the advent of feminism, and antiestablishment expressions exposed, deepened, and politicized existing cleavages in Israeli society.

In the wake of the Six-Day War, Israel and the United States became more overt geopolitical allies. Rather than revisiting the making of that famous partnership—about which there is no dearth of literature—Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets interrogates a different sort of intimacy emerging during this period, with often unexpected results.⁶ It documents the ripple effects that the rise of Black Power in the United States had on both extremes of local politics, the adoption of American technology that fed the budding Israeli military-industrial complex, and performances that revisited the Diaspora and recalibrated Jewish identities in Israel—among other exchanges. While contributing to the burgeoning literature on the American presence in the world, this book seeks to decipher the inner workings of a nation—its social divisions, market behavior, military choices, political campaigns, daily routines, and culture, both high and low—through the prism of its busy negotiation with the ostensible outside, namely ideas, artifacts, practices, and people that appeared under the sign America.

The expanding contact between the two societies reordered Israeli culture and consciousness, affected the swelling ranks of the Israeli middle classes, but also contributed to the politicization of lower classes and to widening the gap between Jews and Arabs. However, the orbit metaphor in the book’s title does not cast Israel as an American satellite; it instead signifies emerging ties characterized by a sense of affinity and kinship as well as by persisting distance, resistance, and mistranslations. These relations were critical to the interlocking processes of nation building and world making in late twentieth-century Israel. American rendezvous and chance encounters refined both individual and collective Israeli self-perceptions, whether Israelis embraced American ideologies and habits or, conversely, viewed themselves and their country in contradistinction to the American Other. The book demonstrates that rather than growing profoundly Americanized, Israelis forged unique paths into the American sphere.

The two wars, the Six-Day War of June 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, serve as this study’s nominal bookends—although discussion occasionally veers, as necessary, outside the six-year span. Concentrating on a relatively short period of time allows for a synoptic analysis of a society at work at a particular moment of great transition. Obviously, Israeli engagement with American culture, knowledge, and practices began much earlier. Concerns about “Americanization” were voiced as early as the turn of the 1950s, most strongly triggered by cultural consumption, namely the popularity of Hollywood films and their effect on taste, fashion, and youth behavior.⁷ But during the turn of the 1970s, the meeting points between the two societies grew exponentially and the relationship along social and cultural axes intensified. Moreover, the content of the transnational dialogue then differed significantly from the recent three decades when the nation’s proximity to the United States propelled it on the road to privatization, deterioration of its social fabric, and other symptoms of severe neoliberalism afflicting Israeli society today.

The 1960s were the zenith of American post–Second World War liberalism with Great Society programs, civil rights legislation, the radicalism of the antiwar and New Left movements, and the dawn of the conservative backlash. Beyond liberalism, a range of ideologies, progressive and illiberal, beckoned to Israelis, whether the feminism of Member of Knesset Marcia Freedman or the extreme nationalism and racism of Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the Jewish Defense League (JDL)—both American émigrés. In a different register, seemingly unbridled consumption, which was still rather modest from the twenty-first-century vantage point, crossed the ocean in tandem with its repudiation, as expressed by Ralph Nader’s consumer activism, Herbert Marcuse’s critique, and the nascent environmental movement. A slew of techniques that sought to ameliorate the ills of modern society arrived as well, “self-actualization” workshops, T-Groups, Eastern religions, and WeightWatchers, among others, although their relationship to consumerism is akin to that between the two sides of a Möbius strip. Youth culture, rock music, longer hair, sexual promiscuity, and drugs—albeit less prevalent than elsewhere in the West—were also a sign of the time.

Consumerist-inflected concepts such as “quality of life,” which was adopted as a mantra in Israel, organizations that sought to protect and beautify cityscapes, and popular human relations techniques were promoted as a basis for reform and renewal, aspiring for higher standards of public behavior and sociability alongside new expectations of personal comfort. By the late 1960s, such ideas found receptive audiences in a society that, beyond the cohesion born out of the perpetual state of war, was already stratified and fragmented, to a large extent “post-ideological,” and rather confused about its core values, especially after the dispiriting economic recession of 1966–67.

