Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967-1973

by Oz Frankel

Overview

In the late 1960s, Israel became more closely entwined with the United States not just as a strategic ally but also through its intensifying intimacy with American culture, society, and technology. Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets shows how transatlantic exchanges shaped national sentiments and private experiences in a time of great transition, forming a consumerist order, accentuating social cleavages, and transforming Jewish identities. Nevertheless, there remained lingering ambivalence about, and resistance to, American influences. Rather than growing profoundly "Americanized," Israelis forged unique paths into the American orbit. As supporters and immigrants, American Jews assumed an ambiguous role, expediting but also complicating the Israeli-American exchange.

Taking an expansive view of Israeli–American encounters, historian Oz Frankel reveals their often unexpected consequences, including the ripple effects that the rise of Black Power had on both extremes of Israeli politics, the adoption of American technology that fed the budding Israeli military-industrial complex, the consumerist ideologies that ensnared even IDF soldiers and Palestinians in the newly occupied territories, and the cultural performances that lured Israelis to embrace previously shunned diasporic culture. What made the racial strife in the US and the tensions between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews in Israel commensurable? How did an American military jet emerge as a national fixation? Why was the US considered a paragon of both spectacular consumption and restrained, rational consumerism? In ten topical chapters, this book demonstrates that the American presence in Israel back then, as it is today, was multifaceted and contradictory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503639522
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	07/23/2024
Pages:	392
Sales rank:	484,473
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Oz Frankel is Associate Professor of History at the New School for Social Research.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
ONE Consumer Modernity and the Everyday
TWO Keeping Up with the Cohens
THREE Electioneering and the Feedback Loop
FOUR Technology Transfer: The Phantom Jet
FIVE Panthers in Black and White
SIX American Gangster in the Promised Land
SEVEN Emissaries of Liberalism in Crisis
EIGHT Back to Anatevka
NINE America on Stage
TEN The American Figure in the Israeli Mind
Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

05/13/2024

American culture, politics, and technology have profoundly influenced Israeli society, according to this enlightening study. Historian Frankel (States of Inquiry) writes that Israeli culture began Americanizing in the 1950s; but after 1967, when the U.S. replaced France as Israel’s primary military supplier, “the meeting points between the two societies grew exponentially.” These points range, in Frankel’s telling, from the impact of American-style electioneering on the 1973 Tel Aviv mayoral race—which former Israel Defense Force major general Chich Lahat won by adopting such Americanized tactics as “pressing the flesh”—to the introduction of “Hasidic folklore” into Israeli pop culture via Fiddler on the Roof. Frankel pulls insight from quotidian details; looking at the 1968 arrival of Coca-Cola in Israel, he notes that the bottles, designed with leak-proof caps so they could be laid horizontally in Israelis’ smaller fridges, helped realize new U.S.-inspired consumerist notions that living in Israel should not require giving up luxuries. The most fascinating chapter profiles the Israeli Black Panther Party. Founded in 1971 to combat unequal treatment of Jewish immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, the movement’s imitation of American-style racial politics “scandalized Israeli society,” Frankel writes, since it “threatened to expose” that the country’s projected image of “social cohesion” wasn’t an on-the-ground reality. Readers will be rewarded by this perceptive history. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"A unique and revealing study of Israeli society, US–Israel relations, and the global transformations of American culture. Beautifully written and sharply argued, this is transnational history at its best." —Nico Slate, Carnegie Mellon University

"Oz Frankel's Israel in the American Orbit examines the diffusion of American patterns and practices into Israeli society and culture in the period 1967–1973. A splendid read, it offers a key to the split culture of Israel in later days between fundamentalists and liberals—following in many tacit ways American social, political, and cultural features." —Uri Ram, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

"American culture, politics, and technology have profoundly influenced Israeli society, according to this enlightening study. Readers will be rewarded by this perceptive history." —Publishers Weekly

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