Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 3

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Rise of the Individual
By: Orit Rozin
Rise of the Individual. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011. 276pp. Pbk. $35.00. ISBN: 1611680816.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Seth Frantzman, PhD
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Israel
In the early 1950s, Israeli reporters and newspapers were fascinated by the arrival of new Jewish immigrants to the newly created Jewish state. “The
veteran Israelis were also aghast when they saw Mizrahi [Jews from North Africa and the Middle East] families packed together, parents and
children, in a single room-or even more than one family in a single room-without any attempt to screen off the area where the parents slept” (p.
177). In another description “two native-born Israeli girls” went to visit an immigrant camp. There they found a “foreign country” full of people
who were “naked from the waist down, with mucus dripping from their noses onto their upper lips and flies buzzing around their eyes.” Writers at
the daily Ha’aretz described the camps as a “wound in living flesh” (p. 177). These vignettes quotes in The rise of the Individual provide a
fascinating glimpse into a struggle that was taking place in Israel between the socialist European Jewish elite, and the Jews who had arrived from
Muslim countries. It is a struggle, full of racism, Eurocentrism, paternalism and outright hatred, which in many respects has defined Israel and
continues to mark Israeli society today.
Orit Rozen, a lecturer in the department of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, sets out to understand how an Israeli society founded by “veteran
Israelis” who were “ideologically committed to the national collective” confront changes that challenges this mentality (p. 192). In a sense, she sets
out that “the achievement of statehood created a burden that threatened to overwhelm the