The onset of a mature consumerist order was certainly an important phase in the long-term elaboration of Israeli capitalism—but the decade between 1968 and 1977 was also a turning point in the making of the Israeli welfare state and the only decade in the country’s history that witnessed a substantial reduction of income disparity.⁸ In part this was based on a different kind of inequality—the employment of unskilled Palestinian workers from the newly occupied territories. But the rise of the Israeli Black Panthers in 1971, among other factors, instigated new welfare policies. Many of these were shaped by ideas and concepts borrowed from American-led, policy-oriented social sciences, while the era that economists now label the “Great Compression” in American wages was still in place.⁹ A major late 1960s education reform in Israel that sought to facilitate “integration” along ethnic lines also took its cues from the American experience.

Both American and Israeli societies were under stress and in flux. The United States appeared on the Israeli horizon as a fractured entity, as a powerful superpower and a paragon of consumerist lifestyle, but, at the same time, as a society too spoiled or profoundly divided and crime infested, perhaps crumbling from within, a mighty giant that lost its way.

The heterogeneous, often contradictory character of the American presence links the turn of the 1970s with a more recent political turmoil in Israel. In the summer of 2023, as this book was being finalized, a judicial overhaul initiated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultranationalist coalition threatened to tear Israeli society asunder. It was met with unprecedented public protests. The proposed legislation to curtail the power of the Supreme Court was largely framed by an American-funded conservative think tank, Kohelet Policy Forum, led by an American-born immigrant, Moshe Koppel, who casts his organization as “the brains of the Israeli right-wing.”¹⁰ At the same time, the resistance movement looked to American democratic and constitutional ideals and to the moral support it received from President Joe Biden and his administration. For some observers the controversy over the judicial overhaul appeared to reenact on Israeli soil a conflict between competing American judicial philosophies. This is only partially true. The underlying divisiveness is indigenous and far exceeds the controversy over judicial matters, but at times it indeed speaks in and is made legible through American ideas and idioms. In general, the American impact on Israel over decades has been much more variegated and ambiguous than is often understood.

America in Israel

Israel’s slide more deeply into the American sphere was a complex, rhizomatic process with many actors, convoluted causal chains, and at times surprising entry points. For instance, that most Israeli institution, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), became a conduit for adopting—beside technology—American organizational methods and standards of professionalism. A retired general, Shlomo (Chich) Lahat, launched the first “American-style” political campaign in Israel (1973) that won him the mayorship of Tel Aviv. Appointed ambassador to the United States (1968–73), former IDF chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin interjected himself into Washington affairs with great self-confidence and a strong sense of personal affinity.

The American presence encompassed a hectic flow of people: immigrants, tourists, university students, and kibbutz volunteers—all arriving in greater numbers—as well as Americanization entrepreneurs, often on the Israeli receiving end; for instance, impresario Giora Godik, who staged lavish productions of Broadway musicals, or lawyer and journalist Natan Brune, who managed Lahat’s campaign after carefully studying American electioneering techniques. American immigrants assumed leading positions in Israeli government and culture. Prime Minister Golda Meir grew up in Milwaukee. The Supreme Court’s president Shimon Agranat was born in Kentucky and educated in Chicago. Nevertheless, American ideas and forms did not require human agents for their promiscuous circulation. They spread through media, popular culture, and other instruments and venues of transmission, including the organizational infrastructure of academia. Knowledge and expertise—managerial, scientific, social scientific, self-help—even Dale Carnegie’s method—were paramount in this exchange. Individuals demonstrating proficiency in the American way of doing things accrued social capital.

The United States also exported social and political transgression—Black Power, feminism, the initial steps of the gay liberation movement, or the violence-prone right-wing Jewish Defense League, in addition to its mainstream electoral tactics such as polling and the merchandizing of political candidates. It modeled lifestyles, from consumerism to flower power and the counterculture as well as circulated artifacts, from Coca-Cola (1968) to military Phantom jets (1969). There was little in this hectic movement that was imposed on Israel. American power’s imprint on forms of local life was not intentional as much as gravitational.

