Re-Generation: Nation and the Constuction of Gender in Peace and War - Palestine Jews, 1900-1918

This book  chapter  in the edited volume Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930 explores the relationship between ideas of nation, gender  and generation in the discourse on peace and war by  Zionist Palestine Jews between 1900 and 1918. The Zionist ideal of the "new Jew", which represented the young generation of Jews,  was in its core a construction of heroic masculinity. In Hebrew the very term "generation"  excluded women. The first Hebrew dictionary, the repository of the revived and modernized language and the life project of philologist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (Perlman, 1858-1922), defines "generation" as "Histories born one of the other, which are one to the other as generations: the father, the son and the son of the son are three generations."  This gendered construction of the "new Jew" had far reachig consequences for the Zinonist discourse on War and Peace in Palestine.