‘The Israeli Victorians’: Anxieties and Distresses among the Middle Class during the 1960s

Abstract

To be modern means many things. For 1960s Israel, modernity conjured up a new way of life in which bourgeois and middle-class activity, mentality, and values played key roles. This article presents an alternative account of the ‘good old days’ when many Israelis felt that the momentum toward a just, free, and peaceful future lay just ahead.

The article casts new light on Israeli bourgeois culture in a period of remarkable transformation. Basing his analysis on Peter Gay’s multi-volume The Bourgeois Experience works on nineteenth century European mentality, and recent historiographical approaches to the West of the 1960s, the author contends that middle class groups can best be understood in terms of their fear and anxiety rather than in terms of their political and economic activity. The ghosts and traumas in Israeli life are shown to have originated mainly from rapid modernization, the shock waves of the massive immigration from Middle East countries, and the long-term effect of two world war sand three local wars.