Jewish Women and the Making of the Levant Fair in the Interwar Era

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the contribution of Jewish women to the Levant Fair during the interwar period. In its time, the Fair became one of the major outlets that permitted Jewish women to contribute to nation-building in the pre-state period, mainly due to a dearth of otherwise suitable opportunities for women. Women participation, however, neither transformed power relations between men and women, nor expanded economic and social rights available to women at the time.

KEYWORDS:

• The Levant Fair
• Mandatory Palestine
• nationalism
• women
• Zionism

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa for its research grant that facilitated fieldwork for this article in Israel. The author also acknowledges the insightful comments and suggestions that Professor Franck Salameh, Professor Hasan Kayalı, the anonymous reviewers, and Gözde Emen-Gökatalay offered. The author would like to express his sincere gratitude to Professor Deborah Hertz whose work on Jewish women inspired him to write the present study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ I use a very broad definition of “Jewish women.” I refer to Jewish women not only in Mandatory Palestine but also in the rest of the world because a significant number of women from foreign countries either displayed their products at the Fair or visited it. The emphasis is on Zionist individuals and organizations since they took the lead in preparations and collective events. It is worthwhile to remark that women’s movements were not undifferentiated blocs but conglomerates of different ideas and approaches. For details, see Anne Summers, “Lost in Translation? WIZO and International Feminism c. 1920–1940,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 21, no. 2 (2022): 190–214.

² Although the Yishuv included all Jews in Mandatory Palestine, by this term, I mostly referred to politically conscious and organized Zionist groups for the purposes of this study. For the distinction between these broad and narrow definitions of the Yishuv, see Dan Horowitz, “Before the State: Communal Politics in Palestine Under the Mandate,” in The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers, ed. Baruch Kimmerling (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012), 32.

³ For examples, see Tammy Razi, “The Family is Worthy of being Rebuilt: Perceptions of the Jewish Family in Mandate Palestine, 1918–1948,” Journal of Family History 35, no. 4 (2010): 395–415; and Matan Boord, “Creating the Labor-Zionist Family: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Marriage in Mandate Palestine,” Jewish Social Studies 22, no. 3 (2017): 38–67.

⁴ Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2 (1989): 218–19.

⁵ Burton Benedict, “International Exhibitions and National Identity,” Anthropology Today 7, no. 3 (1991): 5; Ingrid E. Fey, “Peddling the Pampas: Argentina at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889,” in Latin American Popular Culture: an Introduction, ed. William H. Beezley and Linda A. Curcio-Nagy (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2000), 75; and Eric Storm and Joep Leerssen, “Introduction,” in World Fairs and the Global Moulding of National Identities: International Exhibitions as Cultural Platforms, 1851–1958, ed. Joep Leerssen and Eric Storm (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 4.

⁶ Anat Helman, Young Tel Aviv: A Tale of Two Cities (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2013), 23; and Julia Wölfel, “‘The Flying Camel:’ Defending Jewish State-building in Mandatory Palestine on the Levant Fairs of Tel Aviv in the 1930s,” Jewish Culture and History 23, no. 2 (2022): 139.

⁷ Maoz Azaryahu, “Tel-Aviv’s Birthdays: Anniversary Celebrations, 1929–1959,” in Tel-Aviv, the First Century, ed. Maoz Azaryahu and S. Ilan Troen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 20.

⁸ The value of business transactions at the fairgrounds reached £500,000 in 1934 (Opening Address Delivered by the President at the Annual General Meeting Held on Wednesday, January 9, 1935 at Tel-Aviv (Tel Aviv: Chamber of Commerce Tel-Aviv & Jaffa, 1935), 23; Israeli State Archives (ISA), 00071706.81.8D.09.5B, 24 March 1936, 2).

⁹ For details, see Lawrence Davidson, America’s Palestine – Popular & Official Perception from Balfour to Israeli Statehood (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).

¹⁰ Zvi Efrat, The Object of Zionism: The Architecture of Israel (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2018), 175.

