“Sometimes your heart fills to bursting”: “The New Jew” and narratives of emotional restraint in the Yishuv

Abstract

Zionist historiography associates the rise of the “new Jew” with a culture that ostensibly dictated emotional repression, silence, and even an anti-emotional ethos. The article takes a critical look at that image using conceptual tools developed in the “emotional turn.” It analyses Mandate-era ego documents to reveal that alongside the narrative of more stringent emotional restraint, at least two other narratives circulated in the Yishuv about how immigration affected emotional expression. One associated it with growing diversity and passion in the expression of emotion; another was essentially positive or neutral about emotion work and ignored questions of a collectivist style.