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Abstract
Adopted from the Palestinian Arabs, and made a part of the Israeli “national food” repertoire, hummus is consumed in Israel in huge amounts. At the same time, hummus is associated with masculinity, and its consumption patterns are highly gendered. As the author argues in this article, the masculine signification of hummus resulted from a combination of factors, including its material and nutritional qualities, its modes of consumption, as well as the symbolic meanings that became attached to hummus as an Arab dish. These meanings are related to the place of Arabness in the Zionist construction of a masculine New Hebrew, itself a product of the intertwined politics of settlement and masculinity.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 43/11). The author is grateful to the foundation for its support. She wishes to thank Tania Kolobov for her help with the statistical analysis, and Smadar Sharon, Yehonatan Alsheh, Scott Alves Barton, Julia Lerner and the anonymous reviewers of FCS for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.
Notes
1. In a study that examined the ways in which people in Canada ascribed gender to specific foodstuffs (McPhail et al. Citation2012), hummus was slightly more likely to be associated with women than with men. Personal communication with Deborah McPhail and Brenda Beagan, December 2, 2014.
2. I have used mostly commercials from the 1990s onwards, when industrial hummus began to aspire to resemble “authentic,” hand-made hummus.
3. Three examples are Jacques Cohen and Rafi Cohen for Tzabar, and Avi Mevorach for Strauss. In fact, men are at the center of almost all contemporary hummus commercials that feature production and consumption of hummus in the public sphere.
4. The whole series is available from Dor’s blog: http://micdor.com/cat/ynet/food/trio, accessed May 11, 2014. In the case of hummus, a man’s dislike for the dish is in fact a double failure: on both the gender and the national plane.
5. “Oriental restaurant” (mis’ada mizrahit) is the common Hebrew designation for a type of restaurant that serves a selection of popular Arab dishes: roasted meats, vegetable side dishes and a variety of salads (meze). While in an Oriental restaurant hummus is usually one among many foods on the menu, hummusiyot focus on hummus, and often offer little or nothing else. However, the lines between them may be blurry as respondents may consider a hummusyia, which offers also falafel and other salads, as an Oriental restaurant, and there are also some Oriental restaurants that are mostly known for their hummus.
6. Using the logistic regression technique (p < 0.01, Nagelkerke R Square = 15.9%).
7. See: http://humus101.com/?p=42, retrieved on August 14, 2014. An English version of this blog is titled “The Hummus Blog,” however, it is not identical with the Hebrew one.
8. I thank Shooky Galili for these data. According to Galili, women’s responses were mainly to posts that contained recipes.
9. Three After the Hummus”, http://micdor.com/cat/ynet/food/trio, July 31, accessed November 12, 2014.
10. Examples of sculptures centering on hummus are Eli Petel’s Hummus (2002) and Boaz Arad’s Self-Portrait in Hummus (2013). Examples of songs about hummus are “Hummus metamtem” by Nigel ha-Admor and “Hummusim” by Benjamin Oliel. Examples of films and videos about hummus are Nadav Rosenblum and Micha Cohen’s “Hummus-Chips-Salat” (2009) and Eran Vered’s “The Hummus Investigations Unit” (2012). Examples of literary works are Kenaz’s “The Black Briefcase” and Yitzhak Ginsburg “The Hummus of Sima Chavusha” (2010). The poem is Ze’ev Tene’s (untitled), from his book Short Memory (Citation2009), and the musical score is Kenner’s “How to Make Hummus in 6 Steps” (2014). The master of hummus cartoons was Dudu Geva.
11. For example, Shooky Galili. 2006. Hummus: For Men Only? (and readers’ responses). Hummus for the Masses, http://humus101.com/?p=42, accessed November 12, 2014; ElianLazovsky. 2014. In Big: The Hummus Revolution. In My Desert Home, http://mydesert.co.il, accessed November 12, 2014.
12. Lazovsky, in Big: The Hummus Revolution (see note 11).
13. See a response by a woman named Sharon to Galili’s post Hummus: For Men Only? Hummus for the Masses, http://humus101.com/?p=42, accessed November 12, 2014.
14. See for example the response by “Idan” from November 14, 2007 to the piece by Roy Regev, “Ten: The Overrated Hummusiyot”, NRG, November 5, 2007, http://www.nrg.co.il/online/12/ART1/654/648.html, accessed November 1, 2009.
15. Interestingly, many Arab words that Jews have adopted and naturalized in Hebrew are curses, which are considered a masculine form of speech.
16. Interview with Yehuda Litani, Jerusalem, March 16, 2010.
17. A Jewish organization dedicated to transporting Jewish children from Europe to Palestine, in order to save them from the Nazis.
18. I thank Reuveni-Pridan for sending me Strauss’s commercials from the 1990s and 2000s.