¹¹ George A. Frykman, “The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1962): 95; Gayle Gullett, “‘Our Great Opportunity:’ Organized Women Advance Women’s Work at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893,” Illinois Historical Journal 87, no. 4 (1994): 259–76; Tracey Jean Boisseau, “White Queens at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893: New Womanhood in the Service of Class, Race, and Nation,” Gender & History 12, no. 1 (2000): 33–81; Amy Taipale Canfield, “Discovering Woman: Women’s Performances at the World’s Columbian Exposition Chicago, 1893” (PhD Thesis, Ohio State University, 2002); Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk, Transforming the Public Sphere: The Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labor in 1898, trans. Mischa F. C. Hoyinck and Robert E. Chesal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Brenda D. Frink, “San Francisco’s Pioneer Mother Monument: Maternalism, Racial Order, and the Politics of Memorialization, 1907–1915,” American Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2012): 85–113; Abigail M. Markwyn, Empress San Francisco: The Pacific Rim, the Great West, and California at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 227–54; and Kristy Maddux, Practicing Citizenship: Women’s Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2019).

¹² For example, the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts sent their products to Liverpool in 1912 to be displayed at the Palestine Exhibition, which strove to bring “a new, a happier and a nobler existence for the Jews in the Holy Land” (The Jews of Jerusalem: Speech of Sir John Gray Hill at the Opening of the Palestine Exhibition in Liverpool, June 4, 1912 (Liverpool: 1912), 8, 14).

¹³ For example, the Palestine Exhibition and Bazaar in London displayed articles from the Evelina de Rothschild School in Jerusalem. British Zionist female authors and other public figures, such as Helena Frank, Nina Salaman, and Dorothea Waley Singer, contributed to this exhibition’s booklet and organization (Cyril Picciotto and C. M. Kohan (Eds.), A Piece of Mosaic: Being the Book of the Palestine Exhibition and Bazaar (London: W. Clowes, 1912), 63).

¹⁴ Jewish women in Palestine continued to send their products to universal expositions, such as the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–25, through girls’ schools, the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), and the Jewish Women’s League of Cultural Work in Palestine during the Mandate era as well (“Palestine Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition,” The Australian Jewish Chronicle, May 1, 1924, 7; “Distribution of ‘Wembley’ Awards,” The Palestine Bulletin, Nov. 10, 1925, 3).

¹⁵ “Industrial Exhibition for Palestine,” The American Jewish World, June 26, 1925, 7; Judah Nedivi (Ed.), Tel-Aviv (Jerusalem: Keren Hayesod, 1929), 26; National Archives (United States), RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, Palestine, 1936–1944, April 15, 1932, 9–10.

¹⁶ CZA (Central Zionist Archives), A251\35, Memorandum submitted by Mischar w’Taasia Company Limited to Judge Julian Mack, 1930, 1; Report of the Fair Committee (Tel Aviv: The Palestine & Near East Exhibition & Fair, 1932), 8.

¹⁷ Report of the Fair Committee, 9; The National Archives, London (TNA), Colonial Office (CO) 733/239/1, June 30, 1933, 1.

¹⁸ I prepared this table based on statistics given by “The Levant Fair,” British Chamber of Commerce of Egypt Monthly Journal, Sept. 1933, 127; J. Adler, “Die Levante-Messe in Tel Aviv,” Palästina (May, 1936), 255; and Harry Schneiderman, “Review of the Year 5697,” American Jewish Archives (1937–1938): 485.

¹⁹ “Die Stadt der Gegenwart,” Die Stimme, April 29, 1932, 2.

²⁰ For details see Raquel Rapaport, “Conflicting Visions: Architecture in Palestine during the British Mandate” (PhD Thesis, The University of Wales College of Cardiff, 2006), 120–21.

²¹ “List of Awards,” The Palestine Bulletin, May 12, 1932, 3.

²² CZA, KKL5\5342\1, 22 April 1932, 2.

²³ “Fair Grounds Amusements,” The Palestine Post, June 29, 1934, 8.

²⁵ Davar, May 21, 1934, 5.

²⁶ “Yom Vitso,” Davar, May 31, 1934, 5.

²⁷ On Zefira, see Jehoash Hirshberg, Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–1948: A Social History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 187–93.

²⁸ “Levante-Messe,” Die Stimme, April 1, 1932, 5; “Levant Fair,” The Palestine Post, Feb. 12, 1934, 5; “1924–1934,” The Palestine Post – Levant Fair Opening Special Gratis, April 26, 1934, 4; and “li-kerat Yarid ha-Mizrah,” Davar, Feb. 12, 1936, 5. WIZO utilized from the fairgrounds even when the Fair was closed. For example, it organized its conference, which drew hundreds of delegates from forty-four countries, at the site of foreign pavilions in 1935 (“veʻidat Vitso ha-yom,” Davar, March 24, 1935, 6).