Even close relations with European societies that presumably could offer alternatives to American paradigms brought Israelis closer to the United States. Postwar Europe was preoccupied with negotiating its own broadening relationship with American culture. It was a particularly fraught but famously generative process in France; think of the cinematic “New Wave” and its extensive dialogue with Hollywood. In the decade prior to 1967, France was Israel’s closest ally, which left deep marks on Israeli culture as well. I would term this phenomenon “secondary Americanization.” One of its dialectical effects was a suspicion of American culture some members of the Israeli intellectual classes shared with their European counterparts even before the country experienced the strongest effects of the American incursion.

Otherwise, Americanization, with its judgmental undertones and teleological insinuation, is a concept this book employs hesitantly and sparingly, and only as a shorthand for rather complex dynamics. The term implies one-sided acculturation, leading toward a singular goal. It conceives of the United States as a fixed entity, frozen in time. In contrast, Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets establishes that the processes that appear under the rubric “Americanization” were nonlinear, historically textured, and subject to constant change. Moreover, whereas the social, cultural, and political bonds between the two countries only gained strength in the following fifty years, American and Israeli societies are still quite distinct, regardless of the numerous comparative categories employed by friends and foes to couple them together, whether “immigrant nation,” “liberal democracy,” or, conversely, “settler colonialism.”

Indeed, the comparative imagination is a feature of orbital relations in Israel and in other countries as well. As American iconography, events, and characters came to constitute a global lingua franca, a strong urge arose to find domestic instantiations of American phenomena.¹¹ Examples abound. In the press, journalists looked for the local Watergate or organized crime, and asked whether the Pentagon Papers leak could happen here. Ultra-Orthodox lawmakers voiced alarm about a music festival billed the “Israeli Woodstock.”¹² Emulating the Vietnam-era political cartography, the local political map was redrawn to distinguish between hawks and doves.¹³

Recent scholarship on transnational exchanges underscores hybridity and reciprocity with terms such as the portmanteau glocalization.¹⁴ Pointing to the dialogical interplay between outside forces and local agency is of great analytical value. Nevertheless, untangling the local/global dyad in Jewish Israel—a cosmopolitan society of mostly immigrants—where the local is already and inherently globalized—is particularly vexing. What the global stands for in this context is also unclear. At times it was the particular and local circumstances of the American Jewish community—rather than any universal force—that affected Israeli society. Indeed, Americanization entailed that Israel became a tad more Jewish during the period, moving away from its historical commitment to the “negation of the Diaspora.” In addition, the Jewish presence in American culture and academia affected the dissemination of non-Jewish content in Israel as well. These triangular relations involving the United States as a whole, the American Jewish community, and Israel would not come into view if the discussion were to evolve around the term globalization.

The Israeli case stands out among the many explorations of the American Century’s impact on other nations and regions in at least four ways:¹⁵ first, the effects of American race and ethnicity discourse on Jewish ethnicism in Israel; second, the role of the Jewish American Diaspora; third, in Israel the American influence could not be easily folded into a conventional modernization narrative since it did not confront ancient traditions, entrenched customs, and peasant society, as it often did elsewhere; and fourth, Israel was a society at war and the geopolitical and its attendant volatility was always present in social and cultural transformations.

Two aspects of this volatility are at the backdrop of the ensuing discussion. First, the June 1967 war was followed by what was known as the “War after the War,” Palestinian militants’ infiltration along the Jordan River and terror attacks in Israel and abroad, including the hijacking and bombing of airplanes. Skirmishes along the Suez Canal escalated into a “War of Attrition” with Egypt that concluded in the summer of 1970.¹⁶ In the first three years of our time frame, Israel was largely preoccupied with its security challenges. The lull in hostilities between 1970 and ’73 allowed for greater introspective deliberations about Israeli society and its domestic disparities.

