Did Children Love their Parents? Emotional Scripts of Filial Love in Domestic Ceremonies of Jewish Urban Middle-Class Families in Mandatory Palestine

• In Event: New Perspectives on the Mandate and Israel

Abstract

The proposed paper explores class differentiation as expressed in emotional scripts of parenting performed during family ceremonies among the Jewish urban middle-class in British Mandate Palestine. In middle-class families during the industrial age, domestic ceremonies serve as a social stage for enacting emotional scripts of “good” parenting and a “happy” childhood, thus distancing themselves, tacitly or openly, from the “rude” emotional style frequent among lower-class families associated in middle class imagination with the “non-western.” Drawing from diverse historical sources, such as personal correspondence, visual materials, ego-documents, oral history testimonies, daily newspapers, and magazines (especially those catering to women and children), I first recreate emotional scripts as performed in contemporary domestic special occasions such as birthdays, bar/bat mitzvahs, the first day of school, and Friday night meals. Noting the complicated interplay between “deep” and “shallow” play as defined by Arlie Hochschild, I examine both overt and indirect, verbal and nonverbal expressions of joy, love, and care during family interactions. Focusing on parent-child relationships, I specifically address the gender division of labor in parenting. I then contextualize these staged scripts as patterns of intergenerational relationships between immigrants, mostly from eastern and central Europe, and their native-born offspring. Staging emotional scripts of middle-class domesticity was a paramount means of class distinction from the predominantly Mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jews) urban proletariat. Juxtaposing middle-class emotional style with the perceived lower-class style illustrates the class character of the Zionist and the “new Jew” project, which implied adopting a middle-class emotional habitus. These domestic emotional scripts thus barred lower-class Mizrahi immigrants from the symbolic capital of Zionist ideology.

Author

• Hizky Shoham, Bar-Ilan University