²⁹ “Helping Tourists,” The Palestine Post, April 12, 1936, 2.

³⁰ “Social and Personal,” The Palestine Post, May 12, 1936, 5.

³¹ “Social and Personal,” The Palestine Post, April 23, 1934, 5; “Tel Aviv,” The Palestine Post, May 8, 1934, 8; “Today’s Club,” The Palestine Post, May 22, 1934, 8; and “Tel Aviv,” The Palestine Post, June 5, 1934, 8.

³² “Events,” The Palestine Post, May 15, 1934, 8.

³³ Yael Allweil, Homeland: Zionism as Housing Regime, 1860–2011 (London: Routledge, 2016), 5.

³⁴ Sheila H. Katz, Women and Gender in Early Jewish and Palestinian Nationalism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 115–17.

³⁵ Naomi Ann Lichtenberg, “Hadassah’s Founders and Palestine, 1912–1925: A Quest for Meaning and the Creation of Women’s Zionism” (PhD Thesis, Indiana University, 1995), 79.

³⁶ The Palestine Post, April 26, 1934, 1, 8, 9.

³⁷ WIZO received a gold medal in the category of infant welfare work in the same year (“List of Awards,” The Palestine Bulletin, May 13, 1932, 4).

³⁸ Zohar Segev, “From Philanthropy to Shaping a State: Hadassah and Ben-Gurion, 1937–1947,” Israel Studies 18, no. 3 (2013): 134.

³⁹ “Women’s News,” Jewish Daily Bulletin, April 29, 1934, 5.

⁴⁰ “Social and Personal,” The Palestine Post, May 11, 1936, 5.

⁴¹ Amalia Skarlatou Levi, Evanescent Happiness: Ottoman Jews Encounter Modernity, the Case of Lea Mitrani and Joseph Niego (1863–1923) (Istanbul: Libra, 2015), 72.

⁴² Alan Dowty, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine: Two Worlds Collide (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2019), 16.

⁴³ Margalit Shilo, “Chavat ha-poalot be-kineret, 1911–1917,” Cathedra 14 (1980): 81–113.

⁴⁴ Dafna N. Izraeli, “The Zionist Women’s Movement in Palestine, 1911–1927: A Sociological Analysis,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (1981): 91.

⁴⁵ Michal Ben Ya’akov, “Women and the War: The Social and Economic Impact of World War I on Jewish Women in the Traditional Holy Cities of Palestine,” in World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America, ed. Marsha L. Rozenblit and Jonathan Karp (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 223–26.

⁴⁶ Jenifer Glynn (Ed.), Tidings from Zion: Helen Bentwich’s Letters from Jerusalem, 1919–1931 (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers), 9, 18.

⁴⁷ Gerald M. Berg, “Zionist Women of the 1920s: The Voice of Nation Building,” Journal of Israeli History 25, no. 2 (2006): 316.

⁴⁸ Deborah Bernstein, “The Women Workers’ Movement in Pre-State Israel, 1919–1939,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, no. 3 (1987): 456–57.

⁴⁹ Bat-Sheva Margalit-Stern, “Rebels of Unimportance: The 1930s’ Textile Strike in Tel Aviv and the Boundaries of Women’s Self-reliance,” Middle Eastern Studies 38, no. 3 (2002): 171.

⁵⁰ Deborah Bernstein, “In Search of a New Female Identity: Pioneering Women in Prestate Israeli Society,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 9, no. 4 (1991): 79; and Gerald M. Berg, “Zionism’s Gender: Hannah Meisel and the Founding of the Agricultural Schools for Young Women,” Israel Studies 6, no. 3 (2001): 135–65.

⁵¹ Shaul A. Duke, The Stratifying Trade Union: The Case of Ethnic and Gender Inequality in Palestine, 1920–1948 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 192.

⁵² Deborah Bernstein, “The Plough Woman who Cried into the Pots: The Position of Women in the Labor Force in the pre-state Israeli Society,” Jewish Social Studies 45, no. 1 (1983): 49.