The other turbulent field was the relationship with the United States itself. In hindsight, it grew only stronger, especially after the summer of 1970, when Israel proved itself useful to American interests by deterring Syria from invading neighboring Jordan.¹⁷ But the ties between Washington and Jerusalem were plagued by uncertainty. The White House deployed the ongoing Middle East crisis as a pawn in its maneuvers to reach a global understanding with Moscow and occasionally reassessed its arms supply to Israel. Israelis were particularly nervous about the prospects of a Middle East settlement imposed by the two superpowers.

Consumption/Race/Ambivalence

Bringing a wide range of topics under a single interpretative umbrella exposes threads and affinities among divergent historical phenomena. Despite the seemingly kaleidoscopic quality of the book’s subject matter, the discussion returns to three major themes. The first is consumerism. Consumer modernity constituted one of the quintessential exports of the American Century. Beyond a cornucopia of goods, it featured marketing techniques, shopping venues, types of publicity, civic organizations, and new conceptions of society and the self. The making of a consumer society is a cardinal subplot of Israeli history in the 1960s and early 1970s, often obscured by the geopolitical narrative arc, namely the 1967 war and the military and political events that followed in its aftermath. The book proposes that by the late 1960s a full consumerist order was already in place, before Israel completely embraced capitalism.

Consumerism colonized the daily lives of Israelis, dispatching a bounty of appliances, grooming products, and other commodities to invade their homes. Consumerist thinking infiltrated management and politics, whether in the commodification of political figures or in the growing proclivity of political parties, state officials, and commercial outfits to measure, manipulate, and act on the preferences of consumers, voters, and workers. Indeed, the book argues that the feedback loop, expansively conceived, was among the most significant American imports at the time.

American products arrived in the guise of market commodities and in the form of military hardware as well. My analysis draws parallels between these two categories of artifacts and their reception, the knowledge invested in purchasing an appliance or in handling state-of-the-art military jets, the personal and national attachments they inspired, as well as their contribution to entrenching trust in the “technological fix,” especially in military strategy.

The second theme focuses on ethnicity, race, and racism. Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets argues that the surge of identity politics in the United States affected both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi identities. The early stages of the “roots movement” in America, exemplified by the immense success of Fiddler on the Roof (1964), assumed a significant role in a short-lived revival of east European Ashkenazi culture in Israel, introducing the shtetl and Hasidic folklore into local popular culture, a terrain they had previously rarely inhabited. In 1971, the Israeli Black Panthers burst onto the scene. Seeking to radicalize Mizrahi Jews along the color line, the Panthers inaugurated a new phase in ethnic relations among Israelis.

Critical commentary about race that originated in the United States also entered public consciousness through theater, literature, cinema, music, as well as the social sciences. One of the questions the book tarries with is how racial tensions in the United States and the ethnic fault lines among Jews in Israel were rendered commensurable or comparable. Race/ethnicity is a theme connecting many chapters, whether through the story of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a tiny African American sect whose members began settling in the southern town of Dimona, the recruitment of Black basketball players and Black performers (for example, for the local iteration of the musical Hair), or, in contrast, the immigration of the militant Rabbi Kahane who brought with him to Israel forms of racism more common in the United States, which he applied to the Arab-Jewish divide.

In the 1960s, Israeli, mostly Ashkenazi, elites gravitated toward the aspirational West for reasons that, beyond the Israeli/Arab conflict, encompassed the consumerist tilt and their reaction to the large immigration from North Africa and the Middle East during the previous decades. Urban blight and other “quality-of-life” concerns were often blamed on the lack of Western values and the “Levantinization” of the country. Israeli elites became whiter also in reaction to the racial struggle in the United States. They expressed strong sympathy toward the civil rights movement and deep admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr. But by the late 1960s, the public was inundated with reports about Black antisemitism. The Israeli Black Panthers’ ability to rattle society emanated, in part, from the perceived dangers associated with the American Black Power movement and the New Left.

