Dressing up for Purim
Photo: Shai Rosentzweig
Where are all the Israeli heroes?
Thousands of kids dress up as Spiderman, Batman. What about local talent?
A flood of Dragonballs, rivers of SpongeBob SquarePants, Batmans, Spidermans have filled our streets this week in honor of Purim. There are thousands of pink princesses and fairies around as well.
Israeli children are dressing up (made in China) this week, and will struggle to stay in costume until the last threat comes out. But it's a bit sad to say that this year, there are just about no local heroes making the rounds.
Oh, sometimes you'll see a nameless, Japanese-made cat-clown-policeman–magician, but their numbers are insignificant against the mass-produced superheroes.
If we look closely, we see that Israeli children have become little pawns to the global mass-culture industry, without their knowing it at all.
No Israeli heroes
In recent decades, as national spending on children's culture has risen steadily, I would have expected that spending to have produced Israeli heroes worthy of Purim costumes. But for some reason, it hasn't happened. And when the occasional one has appeared, it has only managed to last one season, barely remembered by next Purim.
Without being nostalgic, I flipped through an old photo album from the 1960s the other day, and found a much wider range of personalities than those turning kids on today. Kids in my class dressed up as Israeli (David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan) and foreign politicians (Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill never looked as good as the year I was in fourth grade).
Of course, there were also local kids heroes; kids with white bed sheets swore they were invisible, and there was the inevitable King David with red side curls, a Samson with dyed cotton for rasta braids, and Moses with a bent wooden staff. Where have they all gone?
Dress up like Amir Peretz?
No, I don't expect Israeli kids today to run out for the latest Amir Peretz moustache, or an Ehud Olmert mask. The level of connection between politicians and intelligent households in Israel today stands at the minimum necessary to vote, and that's okay.
But the worrying thing is that the heroes of yore have found no replacements. No one inspires the kids. There is no one the kids want to emulate for a day or two a year.
The automatic suspects are, of course, our youth groups, where children are exposed to a never ending chain of imported cartoon superheroes, simply because they are cheaper and more profitable.
But this phenomenon leaves our children's imaginative capacity significantly weakened. In addition, it leaves the heroes of Jewish history as the sole possession of the religious and ultra-Orthodox – and they fail to build any new local heroes.
Everything is store-bought, everything speaks, everything comes apart at the drop of a hat and leaves behind no memories.
Does this prove something about deeper patterns of needing culture and creating culture in Israel? We'd be wise to think about it for a minute, after the joy of Purim recedes.
