Abstract
Adopted from the Palestinian Arabs, and made a part of the Israeli “national food” repertoire, hummus is consumed in Israel in huge amounts. At the same time, hummus is associated with masculinity, and its consumption patterns are highly gendered. As the author argues in this article, the masculine signification of hummus resulted from a combination of factors, including its material and nutritional qualities, its modes of consumption, as well as the symbolic meanings that became attached to hummus as an Arab dish. These meanings are related to the place of Arabness in the Zionist construction of a masculine New Hebrew, itself a product of the intertwined politics of settlement and masculinity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 337-359 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Food, Culture and Society |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Research for this article was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 43/11). The author is grateful to the foundation for its support. She wishes to thank Tania Kolobov for her help with the statistical analysis, and Smadar Sharon, Yehonatan Alsheh, Scott Alves Barton, Julia Lerner and the anonymous reviewers of FCS for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© Association for the Study of Food and Society 2016.
Keywords
- Arabs
- Hummus
- Israel
- Masculinity
- New man
- Zionism