The third theme is ambivalence and resistance. With all the uncertainties mentioned above, the United States was turning into Israel’s staunchest ally. Ties between the two countries rested, in addition, on ideological, religious, and personal foundations. Many Israelis had relatives in the United States and after June 1967 the American Jewish community enthusiastically rallied in support of Israel. And yet, the social and cultural interaction at times prompted hesitation, and even resentment and opposition. Israelis demonstrated themselves to be eager participants in the American empire. For some, nevertheless, America’s gravitational power presented concrete threats or nourished persistent angst about dependency and loss of autonomy, diminished values, and being drawn too far, too quickly into the American orbit.

The attitude toward American Jews was similarly divided.¹⁸ Their invigorated commitment to Israel was lauded but the resulting impression that Israel relied on handouts was met with apprehension. And then there was the old rivalry between Zion and America as the competing promised lands for the Jewish people. While flexing its political muscle in favor of Israel, American Jewry was portrayed in countless articles in the Israeli press as a beleaguered community facing a pincer attack by the forces of assimilation and antisemitism, feeding the fantasy of an impending mass immigration to Israel.

The Israeli leadership was prone to moral panics. The Black Panthers spurred deep fears but there were other opportunities for disquietude. The aging American gangster Meyer Lansky’s wish to spend the rest of his life in Israel raised concerns that if he were allowed to stay, hundreds of Jewish gangsters would join him and make Israel the epicenter of global crime. The threat of an unwanted American invasion was also induced by the slow trickle of Black Hebrew Israelites and the prospect that countless Black Americans, escaping poverty and racial strife, would follow suit. The Jewish participation in the American New Left generated anxiety as well. The conservative justice Moshe Silberg decried Jewish New Left circles as “perverse” and claimed there were many “wicked” and “evil” individuals among them.¹⁹

The counterculture faced contending views, largely divided along generational lines. Sixties youth rebelliousness often evoked official derision, although it reminded some of the utopian idealism and the fire in the belly of the early Zionist pioneers that by then had become little more than a faint memory. Moreover, the counterculture served as a venue for Jewish revival in Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s musical evangelism or in the immensely popular 1968 revue, Ish hasid haya (There was a Hasidic man), that coupled the 1960s spirit with Hasidic folklore. Couched as “Hasidism in jeans,” it dressed diasporic Jewish heritage in a modern, albeit rather tame, countercultural garb.

Such an assemblage of disparate styles and ideas was typical of the efforts to domesticate the foreign. American thought, customs, even products constantly required adjustments. The book documents the intricate processes that helped accommodate, normalize, and even birth a supplementary Israeli identity to American ideas and things. They involved linguistic and ideological measures such as translation, renaming, and repositioning. Coca-Cola, for instance, was often marketed as the proper drink for Jewish holidays. But material alterations were also not uncommon. This was the case with both the Phantom jet that had to be continually reworked and the family-size Coca-Cola bottle that did not fit well into the small Israeli refrigerator.

As we shall see, satire, parody, and irony were also tools both to reject or embrace the foreign. Even sheer mimicry or seemingly mindless absorption required agency and occasionally generated strong national feelings. Two examples from the cultural field: the Tel Aviv staging of My Fair Lady in 1964 was heralded as a historic turning point in the annals of Israeli theater, although except for the Hebrew translation, the show faithfully followed the Broadway production. In 1977, when the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team won the European championship, a wave of national pride erupted even though most of the players were American.

Historiography and Methodology

This study is indebted to previous research conducted under the headings of the Americanization or globalization of Israel. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholarly attention was directed at how the globalizing process and neoliberalism affected the country. It largely focused on the period following the mid-1980s. Important monographs in this vein are Uri Ram’s The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem (2007), and Tom Segev’s Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel (2002).²⁰ Additional work on Israel and the United States has addressed management, the social sciences, Israeli basketball, and rock-and-roll music, among other topics.

The recent discussion about globalization and Israel follows and extends a thread of public discourse that grappled with the country’s departure from earlier commitments to socialism, equality, and the pioneering spirit (halutziut). Its origins stretch all the way back to the early years of the state. In 1963, the embourgeoisement of society under state auspices was the impetus behind one of the most famous jeremiads in Israeli political history, Yitzhak Ben Aharon’s article calling for the unification of the three workers’ parties under the declamatory title, “Courage for Change on the Verge of Calamity.”²¹ By the end of the 1960s, concerns about abandoned values proliferated.

