Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967–1973

Oz Frankel. Stanford Univ., $35 trade paper (378p) ISBN 978-1-5036-3952-2

American culture, politics, and technology have profoundly influenced Israeli society, according to this enlightening study. Historian Frankel (States of Inquiry) writes that Israeli culture began Americanizing in the 1950s; but after 1967, when the U.S. replaced France as Israel’s primary military supplier, “the meeting points between the two societies grew exponentially.” These points range, in Frankel’s telling, from the impact of American-style electioneering on the 1973 Tel Aviv mayoral race—which former Israel Defense Force major general Chich Lahat won by adopting such Americanized tactics as “pressing the flesh”—to the introduction of “Hasidic folklore” into Israeli pop culture via Fiddler on the Roof. Frankel pulls insight from quotidian details; looking at the 1968 arrival of Coca-Cola in Israel, he notes that the bottles, designed with leak-proof caps so they could be laid horizontally in Israelis’ smaller fridges, helped realize new U.S.-inspired consumerist notions that living in Israel should not require giving up luxuries. The most fascinating chapter profiles the Israeli Black Panther Party. Founded in 1971 to combat unequal treatment of Jewish immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, the movement’s imitation of American-style racial politics “scandalized Israeli society,” Frankel writes, since it “threatened to expose” that the country’s projected image of “social cohesion” wasn’t an on-the-ground reality. Readers will be rewarded by this perceptive deep dive. (July)