Creating an Israeli Beauty Ideal: The Intersection of Gender, Culture, and Nationalism

This paper investigates the effort to define an Israeli beauty ideal through an examination of beauty competitions that took place in Tel Aviv from 1926-1931 during the period of the British Mandate. During this era the Jewish community of Palestine was seeking to develop a nation and setting the foundations for the state in the social, political and cultural arenas. The winners of these competitions were not assessed in terms of their physical appearance alone.   Rather, they were judged primarily by how well they represented the emerging nation. Held in conjunction with the Jewish holiday of Purim, a minor holiday in the traditional Jewish calendar, the winner of the competition was crowned as “Queen Esther," the heroine of the Purim story, and served as the “Queen” in the annual Purim parade in Tel Aviv.  One national issue was how the new society was going to situate itself between Europe and the Middle East.  In the process of cultural definition, the Jewish community in Palestine struggled to find its own voice and expression, seeking to emulate the “high culture” that it identified with Europe, yet at the same time aiming to become a “Middle Eastern” society. Since the selected queen represented the emerging nation, her country of origin--Middle Eastern or European--became an indication of the preferred cultural milieu. In the emerging Israeli society, then, beauty becomes an arena in which issues of gender, culture, and nationalism are contested.