⁵³ Histadrut provided women “some protection” in the labor force, though (Margalit-Stern, “Rebels of Unimportance,” 176).

⁵⁴ Bernstein, “The Women Workers’ Movement,” 469–470. Also, see Dafna N. Izraeli, “Tnuat ha-poalot be-eretz-israel me-reshita ad 1927,” Cathedra 32 (1984): 109–40.

⁵⁵ Talia Pfefferman and David De Vries, “Gendering Access to Credit: Business Legitimacy in Mandate Palestine,” Enterprise & Society 16, no. 3 (2015): 580–81.

⁵⁶ Her husband, Joshua Gordon, was another founder of the corporation who had previously held the position of the assistant director of the Trade and Industrial Department of the Palestine Government (“Industrial Exhibition for Palestine,” The American Jewish World, June 26, 1925, 7).

⁵⁷ Palestine Near-East Exhibition and Fair, Tel-Aviv, October-November, 1925 (Jaffa: M. Shoham’s Press, 1925), 5.

⁵⁸ “Levant Fair Committee,” The Palestine Post, May 24, 1934, 10.

⁵⁹ For example, the Workshop of the Talmud-Torah for Girls (the Tachkemoni School) in Jerusalem sent the needlework and other articles of its pupils to the Fair in 1925 (Palestine Near-East Exhibition and Fair, Tel-Aviv, October-November, 1925 (Jaffa: M. Shoham’s Press, 1925), 29).

⁶⁰ Levant Fair, Catalogue: Tel Aviv (26. IV-26. V) 1934 (Tel Aviv: 1934), 148, 150. Kirness Sisters engaged in real estate business as well (The Palestine Bulletin, April 17, 1932, 2; and The Palestine Post, April 24, 1933, 4; ha-Arets, March 30, 1934, 10). They moved their firm to Jerusalem during the Great Revolt (The Palestine Post, April 23, 1939, 2).

⁶³ Tal Alon-Mozes, “Rooted in the Home Garden and in the Nation’s Landscape: Women and the Emerging Hebrew Garden in Palestine,” Landscape Research 32, no. 3 (2007): 312.

⁶⁴ Alon-Mozes, “Rooted in the Home Garden and in the Nation’s Landscape,” 327.

⁶⁵ Berg, “Zionist Women,” 328.

⁶⁶ “Home Grown Vegetable Exhibition,” The Palestine Bulletin, May 30, 1928, 3.

⁶⁷ “Horticultural Exhibition in Palestine,” The Australian Jewish Chronicle, Sept. 13, 1928, 47.

⁶⁸ “La Foire du Levant Tel Aviv 1932,” L’Aurore, March 8, 1932, 2; and “mi-saviv li-Yarid ha-Mizrah,” ha-Yarden, Feb. 14, 1936, 10.

⁶⁹ “Dramatic Festival at the Levant Fair,” The Palestine Post, Feb. 14, 1936, 4.

⁷⁰ Hans Loewenson, “Le Pavillon de la Colonisation Juive à la Foire du Levant,” L’Aurore, June 4, 1936, 3.

⁷¹ “Palestine Exhibition’s Achievements,” The Palestine Bulletin, May 8, 1929, 2; and “List of Awards,” The Palestine Bulletin, May 12, 1932, 3.

⁷² American world’s fairs, especially those in the country’s southern states, stressed the importance of domesticity and its virtues (Nathan Cardon, A Dream of the Future: Race, Empire, and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville World’s Fairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 68).

⁷³ Talia Pfefferman, “Separate Spheres, Intertwined Spheres: Home, Work, and Family among Jewish Women Business Owners in the Yishuv,” Journal of Israeli History 32, no. 1 (2013): 22.

⁷⁴ Pfefferman and Vries, “Gendering Access to Credit,” 602.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 604.

⁷⁶ “Palestine From Day to Day,” The Palestine Bulletin, Feb. 26, 1925, 3; “The Home Industries Exhibition,” The Palestine Bulletin, March 12, 1925, 1; and “Palestine From Day to Day,” The Palestine Bulletin, March 19, 1925, 3.

⁷⁷ “Social and Personal,” The Palestine Post, Dec. 8, 1936, 5.

⁷⁸ Davar, May 21, 1934, 5.

