“Muscle”Yekkes? Multiple German-Jewish Masculinities in Palestine and Israel after 1933

Abstract

AbstractIn the 1930s and 1940s, nearly ninety thousand German-speaking Jews found refuge in the British Mandate of Palestine. While scholars have stressed the so-calledYekkes’intellectual and cultural contribution to the making of the Jewish nation, their social and gendered lifeworlds still need to be explored. This article, which is centered on the generation of those born between 1910 and 1925, explores an ongoing interest in German-Jewish multiple masculinities. It is based on personal narratives, including some 150 oral history interviews conducted in the early 1990s with German-speaking men and women in Israel. By focusing on gender and masculinities, it sheds new light on social, generational, and racial issues in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. The article presents an investigation of the lives, experiences, and gendered identities of young emigrants from Nazi Europe who had partly been socialized in Europe, and were then forced to adjust to a different sociey and culture after migration. This involved adopting new forms of sociability, learning new body postures and gestures, as well as incorporating new habits—which, together, formed a cultural repertoire for how to behave as a “New Hebrew.”