This book’s analysis contributes to the rich literature on “America in the World” and transnational historiography in general. The exploration of the advent of the consumerist age enters dialogue with research that speaks to comparable developments elsewhere, especially Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (2006) and Kristin Ross’s writing about consumption and colonialism in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1996). The highly nuanced, ethnographically inclined literature that in recent decades has reevaluated the American presence in Latin America is equally pertinent.²²

The notion of “contact zone” constitutes an effective conceptual tool for studying cultural interactions. It was first elaborated in postcolonial studies to denote “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other. Often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.”²³ The idea of the “encounter” is similarly potent. It interrogates the dynamics of concrete meeting points, acknowledging their temporality and historicity, and allowing for a multiplicity of outcomes without occluding the ultimate asymmetry between the two countries: that Israel became only a junior partner in the American ambit.²⁴

The book’s ten topical chapters shuttle between, on the one hand, exploring specific events or encounters and, on the other hand, delineating routinized patterns of the quotidian, especially in the context of consumption, its seeping into the fields of politics and leisure, and its relationship to other forms of the Israeli everyday. The experience of individuals is underscored. A major question examined is how the transnational becomes personal. Moreover, transnational intimacy breeds thick layers of public and private emotions, attachments, and desires as well as frustrations and anxieties.

The exchange also involved reenactments and performances inside and outside the theater, the staging of America for public viewing and commentary. One quality the book seeks to capture is the fecundity of the transnational encounter in spawning myriad anecdotes and endless storytelling that could provoke surprise, hilarity, or scorn. Another facet is the politics of knowledge, not just the circulation of American-produced information and expertise but the question of how Israelis became acquainted over time with American life.

Gender is an essential theme here. Marketing commodities advanced specific notions about femininity and masculinity. The new institutions of consumer protection, largely helmed by women, also contributed to molding gender discourse. Gender was also a constitutive category in technology transfer and the story of the Black Panthers. The period under examination witnessed the first steps of Israeli feminism, which was understood as an American import. As significantly, both high and popular culture conceived of the Israeli-American encounter in gendered, sometimes sexual, geolibidinal, terms.

This study highlights identity-formation processes, ambiguities, and paradoxes. In one case, human relations experts teach kibbutzniks how to improve social interaction. In another, Israeli pilots teach their American instructors how to dogfight in the air. Other episodes blur the lines separating the local and authentic from the foreign and supposedly inauthentic, as in the story of the Black Panthers.

Research is based on archival work, interviews, as well as a deep dive into the Israeli printed press, reading it against the grain, taking into consideration its biases and blind spots. Analysis draws from theoretical discussions on the consumerist everyday (Henri Lefebvre), cultural capital (Pierre Bourdieu), knowledge as a form of governance and subject making (Michel Foucault) as well as other theoretical formulations that pertain to globalization, performance, analogical thinking, and racial masquerade. Ultimately, the book argues for the historicization of the transnational encounter, paying attention to its path dependency and temporality. Ironically, the appropriation of American ways sometimes placed local culture out of step with the state of things in the United States in what might be termed the “glocal delay.”²⁵

Notes

1. Ruth Bondi, “Portnoy’s Wife’s Complaints,” Davar: Dvar Hashavu’a, August 20, 1971, 8.

2. Amnon Rubinstein, “What We Have in 1970 We Didn’t in 1948,” Haaretz, September 30, 1970.

3. Hillel Halkin, “Americans in Israel,” Commentary, May 1, 1972, 54.

4. Al Hamishmar, April 16, 1973.

5. Ma’ariv, July 7, 1970; Amos Elon, “Golda: A Portrait,” Haaretz: Musaf, July 24, 1970, 38.

6. There are scores of books on Israel and the United States, focusing mostly on aspects of diplomatic relations, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the pro-Israel lobby, the peace process, and policymaking in general. See, for example, Tal, The Making of an Alliance; Aridan, Advocating for Israel; Ariel, An Unusual Relationship; Ben-Zvi, The United States and Israel; Mart, Eyes on Israel; Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby; Olson, America’s Road to Jerusalem; Merkley, American Presidents, Religion, and Israel; Spector, Evangelicals and Israel; Shaw and Goodman, Hollywood and Israel.