⁷⁹ Ilse Reicke, “Women and Building (1931),” in Metropolis Berlin: 1880–1940, ed. Iain Boyd Whyte and David Frisby (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 494; and Cornelia Baddack, “Bewegte Frau am Rande der Frauenbewegung,” Ariadne: Forum für Frauen-und Geschlechtergeschichte 67–68 (2015): 94.

⁸² CZA, S53\1231\1, Statement on Levant Fair Publicity Work, 1934, 4.

⁸³ The Palestine Post, July 9, 1934, 6.

⁸⁵ CZA, S53\1231\1, Statement on Levant Fair Publicity Work, 1934, 4.

⁸⁶ CZA, S53\1231\1, Statement on Levant Fair Publicity Work, 1934, 2.

⁸⁷ CZA, S53\1231\1, Statement on Levant Fair Publicity Work, 1934, 4.

⁸⁸ “Aus Palästina,” Der Judenstaat, Nov. 17, 1933, 2.

⁸⁹ For details, see Sigal Davidi, “By Women for Women: Modernism, Architecture, and Gender in Building the New Jewish Society in Mandatory Palestine,” ARQ 20, no. 3 (2016): 217.

⁹⁰ CZA, S53\1231\1, Statement on Levant Fair Publicity Work, 1934, 3.

⁹¹ For details, see Sigal Davidi Kunda and Robert Oxman, “The Flight of the Camel: The Levant Fair of 1934 and the Creation of a Situated Modernism,” in Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse, ed. Haim Yacobi (London: Routledge, 2017), 52–75.

⁹² “Foire du Levant 1934 de Tel-Aviv,” L’Aurore, Nov. 2, 1933, 8.

⁹³ For an example of the Orientalist but positive portrayal of an Ottoman Jewess at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, see Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance (St. Louis: N.D.Thompson Publishing Co., 1894), 9).

⁹⁴ Alma Rachel Heckman and Frances Malino, “Packed in Twelve Cases: the Alliance Israelite Universelle and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 19, no. 1 (2012): 57.

⁹⁵ Hizky Shoham, “The Jewish Consumer Culture of British Mandate Palestine,” in Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, ed. Paul Lerner, Uwe Spiekermann, and Anne Schenderlein (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 211.

⁹⁶ Liora R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 88.

⁹⁷ The Palestine Post, May 14, 1934, 5.

⁹⁸ For details, see Anat Helman, “European Jews in the Levant Heat: Climate and Culture in 1920s and 1930s Tel Aviv,” Journal of Israeli History 22, no. 1 (2003): 71–90.

⁹⁹ CZA, S53\1231\1, Statement on Levant Fair Publicity Work, 1934, 4.

¹⁰⁰ “À la foire de Tel-Aviv,” L’Aurore, Aug. 31, 1933, 5.

¹⁰¹ CZA, S53\1231\1, Statement on Levant Fair Publicity Work, 1934, 4.

¹⁰² Dorit Yosef, “From Yekke to Zionist: Narrative Strategies in Life Stories of Central European Jewish Women Immigrants to Mandate Palestine,” Journal of Israeli History 33, no. 2 (2014): 190.

¹⁰³ Lichtenberg, “Hadassah’s Founders and Palestine,” 145, 191; Deborah S. Bernstein, “On Rhetoric and Commitment: The Employment of Married Women during the Depression of 1936–1939,” Women’s Studies International Forum 20, no. 5–6 (1997): 600; and Katz, Women and Gender, 104.

¹⁰⁴ Berg, “Zionism’s Gender,” 140. In this, too, the Levant Fair closely resembled world’s fairs in the West, which aimed to educate women on the virtues of scientific nutrition and household management. For example, see Eve Jochnowitz, “Feasting on the Future: Foods of the World of Tomorrow at the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40,” Performance Research 4, no. 1 (1999): 110; and Julie K. Brown, Health and Medicine on Display: International Expositions in the United States, 1876–1904 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 71.

¹⁰⁵ “Levante-Messe,” 5; “Tel Aviv,” The Palestine Post, May 8, 1934, 8; and Levant Fair, Catalogue, 148, 150.

¹⁰⁶ “Baby Pavilion at Fair,” The Palestine Post, April 30, 1934, 6.

¹⁰⁷ For details about the gender dimension of immigration, see Jacob Metzer, “Jewish Immigration to Palestine in the Long 1920s: An Exploratory Examination,” Journal of Israeli History 27, no. 2 (2008): 221–51.

