Overview

The Sabra were the first Israelis - the first generation, born in the 1930s and 1940s, to grow up in the Zionist settlement in Palestine. Socialised and educated in the ethos of the Zionist labour movement and the communal ideals of the kibbutz and moshav, they turned the dream of their pioneer forebears into the reality of the new State of Israel. While the Sabra were a small minority of the new society's population, their cultural influence was enormous. Their ideals, their love of the land, their leisure culture of bonfires and singalongs, their adoption of Arab accessories, their slang, and their gruff, straightforward manner together with a reserved, almost puritanical attitude toward individual relationships was the cultural fulfilment of the utopian ideal of the new Jew. The author's lively, systematic, and convincing portrait of the Sabra considers their lives, thought, and role in Jewish history. This comprehensive study of this exceptional generation, provides a complex and unflinching analysis of accepted norms and an impressive appraisal of the Sabra, one that any examination of new Israeli reality should take into consideration.

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9780520216426

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Reviews

A buccaneering voyage of revisionist exploration. As a portrait of the elite cohort which dominated Israeli society in its formative years, this original and sympathetic book carries almost total conviction. -- Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

Oz Almog is a senior lecturer in sociology at Emek Yezreel College, Israel. He is the author of The Linguistic Culture of the Kibbutz Youth (1993).

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