7. Helman, Consumer Culture and Leisure in the Young State of Israel, chaps. 4–5. The most vociferous voices against Americanization came from Maki, the Israeli communist party; see, for example, the communist daily Kol Ha’am, July 15, 1951, Kol Ha’am, January 1, 1952. For the pre-independence American presence see, for example, Brown, The Israeli-American Connection.

8. Gabbay, Political Economy, 246–48.

9. Goldin and Margo, “The Great Compression”; Picketty and Saez, “Income Inequality.”

10. David Segal and Isabel Kershner, “Who Is Behind the Judicial Overhaul Now Dividing Israel? Two Americans,” New York Times, March 20, 2023; Aaron Heller, “Israel’s Crisis Has a Distinctly American Flavor,” New York Times, March 27, 2023.

11. On American culture and iconography as lingua franca, see Kroes, “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism,” 475.

12. “Watergate Israeli Style,” Ha’olam Hazeh, May 16, 1973, 14–15; Dan Margalit, “Top Secret,” Haaretz: Musaf, July 16, 1971, 5–7; Lamerhav, March 24, 1971.

13. “Members of Knesset’s Dovecote,” Ha’olam Hazeh, April 15, 1970, 15.

14. Robertson, “‘Glocalization’”; Bauman, “On Glocalization”; Victor Roudometof defines glocalization as “globalization refracted through the local.” Roudometof, Glocalization, 146.

15. See, for example, Wagnleitner, Coca-Colanization and the Cold War; Kuisel, Seducing the French; Kuisel, The French Way; Rydell, Buffalo Bill in Bologna; Zeitlin and Herrigel, Americanization and Its Limits; Conrad, How The World Was Won; Vučetić, Coca-Cola Socialism; Stephan, Americanization and Anti-Americanism; Malchow, Special Relations; Tota, The Seduction of Brazil; Bell and Bell, Americanization and Australia; Oldenziel and Zachman, Cold War Kitchen; Contreras, In the Shadow of the Giant; Abravanel, Americanizing Britain; Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall; Wagnleitner and May, “Here, There and Everywhere.”

16. Gelber, Attrition: The Forgotten War.

17. Quandt, Decade of Decisions, chap. 4.

18. In recent decades, the Israeli ambivalence toward American Jews received a few treatments. See, for example, Golan, With Friends Like You.

19. H.C.J. 58/68, Shalit v. the Minister of the Interior. Supreme Court of Israel 23(2) P.D. 477 (1969), 501-2. Also, see Lahav, Judgment in Jerusalem, 204-5.

20. Israel Studies journal dedicated its volume 5, issue 1 (Spring 2000) to the topic of Americanization. On the long history of turning Israel toward capitalism, see Krampf, The Israeli Path to Neoliberalism; Ben-Porat, How Israel Became a Capitalist Society. On the American impact on Israeli social sciences, see Uri Ram’s Israeli Sociology. Monographs on the perception of Israel from the American vantage point include Kaplan, Our American Israel; Mitelpunkt, Israel in the American Mind.

21. Lamerhav, January 11, 1963; Davar, January 11, 1963.

22. Gilbert, LeGrand, and Salvatore, Close Encounters of Empire, represents the best of the genre. Also, see Zolov, Refried Elvis.

23. Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 34.

24. Melani McAlister makes an inspiring use of the concept of the “encounter,” but her approach is limited to American engagements with representations of the Middle East. See McAlister, Epic Encounters.

25. A similar point was made by Amnon Rubinstein and Hillel Halkin in the articles mentioned at the beginning of the introduction (footnotes 2 and 3). For instance, Israelis exhibited enthusiasm about the Cold War when Americans had enough of it.