¹⁰⁹ Barbara J. Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920–1929 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 3–4.

¹¹⁰ Caroline Kahlenberg, “Peddlers and the Policing of National Indifference in Palestine, 1920–1948,” History Workshop Journal 90 (2021): 135.

¹¹¹ Deborah Bernstein and Badi Hasisi, “‘Buy and Promote the National Cause:’ Consumption, Class Formation and Nationalism in Mandate Palestinian Society,” Nations and Nationalism 14, no. 1 (2008): 127–50; Hizky Shoham, “‘Buy Local’ or ‘Buy Jewish’? Separatist Consumption in Interwar Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 3 (2013): 469–89; Hizky Shoham, “‘Small Sales Agents (of Nationalism) Inside the House:’ Childhood, Consumer Culture, and Nationalism in the Jewish Yishuv of Interwar Palestine,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 12, no. 1 (2019): 88–112; Harel Chorev, “Disintegration as an Integrative Process: Revisiting Palestinian Cohesiveness from the Late Ottoman Era through the End of the British Mandate,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63, no. 3 (2020): 434–64; and Yehiel Limor and Ido Zelkovitz, “Politics, Nationalism and Economics: The Postage Stamps of the British Mandate in Palestine, 1920–1945,” Israel Studies 26, no. 3 (2021): 196–216.

¹¹² For details, see Nisa Ari, “Competition in the Cultural Sector: Handicrafts and the Rise of the Trade Fair in British Mandate Palestine,” in European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948, ed. Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 213–46.

¹¹³ Dorothy Kahn, “A Wanderer’s Notebook,” The Palestine Post, April 11, 1934, 4.

¹¹⁴ For the tension between economic nationalism and gender interests, see Bat-Sheva Margalit-Stern, “’Imahot ba-hazit:’ Ha-ma‘avak lema’an ‘totzeret ha-aretz’ veha-’emut ben interesim migdariyim la-interesim le’umiyim,” Yisra’el 11 (2007): 91–120.

¹¹⁵ “European Tel Aviv,” The Palestine Post, Jan. 29, 1934, 2. Rivoli continued to sell foreign products despite the systematic pressure from nationalist groups in the following years. A group of nationalist activists protested the sale of imported products and distributed thousands of leaflets to condemn the firm’s reluctance to sell only national products in 1936 (“hafganah,” Doʼar ha-yom, April 1, 1936, 1), which was another proof of the tension between economic nationalism and the demand for foreign products.

¹¹⁶ Izraeli, “The Zionist Women’s Movement,” 87; Shulamit Reinharz, “Toward a Model of Female Political Action: The Case of Manya Shohat, Founder of the First Kibbutz,” Women’s Studies International Forum 7, no. 4 (1984): 286; Bernstein, “In Search of a New Female Identity,” 90; Yossi Katz and Shoshana Neuman, “Women’s Quest for Occupational Equality: The Case of Jewish Female Agricultural Workers in Pre-state Israel,” Rural History 7, no. 1 (1996): 33–34; and Pnina Lahav, “‘A Great Episode in the History of Jewish Womanhood’: Golda Meir, the Women Workers’ Council, Pioneer Women, and the Struggle for Gender Equality,” Israel Studies 23, no. 1 (2018): 1.

¹¹⁷ Bernstein, “The Women Workers’ Movement,” 461.

¹¹⁸ Izraeli, “The Zionist Women’s Movement,” 112–13.

¹¹⁹ Berg, “Zionism’s Gender,” 135.

¹²⁰ Bernstein, “In Search of a New Female Identity,” 90; and Katz, Women and Gender, 80, 164.

¹²¹ Margalit-Stern, “Rebels of Unimportance,” 187–88.

¹²² Zvi Triger, “Golda Meir’s Reluctant Feminism: The Pre-State Years,” Israel Studies 19, no. 3 (2014): 108.

¹²³ Vincent Vilmain, “A Woman within Zionism: The Path of Myriam Schach (1867–1956),” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues 16 (2008): 174.

Additional information

Funding

The research has been supported by a research grant from the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, Washington, DC.

Notes on contributors

Semih Gökatalay

Semih Gökatalay is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of California, San Diego. His research and publications have been focused on the economic and political history of the Middle East during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to nation states.