He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967-1973, and reported the following:
On page 99 of my book, the reader will learn about a variety of self-improvement fads that arrived in Israel at the turn of the 1970s. I describe a few “encounter” sessions, a self-actualization technique associated with the countercultural Esalen Institute in California. In an event in the city of Haifa two hundred participants were observed running around, slapping each other's bottoms, hugging, sharing secrets, sighing, and screaming. After three hectic hours one woman blurted, “I feel I stand on the abyss.” At another event in a northern kibbutz guest house thirty people were examining each other’s bone structure, sculpting clay with eyes closed, and listening to a recording of lute. The encounter sessions offered individuals extreme experiences that often violated social norms, ostensibly catalyzing self-realization.Learn more about Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets at the Stanford University Press website.
I then turn to the establishment of the first Dale Carnegie branch in Israel in 1973. It was led by Dalia Ayalon, a daughter of former Israelis who grew up in New York City. She was the first woman in the Dale Carnegie organization to be entrusted with establishing a national branch. Specific course topics included how not to worry, to solve problems, to get excited, the art of persuasion, and of course, how to win friends and influence people. By the end of the decade, there would be 5,000 graduates of the Dale Carnegie courses in Israel.
Methods of personal growth were accompanied by efforts at bodily shrinkage. Israel was the site of one of WeightWatchers’ first branches outside the United States. It was launched in 1967 by two immigrants, mother and daughter Regina Diker and Bat Sheva Silverman. It soon proved to be an enormous success with dozens of branches across the country offering beyond recipes and strategies for losing weight, extensive social interactions and opportunities for public testimony.
These imports are essential to my book’s argument in two ways. First, they participated in the making of a modern consumerist order in Israel for which the cultivation of the self was paramount. Second, they support one of my main contentions, namely that by the late 1960s, ideas and practices coming from the United States met with receptivity in a society that, beyond the cohesion secured by the military conflict, was already fragmented, to a large extent “post-ideological,” and rather uncertain about its core values. Israelis adopted other consumer-oriented concepts such as an emphasis on “quality of life.” In addition to engaging in what seemed back then to be runaway consumption they also adopted forms of consumer activism embodied in new organizations such as the Israel Consumer Council. Models for both forms of consumption, the excessive and self-indulgent, and, conversely, the information-laden and rather prudent—arrived from the United States. This observation is tied to another argument the book makes, which is that the American imprint in Israel has been far more diverse and multivalent than is often acknowledged. The book explores Israeli/American encounters much beyond consumption and consumerism, including identity politics, race, ethnicity, military technology, immigration, and popular culture.
Both American and Israeli societies were then under stress and in flux. The 1960s were the zenith of American post-WWII liberalism with Great Society programs, civil rights legislation, then the radicalism of the anti-war and New Left movements and the dawn of the conservative backlash. Beyond liberalism, a range of ideologies, both progressive and illiberal, beckoned to Israelis, whether it was the feminism of future Member of Knesset Marcia Freedman or the extreme nationalism and racism of the Jewish Defense League’s founder, Rabbi Meir Kahane—both American immigrants. From the vantage point of the turn of the 1970s, we can observe the incipient split between liberals and fundamentalists that would characterize Israeli society in decades to come.
--Marshal Zeringue
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