Israel and Problems of Identity.
Mead on Jews
Mead, Margaret. Israel and Problems of Identity. Herzl Institute Pamphlets 3. New York: (Theodor Herzl Foundation), 1958.
12mo.; green wrappers, stapled; decoratively printed in dark green and black. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this printing of “the unrevised text – as transcribed from a tape recording – of a lecture given by Dr. Margaret Mead at the Theodor Herzl Institute, New York City, on October 3, 1957” (Editor’s note).
Mead explains that she was sent to Israel for three weeks, ostensibly as a consultant to the Health Department; later, she was asked by her friend, the anthropologist Dr. Raphael Patai, to deliver a lecture about Israel at the Herzl Institute. Patai wrote a biography about Herzl, was an editor at the Herzl Press in New York, and the Director of the Herzl Institute – an organization committed to promoting discussion and study of the problems that Jewish people face in the world.
The Herzl Institute published a series of pamphlets leading up to Herzl’s centenary – in 1960 – which included Mead’s (No. 3), as well as Patai’s “Cultures in Conflict” (No. 1, 1958); Hillel Bavli’s “Some Aspects of Modern Hebrew Poetry (No. 2, 1958); Leslie Fielder’s “The Jew in the American Novel” (No. 10, 1959); and Gertude Samuels’ “Report on Israel” (No. 14, 1960).
There were at least eighteen pamphlets in the series.
Mead chose to focuses on the identity problems because she believed it to be a topic that “has agitated Jewish thinkers for a very long time” (p. 4). She explains that in the post World War II period, identity has became an important area of analysis, especially for Jews, because, “when so many people are uprooted, so many people are moving, and when we have a continuous discussion in the press on the meaning of Israel and what national identity means. This keeps before us a problem that in the past we didn’t pay very much attention to” (p. 4). She goes on to point out that the “Jewish sense of identity has been preserved without a homeland” (p. 8), and she concludes that “Israel is probably the most valuable laboratory in the world today” (p. 27).
An intelligent – but less scholarly – example of Mead’s anthropological ideology and writing.
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